Category: Music

John Scalzi posted a twisted little piece today, entitled “Songs You Like That You’re Pretty Sure No One Else Does”. He chose a track from David Bowie’s Tin Machine side project, which sets a pretty high bar. He also linked to the track on Imeem, which posed a bit of a problem; none of my obvious candidates were available on Imeem. (We’re talking about things like Jon Astley’s “[Let’s Take Off Our Clothes And] Put This Love To The Test”, and Tracy Ullman’s version of “I Don’t Want Our Loving To Die”.) But then I found it: a priceless example of the so-called “Boss-town Sound”. It’s “Mind Flowers” by Ultimate Spinach, from their second LP “Behold & See”. The names, the lyrics, all sound like a satire on the worst excesses of pretentious hippie narcissism – and yet I still like it. Goes down perfectly with a recreational hallucinogen… or at least it did 40 years ago! It takes its place alongside other psychedelic masterpieces from groups like Arzachel, Man, H.P.Lovecraft, and Country Joe & The Fish.

On a couple of occasions over the last few years I’ve found myself taking a day-long car trip through the UK. Each time I’ve listened to Radio 1, or perhaps one of the local radio stations, and I’ve been struck by the difference between the US and UK music scenes. Here in the US, I’m not sure that thee is a recognizable “US scene” any more: the markets have ben sliced, diced, segmented, targeted, and effectively isolated. Crossover? Not a lot. But in the UK it feels to me that there is still a recognizably British sound, style, gestalt, whatever.
So I’m driving along, listening to the music, and eventually I stop at a motorway services for some food. And I wander through the W.H.Smiths shop, picking up a bottle of Lucozade and a Formula 1 magazine, and checking out the cut-price audio CDs that are on sale. And twice now I’ve found myself buying a CD by a UK artist that (a) I don’t really know, (b) hasn’t broken out in the US, and (c) feels like an archetypically British act. And each time I’m been delighted.
Last year I bought the Oasis “greatest hits” collection, Stop The Clocks. How could I not own any Oasis? Never mind. This time, I found myself looking at Robbie Williams Escapology. Former boy-band member, darling of the football crowds, consummate show-off…. Anyay, I bought it, and I was blown away. A bit uneven, but really good stuff. And this weekend I followed up by getting Rudebox, which is even better. The collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, “She’s Madonna”, is simply wonderful. Highly recommended.

Who will I discover next time, I wonder?

Here’s a video of Quicksilver Messenger Service doing “Mona” at an outdoor gig in 1969. Stunning guitar work by John Cipollina and Gary Duncan, anchored by David Freiberg’s bass. It’s a classic: turn it up.

From the BBC:

Pink Floyd keyboard player and founder member Richard Wright has died aged 65 from cancer.

I think I’ll plug in my headphones and listen to “Umma Gumma” for a few minutes….

We went to see Al Stewart at the Triple Door yesterday. The Triple Door is an interesting place, set up for dinner and music. It’s associated with the Wild Ginger restaurant upstairs, and the food was wonderful.
The calendar entry for the show hadn’t mentioned any other names, and so I was surprised when the MC introduced an opening act: Gabby Young with Stephen Ellis. We were blown away by her voice and her songs. Stephen is one member of Gabby’s band (Gabby Young and Other Animals), but he’s also involved in another group (the name of which escapes me right now Revere), and he did one song from their repertoire, which was very nice.
So to Al Stewart. I enjoyed seeing Al again (how many times now, since 1968?), but we agreed
afterwards that it was slightly disappointing. For me, there were four problems.

• First, Dave Nachmanoff. Some years ago, Dave popped up as an Al groupie who knew the guitar changes to all of Al’s songs, and he became a fixture. He’s a good guitarist, a decent singer-songwriter in his own right (though the one song he sang yesterday was really dire – Sunday School stuff), and a good accompanist. The problem yesterday was that Dave was grandstanding on almost every solo, and a small section of the audience (his fan club?) was wildly and disproportionately applauding everything he did. Al and Dave even commented on it, but it made no difference. I want to hear Al’s songs, not have the words drowned in raucous applause for a routine guitar break.
• Second, the setlist. Al has a new album out, Sparks of Ancient Light. (It’s released on the 16th, but they had CDs for sale at the show.) I wanted to hear more of the songs from the album, but we only got three (or maybe four – I haven’t listened to the CD yet). Instead we got “Al’s greatest hits”: “On The Border”, “Time Passages”, “Soho (Needless To Say)”, “Fields of France”, and “Year of the Cat”. OK, I guess, but a bit disappointing.
• Third, Al was not in the best voice tonight. Side effects of the road trip, or age? I should be able to answer that after listening to the new album.
• And finally there was the drunken, loud-mouthed member of the party of four sitting just behind us. After several requests to the staff, he was eventually escorted off the premises, but it was an unpleasant distraction.

Ah, well.I’m glad we went: the food and wine (a Coldstream Hills pinot noir) were excellent, Gabby Young was a wonderful discovery, and it was great to see Al again.
UPDATE: Well, a number of people on the Al mailing lists have been beating me up about this review. Let me add a few thoughts, edited from my emails.
Al has always worked best with another good guitarist to complement him, and I’ve seen many of them. Peter White and Laurence Juber were/are obviously the best (and I don’t think that Dave would disagree).
So do me a favour. Go back and listen to either “Rhymes in Rooms” with Peter White, or the “Dutch Tour 1996” with Laurence Juber. Even though Peter and Laurence are handling the more complex guitar passages, neither of them pushes forward as Dave did yesterday. Neither of them turns every bridge into a solo. And in those earlier shows the audience responded appropriately.
Look, I like Dave. I have a number of his CDs. The music that he creates covers a wide range, and speaks to different audiences. Some of his songs I like; others I find simplistic or trite. One of the things I love about Al’s work is the subtle, sophisticated word-play, and that wasn’t what Dave offered us last night.
I was glad that I went to the show, and I enjoyed it. That said, I’ve seen Al many times over the last 40 years, and some of those shows were sheer magic. Go back and read my comments on the Al+Dave show in Bellevue in January, 2007. Note that Dave included “The Loyalist”, which fit nicely into the historical theme that Al has made his own. So I was a little disappointed last night – OK?

We’re at the White River Amphitheatre for the Santana concert. We did the “green” thing by parking in Auburn and taking the (9 mile) shuttle bus. It’s now 6:25, the concert is scheduled to start at 7, and we’re at the end of a long line that is only just starting to move. This is easily the most incompetently disorganized concert facility I’ve ever been to. I hope the show is better than the venue.
Update: seated and ready to go by 7:15. Opening act was Salvador Santana Band. 6 members: drums, bass, keyboards, sax/vocals, guitar, and a total loser who fancied himself as a rapper and keyboards player. He had no sense of rhythm in either role. If they’d dumped him, the remaining five guys would have made a great act – tight rhythm, good vocals, inventive solos. Oh well….
And now for Santana!
[…]
Brilliant. A simply wonderful show.

While I was in Chennai, I stayed at the Asiana Hotel. In general, I was quite pleased with it, but there were a few things that seemed out of place:

• Internet service was provided through an open WiFi. I had been expecting the ridiculously overpriced WiFi that seems de rigeur for up-market hotels, but I was pleasantly surprised – at least for the first few minutes. I soon discovered that they were running a proxy server on port 80 which would periodically substitute a hotel advertisement for the page you had requested. Perhaps it was intended to be an dynamic interstitial, but under Safari it simply loaded and stayed there. The side-effects were bizarre: at one point, I brought up an Apple Help page, chose “More…”, and got the Asiana ad instead of the extended help from apple.com. The solution, apparently, was to run everything through a VPN, but that wasn’t available on my personal MacBook Air, nor on my iPhone.
• On Tuesday, I was sick, and stayed at the hotel rather than going in to the office. I delayed checkout until 2pm, and then hung around in the lounge and courtyard, drinking weak tea and hoping for recovery. As with most places in the hotel, there was background music playing. Unfortunately, they were playing just one track: “After the Sunrise”, by Yanni. Over and over again. It’s 4:38 long, so it was repeating 13 times an hour. I was in the lounge for two hours. Brain damage is a distinct possibility….
• The hotel bar was OK, even though they mixed most of the cocktails too sweet, and the tonic (not Schweppes) was so strong that it killed the taste of the gin. But the entertainment was simply disconcerting: two young women in hot pants, backed up by an older guy on guitar and synths. They had a wide repertoire, from Abba to the Cranberries, but their favourite seemed to be “Hotel California”. Did they play it because the girls liked to sing it, or because the guy wanted the chance to come forward and play the epic guitar passage at the end? We’ll never know.

This is going to be a really educational thread…

Tell me what new music or artists you’re listening to these days.
For the purposes of this discussion, “new” is defined to mean:
1. The artist/band started publicly releasing music (or alternately made their major label debut) after January 2005;
or
2. The artist/band started publicly releasing music (or alternately made their major label debut) after January 2003, but you only heard about them in the last year.

(From Whatever » Re-Hipify Me: A Weekend Assignment, over at John Scalzi’s site.)
UPDATE: Here’s my submission.

I just received my pre-release copy of the new No-Man album, Schoolyard Ghosts. It’s abso-fucking-lutely brilliant – their best work ever. I ripped it onto my iPhone, and I’ve been wandering around all day with the album stuck on “Repeat”. (Actually, that’s not quite true: some of the time I was watching the videos on the DVDA that’s part of the pre-release package. You can get a taste of it here – click on video.) The album is being released in Europe in just over a week, and in the USA next month. The pre-release special package is still being advertised at Burningshed, although the bonus CD of alternates and edits has sold out.
I really love No-Man’s music. These days Steven Wilson’s band Porcupine Tree is so popular that it’s easy to forget that PT started out as a side-project from his main work with Tim Bowness in No-Man. I first started listening to PT back in 1999, when they released Stupid Dream, but it took me another three years to discover No-Man, when I bought their fourth album, Returning Jesus.
I’m not going to try and categorize their work: you can do that for yourself. It’s the kind of music that I usually listen to with my eyes closed – a private, personal experience. Of course YMMV. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch the video for “Truenorth” again…

Last Saturday I was staying in Palo Alto ((I spent Thursday and Friday in business meetings in San Francisco, and Monday to Thursday at Stanford University. But that’s for another post.)) and I decided to drive down to Carmel Valley to visit Merry’s parents. As I headed over to 101 for the drive down, I hit the scan button on the rental car radio, and came across a Jefferson Airplane cut. I kept listening, and heard a steady stream of great psychedelic music from the late 60s and early 70s – bands like the 13th Floor Elevators, the Byrds, Iron Butterfly, and the Buffalo Springfield. (Even Blue Cheer!)
So what was this radio station, and where had it been all my life? It turned out to be “KKUP Cupertino – 91.5 FM – Non-Commercial People’s Radio”, and they were having a “Psychedelic Marathon” fundraiser. And fortune smiled: it turned out that KKUP covers both Silicon Valley and the Monterey Bay area, so I was able to hear them almost all the way there (and back, later in the day).
I meant to phone in to make a donation (and get the great Timothy Leary t-shirt that they were describing), but I got distracted by the time I reached my hotel in the evening. So just now, a week later, I visited their website, and the special shirt is no longer available… shucks. Anyway, I ordered a regular station logo shirt, to remind myself to tune in when I’m next in the Bay Area.
Now listening: “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man” by the Byrds.