Category Archives: news

Don’t Give Up Your Day Job, Cousin Sleaze!

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Or maybe you should, Christopher Inserra.

Inserra say he was hurt on the job as a Port Authority cop a couple of years ago. He spent time on disability leave, drawing his $90K salary and $30K of disability payments, even after he was healthy. Even after he went touring with his hardcore band, Cousin Sleaze, during which, the judge said, “you repeatedly gripped the microphone and jumped around the stage while flailing your right arm in a rapid back-and-forth motion.”

The NY Post has the whole story about Inserra’s guilty plea. Enjoy the video, which was shot in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

 

Beatles vs. Stones: A Soundcheck Smackdown

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I went to the recording of the radio show, Soundcheck, tonight, at the NY Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Dubbed Soundcheck Smackdown, the program was something of a debate about who was/is better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.

Hosted and refereed by Soundcheck host John Schaefer, who wore the zebra stripes and had a yellow penalty flag that he threw once, and a whistle that went unemployed, maybe because he swallowed it when Ophira Eisenberg popped the f-word into her argument for the Stones, as in the Beatles asked to hold your hand, but who didn’t imagine fucking all of the Stones. Round to Stones.

Eisenberg’s partner on the Stones team was Bill Janovitz, who wrote a highly-praised essay about Exile on Main Street in the 33 1/3 book series and another book about the 50 most meaningful Stones songs.

Team Beatles was Paul Myers, who is an author and musician and the older brother of his partner, Mike Myers, who is known as the keen wit and lover of language who created Wayne’s World and Austin Powers. Notably the Myers brother have very similar body types, wore matching black t-shirts with the words “John&Paul&Ringo&George” on them, but had dramatically different hair colors (Paul pure white, Mike pure brown).

I don’t know when the show will air, but you can check the Soundcheck site for the airdate.

Before the show we were all handed index cards and pencils and asked to write in 20 words or less why we liked the Beatles or the Stones. I think the Beatles are more important culturally, but after thinking about this more than I had earlier in the week, I came up with this:

“The Beatles were the soundtrack of my life in middle school. The Stones were the soundtrack of my life in high school. I have to go with the Stones.” (What I actually wrote on the card was only 19 words, and probably better).

I think you might enjoy the show, so I’m not going to go into much detail here. But SPOILER ALERT, there was one thing to talk about that gives away who won. Sort of.

Before the show John Schaefer asked how many people favored the Stones. My sense was that all of us who went Stones knew that the Beatles were really better/more important, and our applause was half-hearted, lacking confidence.

The debate had many jabs and ripostes and good theater, but it was clear as it went along that the Ophira and Bill’s argument that the Stones were all rock ‘n’ roll-y, good for sex and burning stuff down, was a better argument than the Myers’s argument that the Beatles changed all of culture riff (even though that is almost certainly true, in a way).

At the end of the show, John Schaefer polled the crowd again about their favorites. This time, the Stones fans, buoyed by Team Stones excellent performance, cheered robustly and with confidence. But the Beatles fans were still louder. No minds were changed, but a rollicking good time was had by all.

The following two songs are the one’s each team chose as their band’s most emblematic:

Each team was also asked to name the other band’s worst song. Team Stones did quite well, though the song they cite is terribly catchy, while Team Beatles latched onto some obvious flaws in a Stones’ tune that time has embiggened. Or, at least, revealed virtues that overcome some of the disco silliness.

KISS Shocker: They Won’t Perform at Hall of Fame Induction

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kiss socketsWe like to have fun with Kiss, who have had a long and storied career.

But now they’ve done it. Somehow these guys have turned a fast start and then years of grinding mediocrity ever afterward into something even Barry Bonds can’t claim: Membership in a Hall of Fame.

But rather than celebrate the moment, put on one of those wild HoF jams that burnish careers, a dispute between the founding members and the current members will keep Kiss offstage (and maybe even some inductees out of the Barclay Center).

Sad, really sad.

Skinny Puppy Sends a Bill

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It isn’t only the MPAA that sends post facto bills for pirated music.

A Canadian band, Skinny Puppy, has billed the US Department of Defense for using its music to torture prisoners held at Guantanamo.

Read more at the CBC website. There’s a clip there, too.

The requested $666,000 seems a bit devilish, doesn’t it?

This clip has some fine dancing.

RIP: Pete Seeger (1919-2014)

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Folk great Pete Seeger passed away today, ideally peacefully, at the age of 94.

Seeger might not be thought of as a rocker, but he represented the spirit and attitude that any serious musician–or artist, for that matter–held and spoke, unashamedly about any cause.

Seeger was a founding member of the Weavers–who recorded probably had their biggest hit in the 50’s with Goodnight Irene by Lead Belly–some of whom were blacklisted during the McCarthy era for their beliefs.

However, in the 60’s, with the emergence of Bob Dyan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, Seeger found company and even a mentor-ship as his songs If I Had a Hammer, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and Turn! Turn! Turn! found their way to radio play.

Seeger, who played with Woody Guthrie as well as Lead Belly (with whom he co-wrote So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You along with fellow activist and musician, Lee Hays) was a pioneer in roots recording, and equally important, the Civil Rights Movement that grabbed hold in the 60’s, and is really still going on.

Seeger was a great gentleman by all accounts, and a man dedicated to humanity and equality and freedom for all human beings: something I like to think all artists, and especially rockers, strive for.

But, in thinking about Seeger, I could not help but think of the clip of him in Martin Scorsese’s fabulous American Masters documentary about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home.

Seeger is so sweet and perplexed and definite about wanting the cables to the electric guitars of Mike Bloomfield and Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, in 1965, that it is funny to think how we all as human beings have our limits and adjustments.

For, Seeger was indeed a progressive politically. And, as a guy who quit the Weavers because they had signed an agreement to perform a cigarette jingle, he was certainly principled. But, I guess some progress, like cranked up Mike Bloomfield blues licks were hard to take for a middle-aged banjo player.

The world was a better place with, and because of Pete Seeger. And, it is sadder with him gone.

I did try to find the clip from No Direction Home, but couldn’t (although I highly recommend the movie and soundtrack) but, I did find this lovely clip of Seeger performing Dylan’s Forever Young.

And, well, remember, attitude does not have to be in-your-face Ted Nugent. A quiet message is always the most powerful, and Seeger was the purveyor of just that.

 

We Buy White Albums by Rutherford Chang

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Dust_and_Grooves_3332Last March the NY Times ran a story about a guy named Rutherford Chang, whose art installation called “We Buy White Albums” was open in Soho of New York City. Chang had collected more than 600 first edition copies of the Beatles album The Beatles, with the embossed lettering, more commonly known as The White Album.

The White Album, Chang found, was something of a tabula rosa, a canvas for stains, drawings, accidents and art, and from the Times story is appears that was part of the plan of the cover’s designer, Richard Hamilton.

Chang created a record store stocked with his White Albums, and spent his time at the store playing each one. They are ordered by the serial numbers that came on the albums pressed before 1975.

Another plan was to play all of them at the same time. Now the record store has opened up in a museum in Hamburg Germany, and Chang has released his overlaid performance of 100 copies of Side 1. It seems record pressings are not all the same, and while this starts out sounding like a somewhat boomy version of side one, by the end of Back in the USSR there is a real loopy dreamscape at work. I learned about this from a story in Slate.

Have a listen here.

What is this shit? A self portrait.

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bob-dylan-self-portrait-2Columbia Records announced today that on August 27th (my birthday, so you know what to get me), they’re releasing Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series No. 10: Another Self Portrait.

When Dylan released the original Self Portrait, in 1970, Greil Marcus’ review in Rolling Stone started, “What is this shit?” And pretty much everyone wondered the same thing.

I was 14 years old at the time, and I’d listened to Dylan, but I didn’t grow up with him. I remember as a 12 year old being at my young aunt’s house in Brooklyn for a weekend, playing Freewheelin’ and Bringing It All Back Home for the first time, many times, enough times to have them ask me to stop. When Self Portrait came out some forgotten relative bought me the songbook for my birthday, and I “learned” the album by playing the songs on my guitar, figuring out the melodies on the piano. I was well aware that Dylan didn’t write most of them, and I was aware the world thought the album was crap, but what I found in that songbook was a collection of great singable songs I was able to play despite my rudimentary six-string skills.

So, what happened when I finally heard Self Portrait, the album, performed by Bob Dylan and his associates? I loved it. It really is a collection of great dynamic musicians sitting around playing some very famous and some less famous songs, with Bob crooning in front of some excellent chick singers, and everyone is seeming to have real fun time (but not making any kind of big deal about it). It’s loose, but the arrangements are bold and artful. It sounds great and the songs really are great. Not folk, not pop, but simply enduring classic songs written for a clear voice and a bunch of friends backing you up.

Not many saw it that way. Some jokers in the 90s created a list of the 100 Worst Albums, and Self Portrait landed third, behind only Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and that album of Elvis talking to the audience. This is funny and just plain stupid.

Self Portrait comprises songs that were recorded in the studio while the band was warming up for the Nashville Skyline sessions. Dylan has had a few explanations for why he released them, as a double album(!), next. The one that seems truest is that he was sick of being the voice of a generation and wanted to do something that was the opposite of supercharged. Nashville Skyline got him part of the way there, but they were still Dylan compositions, still ripe for superheated analysis. (This was the period when AJ Weberman was stealing Dylan’s garbage and publishing about what he found.) An album of casual covers was Dylan’s way of taking the air out of the ball.

But my life was outside that history. For me, Self Portrait was a collection of very agreeable songs presented in a very pleasing way. Casual, appealing, easy to sing. Not the greatest Dylan album, not even close, but one I have listened to often. A great pleasure.

Jefferson Airplane: THE Best San Francisco Band

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volunteers cov

I guess the news of ex-Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna drummer and percussionist Joey Covington’s passing earlier this week sort of pushed the thoughts I have always had about the Airplane into this virtual-osity.

I think of all the San Francisco bands–especially those who bore the “psychedelic” moniker–the Airplane were the truest to the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.

True, The Dead were a great band,but they were a jam band. Big Brother was a great band, but they were a blues band. Quicksilver and Country Joe and the Fish were great bands, but they were indeed psychedelic,though the Fish gravitated more towards jug band music, and Quicksilver the blues.

However, though the Airplane could indeed be classified as a psychedelic band, they embraced what I think is the essence of real rock ‘n’ roll, and that is attitude.

It was the Airplane, who with White Rabbit encouraged us to “feed our head” as part of what I consider a favorite all time album of mine, Surrealistic Pillow.

That disc followed Takes Off, which featured the band’s first drummer, Skip Spence, who then fled to Moby Grape (another great, albeit tragic band), and female lead singer, Signe Anderson. One the heels of Pillow came After Bathing at Baxter’s and then the wonderful Crown of Creation, but it was album #5, Volunteers, that really sealed the deal of the Airplane owning the the title of best band of their generation. That is because very few albums until then were as in your face as was Volunteers.

Aside from the faux salutes and homage/parodies to Old Glory all over the liner notes and inserts, the opening track , We Can Be Together, announced that as “outlaws in the eyes of America,” we would “cheat lie forge fuck hide and deal.” Equally menacing, the song then screams “Up against the wall, Up against the wall, motherfucker.”

The Farm implies the pastoral life romanticized by Flower Power is the way to go, and the beautiful pairing of the post-apocalyptic Wooden Ships (co-penned by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kanter) and Kantner’s adaptation of the lovely Good Shepherd, with the haunting guitar of Jorma Kaukonen might be demure compared to the fuck you of Together, but they never-the-less indicate there is a different path out there and we are on it, like it or not.

There is also the symmetry of the title track and closing cut, that screams “Look what’s happening out in the streets, got a revolution, got to revolution,” riffing off the Goodwill-like spiritual renewal organization Volunteers of America, shouting out just that: We are volunteers of America.

And, though spiritual renewal may indeed be what author Kantner was pointing to, it was certainly not a Salvation Army style one.

There are other parts of the album, like the half sides of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich–something so American–on either sides of the inside of the album, so that when closed, there was indeed a complete sandwich, albeit in just two dimensions.

pbj

Finally, there is the newsletter from the Paz Chin In, a Woodstock take off, that in the text gives us the lyrics (it was still the 60’s, so fuck is replaced by the word “fred”) plus cartoons, baseball stats (with a great subtle homage to local hero and SF Giant, Willie Mays), a goofy crossword puzzle with no questions but cryptic squares, and a funny reminder that says, “Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon.” However, the first is crossed out, and replaced with the word “last,’ and at the time it was true, that Armstrong was first and last.

volunteers back

We are also reminded in the notes to “feed and water our flag,” among other suggestions

In my mind, there is no other statement by any band in the counter culture that ever embraced art and music and sentiments in such a fashion.  Within Volunteers, Jefferson Airplane pushed the agenda of “we are forces of chaos and anarchy,” sneering at the status quo while also supplying a deadly combination of cuts in here-to-fore uncharted territory.  In fact, nothing else was even close.

Of course the band did rankle in other ways. Like Grace Slick trying to get into the White House to then first daughter Tricia Nixon’s tea for Finch College graduates. Slick, as alumnae, was invited, and did try to attend. However, the singer was not allowed entrance. According to Slick, she and her date, Yippie Abbie Hoffman, were pulled out of the entrance line and denied because they were on the FBI watch list at the time.

Per Slick, all the Airplane were on the list for “suspect lyrics.” Also per Slick, she did try to sneak LSD in to slip Nixon the father–hardly beloved by the left at the time–a mickey (presumably in his cottage cheese and ketchup).

Jefferson Airplane did release a few more discs after Volunteers–Bark and Long John Silver–but they never had the bite of Volunteers. The band did release a terrific live disc, Bless it’s Pointed Little Head that captures everything that is Airplane, and features a brilliant cover of Fred Neil’s The Other Side of this Life, which opens with a Jack Cassady bass-line, that is then joined by some deadly interplay by Kaukonen, then Dryden, and the best of the band systematically joining in.

If the Airplane peaked with Volunteers, they then slowly landed, re-emerging as Jefferson Starship, which was a Kantner/Slick/Balin endeavor to start, but quickly the principles abandoned ship, and the group morphed into the Starship, which really had nothing to do with anything Jefferson at all.

However, Kaukonen, Cassady, and the late Covington did form their own spin-off, Hot Tuna who did stay true to the folk-blues roots that signaled a lot of the original band’s sound in the first place.

Certainly, the Airplane, and especially the then exotic and brainy Slick, with the powerful voice, generated a lot of buzz when they entered the eye of the public at large, but to me at the time it all seemed in the context of the media trying to be or act hip. And, though Slick was indeed a great character, the real story was what a killer band the Airplane really was.

More to the point, they were a great band that embraced the “fuck all of you in the mainstream” principles that are the essence of rock ‘n’  roll.

Doors of Life: Always Swinging

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doorsMy life long friend Stephen Clayton managed to see the Doors twice during their mercurial rise,and then demise after the death of Jim Morrison.

He said they were were ridiculously good one time, and awful–as Morrison was drunk–the second time.

Maybe it was fortuitous, but I happened to be listening to the local head banger station (sorry, no XM/Sirius for me yet, still) in my car the other day and John Densmore, the Doors drummer happened to be the guest. I always thought both Densmore and guitar player Robbie Krieger under-rated, living in the shadow of the more riff driven keyboard player Ray Manzerak, and of course the specter Jim Morrison.

Densmore shared some nice tidbits (like that Lonnie Mack, with whom the Doors were touring at the time played the bass on “Roadhouse Blues”) and maybe it was a harbinger as Manzarek passed away Monday at the age of 74 in Germany (presumably undergoing some form of cancer treatment not offered in the States).

Morrison was at least enigmatic, and a strong singer, and he played his Lizard King role to the max, but just how good a band were the Doors?

To me, there is no question the band’s first eponymously titled album was a great one. Forget the signature “Light My Fire.” “Break on Through,” “Soul Kitchen,” and their treatment of the Brecht/Weil tune “Whiskey Bar” were all so realized, as was “The End” which found its way to being a pivotal part of the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”

“Strange Days” had its moments but to me it was largely a function of rushing a second album out on the tails and success of the first. Uneven, at best is what I would call it.

And then I ran sort of cold with the Doors schtick. I never even owned “Morrison Hotel,” or “Waiting for the Sun,” and I have a vinyl copy of “Soft Parade” I bought at a used record store for $2 mid-70’s.

However, I do love “L.A. Woman,” having bought it both when it came out on vinyl, and like the first album, repurchasing on CD (what a racket, vinyl, to 8-track, to cassette, to CD, to digital download, meaning you could buy the same work no fewer than six times if your timing is bad enough).

But, along with “Love Her Madly,” were “Riders on the Storm,” “Cars Hiss By My Window,” and the killer title track that I was surprised to realize I still remembered all the words to when it popped on my shuffle (in the car, so I am not a total cretin) a few weeks back.

Meaning the Doors at worst had a solid sound and a collection of tunes that more than carry the burden of being remembered.

But, were they great, or was Morrison’s outrageous behavior, that was as much contrived as was a lot of his poetry, the real driver of the band’s perceived “greatness”?

I guess that is a lot of the paradox, for Morrison, when on, was apparently a riveting performer, and certainly he had a powerful and memorable voice.

He was also a lout and buffoon who took a lot of pleasure in pissing off Ed Sullivan, which in 1969 was not that hard to do (remember, the Stones, corporate players that they are, were ok with changing the words of “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” although to this day I still shake my head in wonder as to why any of us gives such a shit about who sleeps with whom?).

He was also a drunk, which is pretty well documented and maybe Hemingway could earn a Nobel prize and wear that mantle, but Ernest’s body of work was also a lot more substantial. So was Richard Burton’s for that matter.

I think, though that like Janis Joplin and James Dean (who was vastly over-rated in my opinion, basically playing a role great once, then replaying the same role two more times before he self destructed) and Amy Winehouse and John Belushi (also vastly over-rated) that early death somehow gives the public the freedom to transmogrify “what ifs” into “genius.”

And whatever else be said of Jim Morrison, he was hardly a genius. I mean, if nothing else, most geniuses do not die of natural causes in bathtubs at the age of 27.

But, our desire to apotheosize our fallen idols is probably as out of control as our use of the words genius and classic.

I doubt, were Morrison still alive today, he would be as vibrant and productive as say Darryl Hall. Or even Dave Navarro.