For Matty D

Good seeing you and yours last night.
If you have never heard this before IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND (caps lock)!

MP3 Jimmy Smith: Root Down

We Take Requests

Not O.P. Alex!!!

This was in my personal email from an anonymous family member...

Thinking of music questions, B----'s favorite to ask on first dates and uncomfortable conversations is what was your first concert? Not one your parents dragged you to (Kenny Rogers) but the one you picked out or begged to go to? The beauty is it will never change, it has a date and says something, he's met people that hadn't gone to their first show till their 20's, mine was Powerstation w/ OMD opening.

For me it was the 1977 Texas Jam:
Fleetwood Mac
Steve Miller Band
Little River Band

First Arena Show:
George Benson when he was considered "Pop"

First Show I bought tickets for was U2 War.
Unfortunately my memory of it has blended in with the Red Rocks concert video!!

Visual Scratch, ya'll

fresh off of making the rounds from digital music blogs... it's called Ms. Pinky!

co-ink-i-dinky??

Prince among men

As my Prince education continues, I feel obliged to share this video of the Purple One, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty performing While My Guitar Gently Weeps at what I presume was George's tribute concert. The eagle-eyed might notice little Stevie Winwood throwing shapes at the keys too. Got the video off Tofu Hut, for the record.

First, I got a shock seeing George's son Dhani. I realized he looked like his dad, but holy shit -- spitting image of him in his Quarrymen days. It pained me.

Second, Prince comes on about halfway through and just utterly rips it up. His bit follows an axemeister journeyman bloke's note-for-note reproduction of Clapton's solo, and leaves it in the shade with his own Princified/Hendrixified but utterly-faithful-in-spirit, literally-death-defying monster of a kicked-out jam.

Pavement

There is no band that I regret missing more than Pavement.
The fact that I missed it proves that I don't know very much.
Sometimes I ignore a band because of their name (Death Cab For Cutie).
Sometimes I ignore a band because I think there is too much hype (Nirvana).
I can be prejudiced against entire genres (Country and Rap).
And I don't really listen to the radio very much. So that might explain a little bit
about how I missed them. I remember Alex showed me a video around 2000. They were already broken up by then so it was too late to get excited. I liked it but didn't seek any of it out. Then Senor Rozzi gave me the DVD Slow Century.

This was one of those times, and I think that Bekkah is a big proponent of this theory, that I really had to see the band perform to get it. By the end of the DVD I was exstatic. I have almost all of their music now.

The one original thought I can add to the Pavement argument (is there an argument?) is that their music is a little bit like Ornette Coleman's. There is often 2 simultaneous melodies going on. It is joyous , exuberant, slightly detached and intelligent, but with folksy (populist) undertones.
I believe that Malkmus, not Cobain, was the voice of the 90's.

Some Of My Favorite Pavement Songs

From Tofuhut

This a very appropriate entry on my favorite MP3 blog, Tofuhut:


Back in junior high, on a school trip that ended with a swing by the local mall for lunch, I made one of my very first audio tape purchases, Metallica's Master of Puppets. The album was fast, mean-spirited and a drastic departure from what I generally listened to: the afro-pop, jazz and gospel my father normally played around the house. Metallica was an early attempt at listening to music that my parents had no interest in. My favorite track on the LP was 'Orion', a tightly-crafted, eight minute instrumental that alternated between languorous bluegrass-tinged rock and speed-metal marching music. Before long, I had dubbed that single track over and over to fill up both sides of a blank C-90 and would end my fourteen year old days by cuing 'Orion' up and falling asleep to it. I have no idea how many times I listened to the song, but I do remember that the tape eventually broke.

In any case, when I got around to re-listening to Master a few years ago, I was aghast at how little I enjoyed 'Orion'. The intricacy and mystery that I remembered was mostly gone; it sounded flimsier and less evocative than it ever had. We all have moments when we look back unkindly on the music we once loved; 'Orion' was a pretty sad one for me.

Saturday Surprise

Bekkah and I were listening to the Pixies yesterday and this fantastic song came up:

MP3: Bone Machine

Francis and Kim sound all gospely on this song.
But the truth is I missed the Pixies the first time around.
What great band did you miss the first time around?

In the Beginning was Sound

In the Beginning was Sound

Apropos Jeff's postings on the Recording Angel come these lectures by Daniel Barenboim on music -- this is the first of 4. Available on streaming video, podcast, and text from the BBC Radio 4 site....

The Frug -- live

Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands

has (apparently recent) video of Rilo Kiley doing hit-that-never-was The Frug. It's charming, as you would expect.

It's about the music, man!

Man held as terrorism suspect over punk song

On Headphones

More from "The Recording Angel"

Headphones ... suggest that the kingdom of music is within you.

"So I got the Walkman and it just made me psychopathic, you know time disappeared and space disappeared and I could just do music all the time." (Nina)

"If you're walking down the street or riding a bus, having a nice time listening to music, you are not going to worry about whether your shoes are scuffed, whether you're being polite to the bus driver, whether you're jostling the guys next to you." (Vivian)

"That fits in with my theory of music listening as self-definition and self-expression; it's your way of refusing to be a social unit for a little while or any other kind of unit besides a listening, enjoying unit that thinks its own thoughts and maps its own emotions." (Nina)

When we hear music we expand to fill available space. This is one reason for the Gulliver feeling we get, a feeling of monstrous sensitivity- as though our nerves were stretched across the universe - and vulnerability. (Headphones give this feeling instantly, but in a somewhat different form. While it is hard to say whether my self has expanded or the world has imploded, the violent privacy of the experience makes the sense of implosion stronger. Because the music seems to be coming from inside me, it merges with my direct experience of the will. As a result, the music seems to express my feelings at the moment, even when by its nature it ought to be at odds with them. Another result is one Nina noted: I do not seem to be listening to the music as much as playing it.)