Tag: music_history

Reading Around on June 7th through June 10th

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A few interesting links collected June 7th through June 10th:

  • Don’t mess with Kris – "“One of country music’s brightest stars,” by the way, was Toby Keith — the Jonah Goldberg of country music. It was 2003, remember: Dickhead Nation was in the ascendant and Keith was whoopin’ along with the rest of the rumpus room warriors all lathered up to start bombing brown-skinned people in Iraq. He’d had a hit with “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” so Keith felt entitled to play pompous ass in the presence of Paul Simon and Ray Charles, who had recorded more classics than Toby Keith could ever hope to make, years before Toby Keith was even out of grade school.

    That little encounter between Keith and Kristofferson is one of the most entertaining things I’ve read since “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” in which Gay Talese described young writer Harlan Ellison facing down Ol’ Blue Mouth during an encounter at a night club."

  • Firedoglake » Breaking: Lieberman-Graham Dropped From Supplemental – "According to sources on the Hill, the Lieberman-Graham detainee photo suppression amendment is out of the conference report of the supplemental.

    For everyone who made phone calls — pat yourself on the back.

    Let us all now sit back and enjoy the spectacle of Joe Lieberman throwing a tantrum. "

  • Hullabaloo – Goldilocks Journalists – But the media critiques of the left and the right are substantially different. The right thinks the media is filled with liberal operatives pushing the Democratic agenda. The left thinks the media is filled with insular, shallow and out of touch stenographers. If it makes Milbank and his friends think the anger at the media stems from the last election it's just more proof that the left's critique is correct.

Honest Jon’s Records

Seth Anderson1 Comment

[Honest Jon’s Records Amazon MP3 store]

The July 2009 issue of Uncut has a small feature on Honest Jon’s Records, and one of their famous patrons, Damon Albarn1. There is also a 16 track sampler of songs put out on the Honest Jon label, some incredible stuff.


“Palace of the Winds” (Hisham Mayet)

Browsing Honest Jon’s Outernational page, discovered at least a dozen albums I want, and a film called Palace of the Winds:

‘Intimate and dreamlike… exploring the music of Saharawi culture from Guelmim in Southern Morocco to the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott.’

Desert blues, right up my alley.

Also have already downloaded


“Sprigs of Time: 78s from the EMI Archive” (Various Artists)

Honest Jon’s has spent the last eighteen months delving through more than 150,000 78 rpm records in the extensive EMI Archives at Hayes, Middlesex. The results of this trawl can be heard on the Hayes Archive series, an epic 12 albums covering early recordings of music from Iraq, Turkey, Caucasia, the Lebanon, Greece, Iran (including sides made in Old Street, London, in 1909), Egypt and the Belgian Congo. The 12 volumes will be released according to the standards of HJ’s esteemed London Is The Place For Me series – with full notes, translations where possible, and wonderful artwork. A giddy summer sampler will run organ rolls from Georgia alongside Tamils impersonating motorised transport in 1906, Kabyle music from Algeria into the songs of Bengali beggars, mambos from 1950s Beirut against the Imperial Palace Band of Japan in 1903


“Open Strings: 1920s Middle Eastern Recordings – New Responses” (Various Artists)

Forgotten masterpieces, out-of-this-world improvisations from the 1920s; and dazzling commissions by Sir Richard Bishop, Six Organs Of Admittance and co. ‘Dextrous, frenzied, fearless… awesome’ (Plan B).

and have ordered several others. What a great find!


“Guitar Music from the Western Sahara” (Group Doueh)

Sahara desert rock is one of my favorite genres, check out all these great titles from the Sublime Frequency label (a division of Honest Jon’s).

Footnotes:
  1. famously the frontman for Blur [↩]

Sonic Youth 28 Year Survivers

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“The Eternal” (Sonic Youth)

Seems like I’ve been a fan for nearly as long as the band has existed, but I guess that isn’t true. Probably 23 years ago I bought my first Sonic Youth album, from the used record section at Waterloo Records. Truth be told though, their last dozen releases have been meh, but I keep hoping the next will spark some connection.

‘Bands are usually a young man’s game,” says Thurston Moore, the guitarist with Sonic Youth for nearly 30 years. “Historically, they don’t stay together. We never had any animosity towards each other. I guess we never felt like we hit a wall with what we were doing. We never really had any ambitions for reaching a certain goal. We never had a hit we had to repeat.”

“Lots of bands don’t survive that kind of spike in popularity, or ego, or finances,” agrees fellow guitarist Lee Ranaldo. “We came into this feeling fairly serious about ourselves as artists and this is our medium, which happens to involve a collaborative group – it’s just never gotten boring or rote. It’s still incredibly fulfilling and interesting.”

Sonic Youth played their first gig 28 years ago this month, at the Noise Fest in New York City. Few bands stay together for that long, and fewer still remain so vital. The quintessential New York art-rock group have survived and flourished both through a rare internal democracy (Ranaldo likens their composition process to “making a group sculpture”) and, it seems, by simply being too busy to become disaffected. Sonic Youth’s discography is a sprawling affair, now encompassing 16 official studio albums, various compilations and a slew of self-released, more experimental releases.

All four core members (Moore, Kim Gordon, Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, who have recently been joined by former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold) work extensively outside the group, producing poetry and visual art, solo albums and collaborations with other musicians and artists, and running record labels

[Click to continue reading Art-punk band Sonic Youth talk to David Peschek | Music | The Guardian ]

Am looking forward to getting my copy of The Eternal on June 9.

After years on Geffen Records, Sonic Youth return to an indie label with their sixteenth studio album. “The Eternal” is a supercharged rocker, recalling aspects of the Evol-Sister-Daydream Nation holy trinity, but with cleaner, louder production and more straightforward momentum. With Pavement’s Mark Ibold joining on bass, and producer John Agnello back at the controls, “The Eternal” takes the melodic songwriting of 2006’s “Rather Ripped” and slams down the accelerator pedal. Initial pressing in a 4-panel wallet with two printed inner sleeves; one containing disc, the other a sticker and card with credits. Subsequent pressings are jewel case. Double LP hyper-deluxe HQ 180 RTI vinyl analog in heavy duty Stoughton gatefold sleeve, printed inner sleeves, and MP3 coupon.

Hendrix Murdered By Manager

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“Rock Roadie: Backstage and Confidential with Hendrix, Elvis, the “Animals”, Tina Turner, and an All-star Cast” (James Tappy Wright)

Odd, and only coming out now because of the book.

Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager, according to a new book by one of the guitarist’s former roadies. James “Tappy” Wright has claimed that manager Michael Jeffrey confessed to making Hendrix swallow sleeping pills, because he hoped to collect on his client’s life insurance policy.

Jeffrey feared being replaced with a new manager, Wright writes in his book Rock Roadie, and decided Hendrix was “worth more to him dead than alive”. Jeffrey was allegedly the beneficiary oo the guitarist’s $2m life insurance policy (worth around £1.2m in 1970).

According to Wright, Jeffrey told him about the crime in 1971 – a year after 27-year-old Hendrix was found dead in a London hotel. “I had to do it, Tappy,” Wright claims the manager said. “You understand, don’t you? I had to do it. You know damn well what I’m talking about … We went round to [his] hotel room, got a handful of pills and stuffed them into his mouth … then poured a few bottles of red wine deep into his windpipe.”

[From Jimi Hendrix murdered by manager, claims roadie | Music | guardian.co.uk ]

Probably a lie, but who knows. There have been all sorts of allegations about Michael Jeffrey controlling and manipulating Hendrix, so there could be truth here. And of course, Jeffrey allegedly died in a plane crash in 1973, so nobody can refute the tale. It wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion, hearsay is admissible evidence.

Jeffery has received almost unanimous criticism from biographers of Hendrix. Several have alleged that Jeffery siphoned off much of Hendrix’s income and channeled it into off-shore bank accounts, that Jeffery had dubious connections to US intelligence services (it has been reported that insiders often claimed that he worked for MI5, British Secret Intelligence and that he had connections to European organised crime). When Experience bassist Noel Redding inquired as to where Jeffery was going with briefcases of the bands money, he was asked to leave [the band].

Elvis Costello discovers writing an opera is hard work

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“Secret, Profane and Sugarcane” (Elvis Costello)

According to the print edition of Rolling Stone issue 1080, Elvis Costello has stopped working on the Hans Christian Andersen opera he started in 2005. Some of the songs are getting used in a new “roots” acoustic bluegrass record, recorded in Nashville.

Though Costello releases music at an incredible pace – close to 30 studio albums since 1977 – this record was unexpected, even to the artist himself. “Two years ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make any more records,” says Costello, who released the freewheeling rock set Momofuku and hosted the talk show Spectacle in 2008. “It wasn’t much fun anymore.” But a stint opening for Bob Dylan as a solo act in the fall of 2007 got Costello excited about making an unplugged album. “Nobody was coming to hear me, so I could test out new songs,” he says. “The audience applauded, and then I was gone.” Most of the Sugarcane material, including a few songs he wrote for an unfinished opera about Hans Christian Andersen, was road-tested on the Dylan tour and then fleshed out with a full band at North Carolina’s MerleFest in 2007 and San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2008.

Burnett assembled the band of top roots sidemen – including dobro player Jerry Douglas, mandolinist Mike Complon and singer Jim Lauderdale – and also fed Costello ideas for tunes. “T Bone sent me Robert Johnson’s ‘From Four Till Late’ and a Sidney Bechet record,” recalls Costello. “And he said, ‘Can we write something that jams those two ideas together?'” The result, “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” is an “I’ve Been Every where”-style blues ramble that wryly mocks loose women from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Ypsilanti, Michigan. “I played that one with Dylan every night,” says Costello, who will tour with the Sugarcane band this summer. “And I was amazed at how much applause you can get for impugning the reputation of a city’s womanhood from the stage.”

What I heard of Momofuku wasn’t all that interesting, but perhaps this new album will be more fun to listen to.

Reading Around on May 27th through May 28th

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A few interesting links collected May 27th through May 28th:

  • 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
  • By Joe Hagan: Steve Earle and the Ghost of Townes – Too bad this isn't online, wanted to excerpt a couple of paragraphs. Good article, but no longer on the newstands, so no way to read it now.

    "a profile of Steve Earle in the latest issue of ROLLING STONE magazine. Here's the tagline:

    The country rocker almost died emulating his damaged mentor, Townes Van Zandt. On a new tribute album, Earle looks back.

  • Stupid and Contagious: Townes Van Zandt – "Rake" – One of Townes Van Zandt's greatest of many many great moments? Impossible to say. There are so many classics in his almost peerless catalogue.

    But playing Steve Earle's remarkable new reinterpretation of this classic track over and over and over this past week – less ostensibly mournful and a little more revved up perhaps, yet also, strangely, at the same time gloriously sparser than Townes' original – we'll say maybe it is!

    Beautiful poetry. Magical music. A superb performance. A pristine piece of perfect art.

    A true classic. If not only for the superb unforgettable line "except for the turning of night into day and the turning of day into cursing'"!
    and
    "I covered my lovers in flowers and wounds"

Sonics Psycho

Seth Anderson0 comment

I have no idea of the context of this video, which mostly consists of a young woman in a plexiglass box writhing and go-go dancing to the Sonics song, Psycho. Dancers from 1965 crack me up, but The Sonics are great in any context.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw6Fjo6VXTg


“Here Are the Sonics” (The Sonics)

Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt

Seth Anderson0 comment

One of my favorite new albums discovered this year1 is Steve Earle’s tribute album to the late great Townes Van Zandt [wiki].


“Townes (2CD LTD Deluxe Edition)” (Steve Earle)

In a certain mood, Townes Van Zandt songs are like no other songs, with their melancholy poetry and blurred edges of a life lived to extreme. Van Zandt was the sort of artist who devoted his whole being to his music, at the expense of his body, his comfort, and his family.

Joe Hagan wrote a piece about Steve Earle’s relationship with Townes Van Zandt in a recent issue of Rolling Stone, but unfortunately, as far as I know, the article is not available online. I have a scanned PDF I could send you if you want, but here are a few paragraphs transcribed from my dead-tree edition:

Steve Earle and the Ghost of Townes
The country rocker almost died emulating his damaged mentor, Townes Van Zandt. On a new tribute album, Earle looks back. By Joe Hagan

[From : Rolling Stone Issue 1079]

[quote]

IN 1972, STEVE EARLE OVERHEARD A man talking about a birthday party being thrown for Texas country legend Jerry Jeff Walker in Austin, where Earle was living. He crashed the party and, around 2 a.m., in walked the tall, lanky form of Townes Van Zandt, wearing a white buckskin jacket with fringe on the arms. “He started a craps game and lost every dime that he had, and that jacket,” recounts Earle.

…

From Van Zandt, Earle absorbed poetry, literature, fingerpicking styles and a sophisticated lyric sensibility, all while getting into legendary misadventures. Once, while visiting Van Zandt at his cabin in rural Tennessee in the late Seventies, Earle was bragging about his burgeoning gun collection when Van Zandt, exasperated with his young acolyte, loaded a single bullet into his .357-caliber Magnum, spun the revolver, pressed it against his temple and pulled the trigger. Earle was horrified – and angry. He “beat the hell out of” Van Zandt and left. “It was the only time I ever got physical with him,” he says. “It took me a long time not to be angry about it.”

According to legend, Van Zandt came by to check on Earle during the height of Earle’s heroin addiction, asking him if he was using clean needles. When Earle said he was, Van Zandt replied, “OK, listen to this song I just wrote.” “And that was the first time I heard ‘Marie,'” says Earle. He covers the song on Townes.

I sincerely hope that Steve Earle either finds a way to release these audio anecdotes, or works them into a film or a book, or something.

Earle recorded the album in his Greenwich Village apartment, working 11 hours a day for a week. With the “record” button on, Earle maintained a rolling, Van Zandt-inspired meditation, relating impromptu stories and stray recollections about his mentor. The recording engineer, Steve Christensen, told Earle he felt like he was “listening to something I shouldn’t be listening to,” because it seemed so personal. Which is when Earle says he “realized that’s what the criteria is, that’s how I don’t fuck this up.” (He hasn’t figured out yet what he’ll do with the recorded anecdotes.)

If you have never listened to Townes Van Zandt, you are in for a real treat, as a lot of his back catalog is available on CD. I’d suggest dipping your toe with a greatest hits package, and then jumping right into the box sets. There is a quite decent film called Be Here to Love Me (a documentary composed of snippets of Townes Van Zandt) available at Netflix or Amazon, I’ve blogged about it before.


“The Late Great Townes Van Zandt” (Townes Van Zandt)


“Our Mother the Mountain” (Townes Van Zandt)


“Texas Troubadour” (Townes Van Zandt)


“Townes Van Zandt – Be Here to Love Me” (Margaret Brown)

Footnotes:
  1. I use that peculiar phrase because I don’t necessarily care if an album was released recently: just if it is new-to-me. For instance, other favorites from this year so far – Louvin Brothers, Dukes of the Stratosphere, The Heliocentrics, blah blah blah [↩]

Funkadelic Cosmic Slop Video Promo

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A weirdly wonderful film promo from Funkadelic, circa 1973, found on YouTube. Yes, I would hazard to guess there were a lot of drugs involved.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp4pgMOugbo

(via @joem500)

from the album of the same name.


“Cosmic Slop” (Funkadelic)

If memory serves, this was the first Parliament/Funkadelic album I bought – a gatefold LP from Westbound Records on heavy, archival vinyl. I even remember where I purchased it: a funky little record store next to Mad Dog and Beans and Les Amis on The Drag near the UT campus in Austin. Sadly, all three of these fine establishments, who have a cameo in the film, Slacker, are defunct, replaced by a Starbucks, a Subway, and a crushing sameness, so common to America in the 21st CE.

John Cale and The Velvet Underground

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“The Velvet Underground & Nico” (The Velvet Underground, Nico)

Like a lot of musical obsessives, The Velvet Underground was essential listening when I first began exploring music.

Jonathan Jones had the good fortune to check out John Cale’s exhibit in the Venice Biennale. Sounds like an interesting exhibit, but of course, The Velvet Underground’s history is always on the agenda:

It sounds at first like an electronic whine, a build-up of noise in the amplifier. Then there’s Lou Reed’s voice, young but hardened: “When the smack begins to flow, and it shoots up the dropper’s neck, and I’m rushing on my run, then I feel just like Jesus’s son.” Behind it all, there’s that strange keening, humming note. Listen to the Velvet Underground’s Heroin on headphones and you realise it’s not feedback after all, not a synthesised warble, but the rich timbre of a violin playing a single note, held for a disturbingly long time. It’s the darkest thing in the darkest of songs. If Reed sounds as if he’s made a pact with the devil, then the musician who plays that buzzing fiddle – John Cale – must be the devil himself.

[From The Velvet Underground’s John Cale on reconnecting with his Welsh roots at the Venice Biennale | Art and design | The Guardian ]

and doesn’t sound like any feel-good reunion between Lou Reed and John Cale will ever occur

Andy Warhol produced the Velvets’ first album and designed its banana peel cover. No figure in modern culture is more misunderstood than the Velvets’ manager, and nobody speaks up for Warhol more eloquently than Cale. He won’t hear a word against Andy. The Factory, he insists, was a true underground – “it was outrageously creative and vital” – and Warhol cared about, and properly curated, the Velvets. A rare bit of footage Warhol shot in the Factory shows Cale fiddling with the amplifier, while Reed strums and drummer Maureen Tucker knocks out her steady, dry beat. Warhol listened carefully, and remembered it all. “He was the one who’d remind us of an idea we’d forgotten.”

Cale is still smarting from what he sees – amazingly – as the tragic waste of the band. Warhol took them to the west coast, he tells me. While they were away, Bob Dylan’s manager took out a lease on their Manhattan venue. This was part of Dylan’s feud with Warhol, whose world is caricatured in lyrics on the 1966 album Highway 61 Revisited. Then Reed sacked Warhol and Cale. A new manager, says Cale, “appealed to Lou’s desire for glory”. In the years since, Reed and Cale have occasionally got back together – but from the furious way he talks, I’d say any further reunion was unlikely.

All through the solo career that followed, Cale has returned again and again to his Welshness. He has recorded Dylan Thomas poems, and in the early 1970s composed a nostalgic Thomas-inspired song, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. And apart from the Thomas obsession, there is a lyricism to his music, one that struggles with his severity and evokes all those years in the Welsh Youth Orchestra.


“Paris 1919” (John Cale)

If you own just one Cale solo album, Paris 1919 is my favorite.

One of John Cale’s very finest solo efforts, Paris 1919 is also among his most accessible records, one which grows in depth and resonance with each successive listen. A consciously literary work – the songs even bear titles like “child’s christmas in wales,” “macbeth,” and “graham greene” – paris 1919 is close in spirit to a collection of short stories; the songs are richly poetic, enigmatic period pieces strongly evocative of their time and place. Chris Thomas’ production is appropriately lush and sweeping, with many tracks set to orchestral accompaniment; indeed, there’s little here to suggest either cale’s noisy, abrasive past or the chaos about to resurface in his subsequent work – for better or worse, his music never achieved a similar beauty again.

ThruYou mashup

Seth Anderson0 comment

I think I linked to this lovely YouTube mashup a few months ago. If you haven’t seen it, you are in for a treat.

This spring, the radical dissonance at the madhouse YouTube was — for a moment, at least — subdued. Did you feel it? The cacophonous video-sharing site was briefly brought to harmony in March by a composer, animator and musician known as Kutiman. Born Ophir Kutiel in Jerusalem in 1981, Kutiman created a minor masterpiece with an online project called ThruYOU that makes both sense and music of YouTube’s warring tendencies of compartmentalization and community.

ThruYOU is an album of seven original songs, each built from dozens of fragments of video clips of (mostly amateur) musicians, selected from among the seemingly endless footage of music lessons and private recitals archived on YouTube. (You can watch and listen on Thru-You.com, Kutiman’s cleverly custom-designed site.) Over what must have been a grueling two months, Kutiman collected an array of striking sounds and images, some no longer than a split second, and pressed them into musical service. Each one now furnishes a note or two, or a groove or a sensibility, in Kutiman’s audiovisual medleys. He has put the fractured universe of musical YouTube in concert. The housebound noodlers of the world now miraculously jam together.

…

But whatever its standing as ideological object, ThruYOU is also just stunning. Using and refining the technique of “video scratching,” ThruYOU builds fully orchestrated songs from Kutiman’s selected digital excerpts. Most of the clips show musicians in modest domestic spaces, improvised studios, barely finished basements and bunkerlike bedrooms. The videos almost always feature one musician in a soliloquy tableau that’s by now familiar to YouTubers: somewhat sheepishly, a soloist plays into a self-monitored camera and cheap microphone.

[Click to continue reading The Medium – World Music – NYTimes.com]

Here’s the first track: Mother of All Funk Chords

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA

Though really, you should spend a few moments and watch all of the cuts from this “album” directly at Thru-You.com (the track selections are on the right of the screen). I shudder to think of how much time was spent compiling and cross-referencing these clips, but the results are just stupendous.

Reading Around on April 26th

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Some additional reading April 26th from 07:43 to 20:01:

  • Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (or, the Privatization of the English Language) | Zen Habits – "Her lawyers asked me to insert the (R) symbol after the phrase, in my post, and add this sentence: “This is the registered trademark of Susan Jeffers, Ph.D. and is used with her permission.”
    Yeah. I’m not gonna do that.
    I find it unbelievable that a common phrase (that was used way before it was the title of any book) can be trademarked. We’re not talking about the names of products … we’re talking about the English language. You know, the words many of us use for such things as … talking, and writing, and general communication? Perhaps I’m a little behind the times, but is it really possible to claim whole chunks of the language, and force people to get permission to use the language, just in everyday speech?"
  • Democracy Now! | Flashback: A Look Back at the Church Committee's Investigation into CIA, FBI Misuse of Power – "We take a look at one of the most famous special Senate investigations of government misconduct. In the mid-1970s, a US Senate committee chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho conducted a massive investigation of the CIA and FBI’s misuse of power at home and abroad. The multi-year investigation examined domestic spying, the CIA’s attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, the FBI and CIA’s efforts to infiltrate and disrupt leftist organizations, and more. We speak with Sen. Frank Church’s widow, Bethine Church, and Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr., who served as chief counsel to the Church Committee"
  • A Guide to Beating the Fears That Are Holding You Back | Zen Habits – "Just got a copyright infring. notice from lawyers of author Susan Jeffers, bec I used the phrase "feel the fear & do it anyway" in a post."
    Some moronic author, Susan Jeffers is asserting copyright claim to this phrase, and sending threatening letters to my cousin Leo, who used these words in a blog post. Come on, get real. Hasn't she (or her lawyers) heard of the phrase, "everything that has been said has been said before". There are only 26 letters in the alphabet – phrases can't be copyrightable.
  • Que reste-il de Kurt Cobain ? | Rue89 – my photo of Kurt Cobain graffiti used (with poor link/credit, but I'm working on that)

And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Our Vinyl

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“And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost” (Roger Bennett, Josh Kun)

Ha, what a great idea for a book. I want to go to this, though $15 a person seems a little expensive.

An affinity for kitschy album covers became a quest as Josh Kun and Roger Bennett scoured attics and garage sales to collect once-loved gems. In Jewish recordings from the 1940s-1980s they discovered sacred songs, Jewish mambo, comedy, folk tunes, and the “holy trilogy” of Neil, Barbra, and Barry. Their book includes commentary from writers and performers including Aimee Bender, Michael Wex, Shalom Auslander, Sandra Bernhard, Motown legend Lamont Dozier, and TV pioneer Norman Lear. With music and visual images, Josh Kun will share how these recordings speak across generations to tell a vibrant tale of Jews in America.

[From Spertus | Author Event | Booksigning]


“Hot August Night (Remastered / Expanded) (2CD)” (Neil Diamond)

The Amazon blurb says:

What started out as a mutual affinity for kitschy Jewish album covers–think Neil Diamond baring his chest hair on the cover of Hot August Night or Barbra Streisand in hot pants on the cover of Streisand Superman–soon became a quest for identity, history, and culture between the grooves of LPs.

Together, Roger Bennett and Josh Kun embarked on a thrilling journey, scouring the world to collect thousands of vinyl LPs from attics, garage sales, and dusty archives. Pieced together, these scratched, once-loved and now-forgotten audio gems tell a vibrant tale: the story of Jews in America. And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl spans the history of Jewish recorded music from the 1940s to the 1980s, weaving an account that begins with sacred songs and ends with the holy trinity of Neil, Barbra, and Barry. The LPs found here are also a love letter to forgotten moments in Jewish American pop history, celebrating well-dressed cantors singing Christmas tunes, Long Island suburbanites dancing the mambo, and Chassidic prog-rockers.

The music, much of which is no longer available in any format, is brought to life through commentary from writers Aimee Bender, Etgar Keret, Michael Wex, and Shalom Auslander; performers Sandra Bernhard and Motown legend Lamont Dozier; music critics Oliver Wang and Anne Powers; and TV pioneer Norman Lear. A gateway to a forgotten kingdom of sound, the good, the bad, and the ugly of Jewish vinyl gives this aspect of Jewish culture the attention it so richly deserves.


“Streisand Superman” (Barbra Streisand)

Reading Around on March 30th

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Some additional reading March 30th from 14:16 to 19:48:

  • jimmy's cocktail hour: Whiskey for the People. – "Pikesville Rye is widely distributed, and is usually available for around $11.99. Some parts of the country get it for $9.99. Let's call it $12. This is good rye at a bargain price. If you have a bottle of bitters on hand, you're all set. "
  • Cocktail Hacker » Blog Archive » MxMo XXXVI: Recession Gin and Tonic – So how hard is this cocktail going to hit your wallet? It’s not going to hit it hard at all. It’s going to be like a kitten falling on a pile of pillows.

    Burnett’s Gin (1.75 L) $15.99 -> 2 oz $0.54
    Realime (15 oz) $3.09 -> 1 tsp $0.04
    C-Dry Tonic (6×12 oz) $2.99 -> 6 oz $0.25
    Total Cost Per Drink $0.83
    Eighty three cents. Try to wrap your head around that number. That’s cheaper than a soft drink nearly anywhere. It’s cheaper than a crappy cup of coffee from the vending machine in my office.

  • The Cocktail Chronicles » MxMo Hard Times: Drink Like a King(sley) – Need to read this book!
    "Vital requirement: prepare pre- and post-dinner drinks in some undiscoverable pantry or broom-cupboard well away from the main scene. This will not only screen your niggardliness; it will also make the fetching of each successive round look like a slight burden, and will cast an unfavorable limelight on any individual determined to wrest additional drinks out of you. Sit in a specially deep easy-chair, and practise getting out of it with a mild effort and, later in the evening, a just-audible groan, though beware of overdoing this."
  • Twitter Blog: Replies Are Now Mentions – Seems like this should pick up on re-tweets too (RT @swanksalot for instance). Good tweak to the API.
  • The Art of Sampling | TheFrontloader.com – "Sometime late last year, I was looking through the new releases when I came across a sincere tragedy. Hilary Duff was back, and THIS time, it was personal… “Personal Jesus”-personal. It seemed that, for her “Best Of” album, she needed a new song and thus decided to sample Depeche Mode’s 1989 hit “Personal Jesus” for her single, “Reach Out.”

    At first I couldn’t believe it because I consider Depeche Mode music sacred ground, but then I found a link to the music video and decided to see if it was true. For those of you that have been lucky enough to miss this, consider yourself very unlucky right now"

  • The Washington Monthly -IF IT'S SUNDAY, IT'S JOHN MCCAIN – John McCain has appeared on Meet the Press – just one of the multiple Sunday morning talk shows – 54 times, and I would guess that most of them have come in the years since announcing for President in 1999, since before that he was a more obscure figure in Washington. I can't imagine there's anyone else even close to that number. And yet McCain is an easy guy to find on the Rolodex and get to appear on your show. It points to a staleness in the official discourse.

Jimi Hendrix reality TV footage to be released by his estate

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“The Jimi Hendrix Experience” (The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jimi Hendrix)

I’d watch that, if it isn’t horrible.

Candid, “reality TV”-style footage of Jimi Hendrix at home, backstage and “hanging out” will soon be released, according to the late musician’s sister.

The footage dates from 1969, when a camera crew followed Hendrix for a month, catching him both on and off stage. The Hendrix estate will release the footage in a DVD later this year, as part of a new deal with Universal Music Publishing Group.

[Click to continue reading Jimi Hendrix ‘reality TV’ footage to be released by his estate | Music | guardian.co.uk ]

and I wonder why the Hendrix estate is blocking the making of a bio-pic? Are they working on their own? or what?

Experience Hendrix have “10 more years of Hendrix music” in their archives, according to Janie. “Currently I am in the studio transferring tapes of Band of Gypsys performances that have never been released before,” she said, referring to Hendrix’s final band. The company plans to release at least two albums this year, and a Jimi Hendrix Experience concert DVD of the band’s Royal Albert Hall gig in February 1969.

The Hendrix estate has continued to block attempts to make a Jimi Hendrix biopic, most recently refusing to license any music to a proposed film starring Outkast’s Andre 3000.


“Electric Ladyland (w/dvd)” (Jimi Hendrix)

plus there is this:

Fourteen acoustic demo songs by Hendrix, recorded in 1968 and traded to a neighbour in exchange for milk and sugar, are to be auctioned in April. The battered, coffee-stained green box contains 1,800ft of quarter-inch tape, from when Hendrix was working on his third album, Electric Ladyland.

The songs mostly feature Hendrix playing solo acoustic guitar. Though he covers Dylan, he plays Tears of Rage and not the now-classic All Along the Watchtower, which appeared on Electric Ladyland. A few tracks include an unnamed harmonica player.

Hendrix gave the tape to Carl Niekirk, who owned a photography studio beneath the rocker’s Brook Street, London flat. “It was a constant stream of people coming and going and partying,” Niekirk told the Independent. As the flat and studio shared an entrance, the photographer would often have to let in Hendrix or his guests – including George Harrison.

One day, Hendrix asked Niekirk if he could borrow some sugar. When the photographer took it up, the rock star gave him the tape. “Because I asked him, he just gave it to me,” Niekirk said. “As simple as that.”

[From Jimi Hendrix’s acoustic Electric Ladyland demo tape to be auctioned | Music | guardian.co.uk ]

which took decades of legal wrangling before it could be released