This is about a story in The Guardian. In 1979 an experimental/noise/art/industrial/krautrock band called Nurse With Wound put out their first album. The inner sleeve listed their favorite 291 bands.
In the 90s that list became something of a challenge for fans of this sort of music to find, and some it was released on CD for the first time. Now, 40 years after it was originally released, Nurse with Wound is working with a record label trying to put together compilation sets with one track from each of those bands. This is their story, well worth reading if only for some of the band names.
Here’s that album, which is everything haters of experimental music are likely to hate, but with some interesting sounds along the way.
Think about this now. Rank your top five. There were 22 it seems, in the UK.
The Guardian has their own take. You can find it here.
My favorite was Eight Days A Week, I own it, but it seems it wasn’t released in the UK.
Reading the story I guess I understand the writer’s thinking, but he’s out of his mind. Here’s the My Sharonna of the birth of rock/pop music. No doubt.
Frank created a book of photographs called The Americans back in the 50s. It’s a terrific book of strikingly straightforward and revealing images full of, um, Americans.
Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to The Americans, an obvious choice at the moment On the Road ruled the world. Kerouac also wrote and narrated Frank’s first film, a shambling tale of New York City’s bohemian lives, called Pull My Daisy. You can view it here.
Frank, of course, took the photos that made up the collagey cover of the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street.
Frank also made a tour documentary with the Stones at about the same time. It is called Cocksucker Blues and the Stones, who have said they thought the film was excellent, sued to keep it from being released because its explicit sex and drug scenes were too much even for them.
A deal was reached that allowed Frank to show the movie five times a year provided he was in attendance. I remember one year leaving the Rolling Stone magazine Christmas party early to see the film at the Anthology Film Archives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. You can find the film in pieces on You Tube, from time to time. Frank clearly wasn’t policing the copyright, nor were the Stones, as evidenced by this music video that uses some of the film.
Frank also made some dramatic films that drew notice, though the only one I saw was a shambling road picture featuring a who’s who of cool rock dudes in the late 80s (I’m talking guys named Johansen, Waits and Strummer, plus Leon Redbone).
This is the trailer with French titles.
This seems to be the whole film with German titles.
Final bonus video with Frank’s Super 8 film of the Stones.
Liz Phair has some books coming out soon. I’m not clear based on the story, but it seems like two memoirs are on their way. I’m a fan but that idea didn’t excite me until I read this interview with Rob Tannenbaum, which dropped on vulture.com today.
I’ve been a big Liz Phair fan from the beginning, so big that I actually really liked her 2003 eponymously named Liz Phair elpee, which was given a provocative 0.0 (on a scale of 10) rating by Pitchfork. It also provoked attacks on Phair by Meghan O’Rourke and others, who should all have known better.
My point isn’t that Phair is bulletproof. You’re entitled to dislike her music, obviously, which is odd and aggressive and indie most of the time, on the merits (or demerits), but she is an artist with a long history of putting her heart and soul on the line. In her defense, at some point (after four or five albums, let’s say) she should have earned trust instead of enmity from those who admired those early albums. She’s a singer songwriter, give her a break (I would think would be the default), but they turned on her brutally, dismissively. It was terrible. That issue was tackled 16 years ago, and mercifully Phair is still kicking it
Today we have a woman who is putting on hot shows (I saw her in Denver and Brooklyn recently) and despite her protestations about stage fright she seems like a live wire living for the spotlight.
This post is about the interview with Tannenbaum, in which Phair talks about a lot of things that wouldn’t be the first thing you think about a singer-songwriter promoting a book. Or two. But it’s also a chance to thumb our noses at Pitchfork and the others who dismissed the woman rather than engage with what she was trying to do. If you didn’t understand Phair you might think this commercial move was reprehensible, but it’s way more interesting to think about how that reviled album differs from both Brittany and all the indie expectations that provoked the haters.
There’s a new movie out from Danny Boyle, who made Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, called Yesterday, about an indie Indian rocker who has an accident and wakes up in a world without Beatles. As in, a world in which he knows the Beatles music but no one else knows of it.
I don’t know if this is a good premise for a movie, I have my doubts, but it surfaced this charming story of Peter and Gordon, guys who should have been remnants, but who kept getting hit songs, starting with this one Paul McCartney wrote when he was 16.
Jody Rosen has written a long and worthwhile story about masters archives, jumping off from a fire that burned about 120,000 masters of the Universal Music Group in 2006.
He does a great job explaining why the masters of albums by Elton John and Nirvana and Muddy Waters and John Coltrane, among many others, are valuable even when you can stream their music online.
But then he gets grittier, and talks about Don Bennett, whose masters burned in the UMG fire, and whose career is almost impossible to survey. He was a vocalist in the Chocolate Watchband, which I’d heard of, but he also had a solo career, which has almost completely disappeared.
The point? Lots of music that is disregarded at first turns out to be valuable later.
So, here is the Chocolate Watchband. And a plea for Rosen to digitize the album he bought and get it out there!
Vampire Weekend has a new album out. Drew Magary wrote a funny review of it.
I haven’t listened to the album yet. Don’t know why I would (though I like Oxford Comma, the song), but this is my favorite quote (I liked that one Shins record a lot, only to recoil afterward): “Motherfucker, this just sounds like the other two songs. Like The Shins did a one-off album after scoring a djembe at a yard sale.”
Longtime friend of the Remnants, Michael Salfino tackles what turns out to be a more interesting question than it seemed on first hearing. How great was Paul McCartney’s solo career compared to the Beatles?
For my part, I think McCartney’s best solo song is Maybe I’m Amazed, but I also think Silly Love Songs is a brilliant bit of self-referential pop fluff (with a side of self referential sarcasm).
Michael doesn’t point out that Sir Paul is the only Beatle to record songs with Elvis Costello, Kanye West, and (the remains of) Nirvana. Constantly exploring, working, imploring, McCartney’s career has been admirable, even when the music is less successful. It’s hard to always write and perform great music.
Michael and I went to a show with Mike Meyers, the Spy Who Shagged Me, at the NY Public Library a few years ago, that tried to answer the same question.
Michael’s approach here is a little more data driven than Mike’s (and his brother’s), and at the same time just as arbitrary as everyone else’s. The problem, I think, are the categories. Deriving anything from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is bound to get you in trouble.
What are the right categories? Off the top of my head?
Best Album
Best Run of Albums
Live Performance
Influence
Innovation
Songs
I don’t know. It’s hard not to shape the questions to fit the answer you want to give, though I think the answer is the Beatles, even though the Stones are my more favorite band.
Try going with my categories and Michaels and see if you can up with different answers?
