These free album streams are available from AOL/Spinner through Sunday, December 7, so listen while you can. Try before you buy.
Note: AOL/Spinner still call these "full" album streams despite the fact that they rarely stream the entire album anymore, especially in the cases of multi-disc sets. Consider yourself warned.
I was born at Great Lakes Naval hospital just north of Chicago. My dad was in the Army and stationed at nearby Fort Sheridan and we lived in Chicagoland until I was four. Our family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up, but I always had a fascination with Chicago. That fascination grew when my best friend and GLONO founder Jake Brown invited me to the annual spring break trips he took to the city with his mother. Two teenage boys wandering the streets of downtown Chicago was sure to lead to something, and for me it was a determination to someday return to my birth city.
College and years wandering from job to job in Michigan kept me from following through on that dream until 1999 when my girlfriend and I decided to just pull the trigger and make the move. We'd grown bored with Grand Rapids and we had a couple friends who'd recently moved to Chicago so why not? That decision was the start of nine and half of the best years of our lives.
From Matador Singles '08, which is a really good collection of poppy lo-fi messy garage punk songs. The fact that he comes from Memphis makes sense. I hadn't heard anything by him before this album, but now I'm pissed I missed seeing him this summer.
There's no question that negative reviews are far more fun to read than their postiive counterparts. Jim DeRogatis clearly agrees, since he edited a collection of disparaging essays about the canonized classic rock albums, Kill Your Idols. And now, DeRo rips it to the Killers in a review in their hometown newspaper:
Alas, working with Stuart Price, the Brit producer best known for Madonna's 2005 product Confessions on a Dance Floor, they adorn the simplest ranch house of a melody with the silliest Bellagio excesses, inexplicably littering on steel drums, congas and timbales ("I Can't Stay" and "Joy Ride," which would embarrass the Barry Manilow of "Copacabana"), mock South African choirs paired with martial drums ("This Is Your Life"), a ham-handed evocation of Bono fronting a community orchestra ("A Dustland Fairytale") and everywhere, absolutely everywhere, some of the worst saxophone ever heard in rock 'n' roll.
". . .rock 'n' roll is always a quintessentially B art form. Its potency, even the bulk of its charm, has always been about no respect for artistic authority, musical elegance, refinement of taste, or virtuosity." So write David Sterritt and John Anderson in the introduction to one of the 11 sections in their eclectically focused selection of essays culled from sources ranging from the Los Angeles Times to tcm.com, The B List (Da Capo Press; $15.95). The section in question is titled "Whole Lotta Shakin': Rock, Pop, and Beyond," and it contains essays on the movies The Buddy Holly Story, King Creole, American Hot Wax, The Girl Can't Help It, and Greendale. The essay on Neil Young's Greendale, by Sam Adams, contributing editor at Philadelphia City Paper, is quite possibly worth the better part of the price of this collection of essays on that movie as well as 57 others that Sterritt and Anderson encompass in the subtitle The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love.
Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and a film professor at Columbia, and Anderson, a writer for venues including Variety, miss the point vis-à-vis B movies and rock and roll. A better way of looking at it is that a B movie is to a full-blown feature what a B side is to a disc. Peter Keough, a film editor at the Boston Phoenix, writes in one of the collected essays, "Traditionally, the term B movie refers to those cheap, readily accessible, generally lurid exploitation films from pulpy genres designed to fill the second billing for the main feature." The occasion of his essay is Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), which was made just after The Godfather. Clearly, Coppola didn't make a film that had "no respect for artistic authority;" Keough points out that Coppola acknowledged Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) as inspiration for the film; Blow-Up was nominated for two Academy Awards (director; screenplay), and while it didn't win either, let's face it: back then, mainstream was the only stream so far as the Academy was concerned. Keough writes that The Conversation represented a "new kind of B picture,. . . an intensely personal expression of the filmmaker's soul."
The recent coverage of Glen Campbell here is remarkably coincident with the rise of a performer of similarly long pedigree who, some would say, has had a recent resurgence, while others—David Wild, foremost among them—would say he's never really stopped shining. Yes, I am talking about Mr. Neil Diamond.
First, permit me a digression. . . .
It had the makings of a good road trip. A new car. A full tank of gas. Clear weather. A challenging route. My navigator, although I didn't know him all that well, was a personable fellow, who can read a map and, more importantly, drive well, so I didn't need concern myself with our getting lost or spinning uncontrollably over the edge of a mesa. But I was to learn more about him. And I was to have an out-of-control experience of another sort.
A couple hours into the trip, when the radio stations had gone from bad to worse to static (no satellite radio in the car), my colleague reached into a satchel and extracted his iPod. He hooked it into the aux jack. Neil Diamond's Home Before Dawn had just been released, and he dialed it on. I was to discover that my navigator, a man a few years younger than Diamond, spent his Thursday nights as a singer is a bar where Thursday night meant "Karaoke Night." When management saw that the stage was empty and it seemed as though it was going to stay that way, up went the ringer, my navigator, who would belt out Aerosmith, Meatloaf, Rod Stewart, Bonnie Tyler. . .it didn't matter.
And in the car I was to experience this, over and over again, but in a different way. His all-time favorite and audio mentor, I was to learn, is Neil Diamond. This was not Neil and Streisand in the car. No, this was pure, unadulterated Diamond lust. For hours.
It's hard to imagine that the douchebags in BrokeNCYDE even have parents, nevermind what those parents' houses look like. But I imagine the same could have been said about The Byrds' former member and CSNYmega-hippy David Crosby (pictured with his father, Floyd) or Frank Zappa. That's what makes this little gem on Apartment Therapy so cool. It's a series of photos featuring rock stars from the 70s in their parents' or grandparents' homes. What an interesting, intriguing concept.
Crazy old Neil Young has set yet another release date for his Archives set, according to Rolling Stone. We're looking at January 27, 2009. At least until they change it again...
After more than 20 years, the first volume of Young's career-spanning box set is finally coming out. The 10-disc set (available in Blu-ray for $432 or DVD for $345, and eventually in CD and download formats) is built around an interactive timeline that allows users to access hundreds of hours of audio and video, ranging from Young's high school band through 1972's Harvest. "There's photos, there's original lyrics, there's all the materials that make up a career," says Larry Johnson, the set's producer. So when is Vol. 2 due? "Now that we've done the format," says Young, "it'll be quicker."
That's a lot of dough. Ten Blu-ray discs for $432? If my math isn't too far off, that comes out to $43.20 per disc, which seems kinda high. Then again, you've gotta be kinda high to believe that you're really going to be holding this in your hands on January 27, 2009.
Via Aquarium Drunkard, who's currently hosting the bootleg, Chrome Dreams.
The subtitle of He Is. . .I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond might seem somewhat ironic, but there is so much schmaltzy prose going on that it is clear that the author never stopped loving Neil Diamond.
Documenting the general feeling that we are at a low ebb where the only place to go is up, Badu creates a major piece of work, challenging but rewarding.
• Mixmaster Shecky on Good Night Chicago: A Brief History: Shit - this was unexpected. Portland sounds pretty decent, but Chicago definitely won't be the same w/out youse.
Keep up the...
• Kiko Jones on Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy: I'm digging “I.R.S.”, “Riad N the Bedouins”, “Scraped”, "Catcher in the Rye", and the title track. As delayed, much-awaited albums...
• Mixmaster Shecky on New Jay Reatard video: See/Saw: Reatard's stuff is pretty awesome in general. I might have to pick up that Matador Singles disc.
• J.C. on 2008 Albums Sold - Year To Date: "Lefsetz is a moron constantly pontificating on the obvious and always from the view point of a middle-aged hipster comparing...
• steve-o on Video: BrokeNCYDE - Freaxxx: To quote an anonymous internet commenter:
"Someone needs to take these guys and rub their face on a synthesizer and say...
Five years ago today, the comments page for Johnny's review of 8 Mile got so out of control that we had to break it off into a separate page because it was crashing our server: Your Comments on 8 Mile...
America loves its football game pep music It's Sunday. Week 11. Fat men in Braveheart facepaint shout oaths and threaten bodily harm at other groups of fat men clad in Braveheart facepaint of a different color and stripe. The roller...
According to Wilco's official website, they "have agreed to terms with Nonesuch Records (www.nonesuch.com). More information about all of this next week." I'm not exactly sure what this means, but the people at Pitchfork interpret it to mean "Wilco have...
One of the issues regarding music is the degree to which it is calculated. Calculated in dollars and... more dollars. Let's not be naïve. The music industry is an industry like any other. It is about selling goods and services...
