22 February 2013 (Day 53) - Archive.org

One of the great things about the internet is how we can now access so many live performances by acts from an incredibly wide period of time.  For example, I was looking at the SugarMegs site the other day and was staggered to find a number of shows from Melbourne including The Rolling Stones at Kooyong 40 years and a few days ago and the monumental Neil Young with Crazy Horse/ The International Harvesters shows at Festival Hall from 1985.  This is something that some  bands have well and truly commercialised, enabling fans of acts such as Pearl Jam, The Who, Metallica and The Pixies to obtain recordings of shows that they’ve attended as a form of audio souvenir.

But the forerunner to all of this is probably the Archive.org site.  This is an American non-profit internet archive that seeks to preserve many forms of audio visual material online for free distribution and downloading.  Included in the site is a live music archive where recordings of performances for many acts have been preserved.  Nothing is permitted to be played on the site without the permission of the act and recordings can be uploaded by anyone.  As such quality can be variable because the source material could have come from someone’s recordable Walkman, a cassette recording of a radio broadcast or from the act’s soundboard.

Provided permission has been granted any act can have their performances uploaded leading to the site being dominated by acts I know nothing about.  But there is an impressive range of name acts available if you’re prepared to browse the list including Warren Zevon, The Dream Syndicate, Ween, Ryan Adams, Little Feat, the Smashing Pumpkins and the John Butler Trio.  It is also the home to the Grateful Dead archive of a staggering 9,106 shows.  Here are three performances I was given copies of and decided to play over the course of the day:

(143) Camper Van Beethoven – 9.30 Club Washington D.C 12 October 2004

This is an excellent sounding audience recording for a show around the time of the release of their slightly disappointing New Roman Times album.  Fortunately the better tracks from that album got into the set along with plenty of CVB classics to keep up my interest including Tania, Take The Skinheads Bowling, their cover of Status Quo’s Pictures Of Matchstick Men and rounding things off, Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive.  

(144) Fugazi – Electric Factory Philadelphia 5 March 1997

One of the finest bands, if not THE finest, to have emerged from the Washington DC punk scene, Fugazi were a legendary band live.  This would have been one of the last gigs performed prior to the end of the tour supporting the Red Medicine album and provides a fine representation of their catalogue and the power of their live performance.   The only drawback for me is that this show lacks many of my favourite Fugazi numbers.   There are only 18 Fugazi gigs on Archive.org because the band is systematically live recordings they made of 800 of the approx. 1000 gigs they recorded in their career.  The ones released to date are available for download for a suggested fee of $5.

(145) Sleater-Kinney - 9.30 Club Washington D.C 3 August 2006

This is a radio broadcast but I suspect this was never on the Archive.org page but rather from the npr (National Public Radio) site.  Nonetheless this is a powerful performance from the all girl punk three piece with songs from their entire history.  This wasn’t altogether surprising as this turned out to be one of their final shows.

21 February 2013 (Day 52) - Recent Purchase Update # 2

I’ve ditched the idea of a weekly purchase update because it dawned on me that I don’t necessarily listen to my purchases as soon as I obtain them.  My purchasing has never been dependent upon record company release schedules.  I’ve found that if you’re able to supress the impulse purchase urge they rely upon, you can buy albums at a much cheaper price later on, or when the band inevitably tours Australia, a “special tour edition” with bonus tracks or a DVD. 

(A digression – Tip 1: Beware of whenever the catalogue of a major artist or a highly popular or influential album suddenly becomes available at a bargain price.  In many cases this is usually advance warning that the act’s catalogue is about to be rereleased in a remastered form with bonus tracks and discs or that a Collector’s Edition of the popular/influential album is coming.)

In adding to my collection, I’m unconcerned about when an album was released.  These days my additions are driven by a need to hear something new or different.  Whilst this results in my adding to the catalogue of albums by favourite artists, I’m just as likely to dig into music’s past as well as its present.  By adopting such a mindset, I’ve found that my collection is akin to a never ending jig saw puzzle with me continually finding specific pieces of my picture without ever knowing what that picture is ever going to look like or indeed whether it is complete.

Some of the pieces I’ve recently obtained and played today were:

(140) Burial – Truant/Rough Sleeper

Burial is the performing name for William Bevan, am electronic musician with seemingly a dark, almost malevolent musical vision, sort of like a tuneful version of the sounds that filled the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Eraserhead.   Like that movie, the music evokes black and white imagery in my mind.  His first, self titled, album is awesome, however, this release from last year comprising two tracks lasting a combined 25 minutes is less so.  Both tracks place a greater emphasis on drums and bass and this alone appears to lessen the music’s intensity.

(141) Yoko Ono – Yes, I’m A Witch

So many people appear to hate Yoko’s music and it is sometimes difficult to assess just how much of this is due to her perceived role in the breakup of The Beatles and her influence over John Lennon.  I find her singing hard to take at times but I think it’s fair to say that she was making music that was ahead of its time.  This particular album provides some evidence that the world is catching up.  It consists of a number of Yoko songs that were mostly rerecorded by other acts but with her vocals retained.  The results are marvellous, the new backings providing for the most part sympathetic backing to that most maligned of voices.  Highlights include tracks with Blow Up (Everyman Everywoman), Le Tigre (Sisters O Sisters), The Flaming Lips (Cambridge 1969/2007) and a monumental version of her best known song, Walking On Thin Ice with Jason Pierce of Spiritualized.

(142.1) The Byrds – (Untitled)*

This album was originally a double vinyl half live half studio release by the version of The Byrds comprising Roger McGuinn, Gram Parsons, Clarence White and Skip Battin.  The gatefold cover image shows the band members on steps with either the country (front) or the sky (back) in the background and is a brilliant representation of the mix of psychedelica and country evident in these tracks.  The studio tracks contain Chestnut Mare, one of Parsons’ best known songs and some other really interesting material.  Well Come Back Home appears to address the indifferent attitudes being expressed to Vietnam veterans and the humorous You All Look Alike records the same attitudes expressed towards hippies.  But it is the live material that is the main reason to hear this.  Side 1 of  the original album is a series of classic tracks plus a cover of Dylan’s Positively 4^th Street recorded in this new style but the absolute highlight is the 16 minute version of Eight Miles High that took up the entire original Side 2.  This version features an extremely lengthy music introduction which gave all of the musicians room to shine before the song itself is handled fairly economically.  It’s a measure of The Byrd’s place in American music that this same approach was adopted lock, stock and barrel nearly two decades later when no less a band than Husker Du ran their own lengthy instrumental Recurring Dreams into their mighty cover of the song.  (You’ll find it on the Live From The Camden Palace DVD.)

*My copy is the expanded version with a bonus disc of additional music called (unissued).  I couldn’t get round to playing it but will do so at some point in the future, hence the .1.

20 February 2013 (Day 51) – Reasons to be Grateful

There are all sorts of reasons why I’ve latched on to a particular act over the years.  And then are reasons why I’ve prized certain albums by these acts. Sometimes I value a particular album because it was the reason I latched on to an act.  Today’s listening provides some examples.

(137) Los Lobos – By The Light Of The Moon

With their potent mix of rock, rockabilly, Mexican and many other sounds, Los Lobos are one of America’s true living musical treasures.  They’ve been together in one form or another since 1973 and their line up has not changed other than to absob Steve Berlin.  In that time they’ve released a string of incredible albums with nary a duff one in the lot.  Even the albums released by their side projects – Los Super Seven and The Latin Playboys – make for compelling listening as was Soul Disguise the solo album by guitarist Cesar Rosas.  They’re frequently sought after for soundtrack appearances – they hit number 1 with their version of La Bamba a couple of decades ago – and for their collaborative abilities, their work with Paul Simon on a track on his Graceland album the best known.

By The Light Of The Moon is my favourite Los Lobos album over other worthy candidates such as How Will The Wolf Survive?, The Neighbourhood, Kiko and The Ride.  It is bookended by the wonderful One Time Last Night and the sublime Tears Of God.  It’s got the joyous Set Me Free (Rosa Lee), the rocking Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes and pointed Is This All There Is?  Try as I might to make a case for some of their other albums what I can’t escape is that this is album they toured behind the one and only time I’ve managed to see them.  Each time I play this I’m immediately transported to that night at The Palace and it seems like yesterday.   26 years later I’m still waiting, but each time they’ve subsequently played here, I’ve purchased tickets only to fall ill. Perhaps this curse is really a fate designed to preserve a perfect memory of both gig and album.

(138) Frank Zappa – Hot Rats

I am a Frank Zappa fan and have almost every one of the albums released during his life time to prove it.  A Zappa fan has to put up with a lot.  There’s the wilful changes of musical direction, some dodgy albums (I defy anyone to sit through Thing Fish) or tracks (ditto The Adventures Of Gregory Pecory), some classical music albums (although The Yellow Shark is absolutely brilliant), bouts of misogyny and other lyrics so juvenile that 10 year olds would blush.  Yet I’m willing to wade through all of that because Zappa at his best is better than just about anyone.

Hot Rats was my introduction to the weird and wonderful world of everything Zappa.  A largely instrumental album except for a Captain Beefheart vocal cameo on Willie The Pimp, it is an awesome showcase for his mastery of the electric guitar.  This contains some of his best known instrumental work outs and concert mainstays notably Willie, Peaches En Regalia and The Gumbo Variations.  It is also the best entry point into the Zappa catalogue….if you dare.

(139) R.E.M – Reckoning

The first time I heard of R.E.M was when Rolling Stone magazine hailed Murmur as the best album released in 1983.  Somehow I managed to miss hearing it and so its follow up Reckoning was the first album of theirs I heard.  I was hooked straight away by the sound of Peter Buck’s guitars, Michael Stipe’s mysterious vocals and the unbelievably catchy songs, not particularly caring what they actually meant.  I was happy enough to sing for example, “She’s got pretty persuasions” to myself and make up lyrics for the remainder. (Even today I believe this was Stipe’s intention.)  I took the same approach (and obviously different lyrics) to songs such as So. Central Rain, Harborcoat, (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville and Little America.

Put another way, R.E.M were able to infuse a sense of wonder in the listener about their songs and were able to sustain that sense for a very long time and an extraordinary run of albums.  They also had the grace and common sense to call it a day when the realised this had finally worn away.  This started the process for me and for that I’m eternally grateful.

19 February 2013 (Day 50) – 5 Albums With Absolutely Nothing In Common

I knew I would be able to get through a few albums today so I set myself the task of playing albums that I could not link in any way whatsoever.  This is one of the things that I normally pride myself on in selecting listening matter but this project, and the need to find something to comment on each day, has influenced my thinking in ways I hadn’t anticipated. 

To make things interesting, I brought in the rule that all of the albums had to be rock albums. Otherwise, it would have been too easy to follow a rock album with, say a delta blues album, then a jazz album, then a reggae one.  (Of course I could have nixed that anyway by stating that these are all examples of black music, but I hadn’t thought of that at the time.)  In any case with that, supposedly difficult limitation, I think I did pretty well; you be the judge.

(132) Cowboy Junkies – The Trinity Session

By now everybody knows of the circumstances of the recording of this album by this Canadian band.  (Recorded on a single microphone in a Toronto church presumably for a pittance for those who don’t.)  Lo fi doesn’t even begin to describe the vibe early but it suits the material and the exquisite whispered vocals of Margo Timmins incredibly well.  For some reason the highlights come in the second half of the album, 200 More Miles, Dreaming My Dreams (trying playing that in front of a roaring fireplace) and of course their magnificent cover of Sweet Jane.

(133) Tool – Lateralus

Tool is seemingly where prog rock meets metal without sounding like either.  “I know where the pieces fit”, sings Maynard on this album.  Good. Now you can tell me but unfortunately the track concerned is called Schism.  Adding to the wilful confusion are enigmatic lyrics that are too angst ridden to be associated with either musical camp, traces of world music (such as the into to Reflection) and in Maynard the most withdrawn lead singer in music.  Unbelievably the whole thing works wonderfully particularly on intricate, epic tracks such as Ticks & Leeches and Triad.

(134) Bad Company – Straight Shooter

From the ashes of Free comes this no frills, straight ahead, blues/rock beauty, a particular favourite of mine in the mid too late 70s.  This neatly encapsulates the era – the songs about making love (Feel Like Makin’ Love), love gone bad (Good Lovin’ Gone Band), women (Anna and Wild Fire Woman), a cautionary tale (Shooting Star) and a tender ballad to round things up (Call On Me)  All this and the great voice of Paul Rodgers too.

(135) The B-52’s – Self Titled

Their debut album and the one that has Planet Claire, 52 Girls and the immortal Rock Lobster on it.  Need I say more? Err, yes.  For me the highlights are the final two tracks on the album.  First is the hilarious 6060-842 which probably contains the definitive Fred Schneider vocal performance, especially his answering the phone bit.  But even this is topped by the cover of Petula Clark’s Downtown, an act of supreme demented genius.

(136) Rancid - …..And Out Come The Wolves

For the most part this is an exemplary set of rousing 90’s American punk tunes which should have been much bigger that it was.  Just one listen to hook heavy tracks such as Ruby Soho, As Wicked, Disorder And Disarray, Junkie Man and the Oi Oi Oi chorus in Avenues & Alleyways and you’ll be hard pressed to stop joining in.  It is as exciting as this form of music gets and their live shows in the era were even better.

18 February 2013 (Day 49) – Did Richard Wilkins Say Mudhoney?

So far in this endeavour I’ve only been able to establish any subconscious selections of listening matter as a reaction against or complementing something I’ve just played.  Today I’ve been able to trace a selection back to something that occurred earlier in the day and that something is Channel 9’s Entertainment Editor Richard Wilkins. 

For the most part Wilkins’ music reports are right from smack in the middle of the road, not surprising really given that they’re made for morning television in the guise of the Today show.  I’d imagine his brief would be to highlight acts fitting the show’s target demographic.  Judging from the majority of musical acts profiled, I’d image that would be either elderly or musically conservative viewer.  Pink would be about as radical an act as can be envisaged.

This morning’s story was a pleasant enough conversation with jazz singer Norah Jones who is currently on an Australian tour.  At the end of the piece he held up the cover of her latest album and stated for anyone interested that it was based on a Mudhoney poster she saw on the walls of the studio where it was recorded.

My ears pricked up.  Did I just hear the word “Mudhoney” escape from the lips of the mighty sage? Did he mean Mudhoney the Seattle masters one writer referred to as the grunge connoisseur’s band of choice?  You mean he’s heard of them and – gulp – their music?  Then darker thoughts started to circulate.  What’s his motive?  Is he trying to impress someone out there?  To win a bet? Earn credibility points the next time he hosts the ARIA’s?  The mind boggled.

Anyway, I had a meeting first thing up this morning so by the time I had a chance to play something, I’d forgotten all about it.  But then I selected:

(130) Mudhoney – Under A Billion Suns

This is one of Mudhoney’s most recent albums and one of their most satisfying.  It neatly encapsulates everything that makes this band great; grungey rockers like It Is Us, and Empty Shells, slower dirges such as Where Is The Future? And Hard-On For War and tracks incorporating horns into the mix.  But the big difference here, as demonstrated by the song titles cited here, is in marrying their sonic template to lyrics of real substance.  These really suit Mark Arm’s voice, one of the best in all of rock.

Now I’m not sure whether I can extend the Wilkins memory further but the only other album I played was:

(131) Talking Heads – Fear Of Music

This is my favourite Talking Heads album although I really can’t determine how much of the credit resides with its producer Brian Eno.  Side 1 of the original vinyl release was absolutely flawless and practically a record in its own right.  It started with I Zimbra, its African rhythms anticipating the next album Remain In Light.  Then came Mind, Paper, Cities, the brilliant Life During Wartime before finishing up with Memories Can’t Wait, a side of such brilliance that I frequently played it twice before going onto Side 2 (if it all).  Although it contains such staples as Air and Heaven, Side 2 pales into comparison but that is testament to the brilliance that preceded it rather than any shortcomings. 

17 February 2013 (Day 48) – Synch Or Swim

Damn this hot weather.  I was going to journey today to a wedding reception place and bingo hall in Altona (again!!) for the second day of the All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival.  Yesterday was headlined by Swans, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and My Bloody Valentine.  Today features curators The Drones, plus The Beasts Of Bourbon, Pere Ubu (playing The Modern Dance), Crime And The City Solution, Einstürzende Neubauten and many others.  But I was worried about the heat and today is something like the fifth day in a row over 31 degrees Celsius.  So my priorities today were to keep cool and import a stack of CDs into the iPod.

The latter task involves having to work with iTunes.  This involves a great deal more work that the good people at Apple originally probably envisaged.  Once I’ve imported my disc, I immediately bring up the tracks in my library to edit all of the data provided that I simply don’t want.  These include songwriters, music genres, those annoying details at the end of tracks such as (album version) or (2007 remaster) and basically anything that could affect a true random shuffle other than album titles, song titles and track lengths.  What puzzles me here is that I can remove these items from my music library so that it doesn’t show on my iPod but I can’t delete other things I don’t want on my iPod such as the installed Games and all the other features I never use and never will use such as provision to store Contacts, Photos, Video, etc.  I repeat something I wrote last month; anyone who buys a 160GB iPod does so because they want as close to 160GB of music as possible.  Nothing else matters.

Then I’ve got to edit artists and album titles.  Editing artists is an absolute must because even the most minuscule difference will result in a new artist appearing on the iPod.  For example, I don’t want my Neil Young albums appearing in two separate artist lists, one for Neil Young and another for Neil Young And Crazy Horse; all get attributed to Neil Young.  I then need to make sure that artists are sorted so that they appear in an alphabetical sequence by artist surname or group name.  Occasionally I’ll need to sort or edit an album title especially when there are many albums released with the same title such as Greatest Hits, Live, The Very Best Of, The Essential, or Gold. And finally there are things that I feel I should correct.  For example, today I imported The Jeffery Lee Pierce Sessions Project album I played last month.  This is actually the second album released by this amalgamation of acts and so I think it should be listed as an artist.  This means taking the individuals created to each artist on the album into the song title.  (iTunes really doesn’t handle compilations all that well.) After this, I will uncheck any tracks I don’t want, almost always to avoid unnecessary duplication of tracks.

Next up is a task that I really think is really unnecessary.  When you import your CD, iTunes gives you all of this data but not the album artwork.  You then have to specifically take action to retrieve it.  Why not give the artwork along with everything else and let the consumer decide whether to keep or delete it?  Finally, it’s time for the synching process, something that Apple has considerably approved and it goes smoothly.

And so there you have it, a posting to disguise the fact that today, I’ve played only one album and it was whilst writing this post.

(129) Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers – Hard Promises

For a long time, Damn The Torpedoes was my favourite Petty album.  However, every time I play this album the gap continues to narrow to the point where I’d say it’s now at level pegging.  This is strange because I can remember being underwhelmed when this first came out.  Anyway this has a cracking start with the two singles The Waiting and A woman In Love (It’s Not Me).  This is followed by Nightwatchman, one of the few Petty tracks that could be described as approaching funky. Kings Road and A Thing About you are first rate rockers, Insider is another good duet with Stevie Nicks and You Can Still Change Your Mind is a fine ballad to close proceedings.  

16 February 2013 (Day 47) – Tis Was The Thrill Of The Hunt *

Actually, there was some good news yesterday but I didn’t want to trivialise the event in our lives from overseas.  After all the receipt of my first internet order for the year is very unimportant in the scheme of life. 

I’ve been forced into having to buy my music from the web for a number of reasons.  First, there are few stores around the stock a lot of the music I want to purchase.  There are the JB HiFi’s and some independent stores such as Greville’s, Missing Link and Polyester but all of these are a distance from my place.   Moreover, there is no guarantee that they’ll have what I want and even if they did I might have to pay significantly more for the privilege.  That prices over the web can be quite reasonable is simply the cherry on the cake.  Whilst I’d prefer to keep Australians in a job and would be willing to pay a modest mark up, I simply refuse to pay the outrageous mark ups that many of the chain stores used to charge.  JB HiFi exposed them and they’ve all paid the price, so to speak, at least in Melbourne.

My copy of The Fall’s Complete Peel Sessions is a case in point.  When I decided to buy it, I did the rounds of about 6 JB’s, plus Grevilles and Missing Link only to discover that no one stocked it although Missing Link claimed they had sold their only copy a few weeks prior.  Everyone offered to order it for me at a price ranging from $60 – 120 and a delivery estimate of 2-4 weeks.  I eventually got it over the web via an English site and it cost me approximately $40 including postage and I received it in 5 working days.  How can any bricks and mortar shop compete against that?

This doesn’t mean that I’m happy with having to purchase my music this way.  Previously one of my favourite pastimes was the hunt.  I had a network of chain stores, independent stores, second hand places, record fairs and others in which to fossick. Usually I set out with no real intention of buying a specific album. I let their stock surprise me preferring the thrill of finding something unexpectedly that I’ve desperately wanted. 

But as we all know, time marches on and the world and my life changed and I’ve had to embrace the brave new worlds of the internet and marriage. If the shops hadn’t started to close, I would have needed to abandon my expeditions anyway due to marriage. This is not coincidental.  As the movie adaption of Nick Hornby’s great book High Fidelity makes perfectly clear, the art of record shopping is an existence pursued almost exclusively by single men as a substitute for absent female company.  I know that it applied to me; let’s face it I never managed to pick up anyone as I flicked through a CD or vinyl rack.  No woman ever came to me saying, “Oh, I really want that extra rare album that you’re about to buy for a steal.  Can you make a copy for me?  Maybe we could meet for coffee?”  Don’t get me wrong here.  I wasn’t like one of those anonymous geeks in the comic book store in The Big Bang Theory staring whenever a woman entered the store. I wouldn’t have noticed because I was focused on the search attempting to uncover that gem before anybody else.  (Well, it’s either that or comic book fans really are different.)

So onto today’s listening brought to you by a warehouse somewhere in Europe and Australia Post.

(127) La Dusseldorf – Individuellos

This is the third and last La Dusseldorf album, at least with Klaus Dinger as a member.   This is about as close an album to anything resembling mainstream sounds (Kraftwerk included) that any of the German experimental bands of the 70s got.  There were even moments on this which appear to foreshadow the New Romantic movement.  Is this why Dinger left the band?

(128) Howlin’ Rain – Magnificent Fiend

Howlin’ Rain was formed by Ethan Miller as his previous band Comets On Fire came to the end of it life.  Both bands played modern versions of psychedelic rock crossed with blues, folk and other influences.  The difference is that Comets On Fire played a more ragged and primitive form and Howlin’ Rain favours a more melodic and cleaner sound.  Yet when Howlin’ Rain truly rocks out as they do on the glorious Lord Have Mercy, such differences are moot.

(* I’ll be damned if I’ll title any post after a line in Eye Of The Tiger, hence the otherwise unnecessary “Tis”.)