by Chris Barrus
Electrelane at the Troubadour last night. Great show – anyone out there who’s going to any of the Arcade Fire shows should make a point to get there early. Better yet, just see them on their own. No Shouts, No Calls is on my 2007 short list of albums.
More photos on Flickr.
La Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows has been kinda up and down lately (Arcade Fire in the elevator was just too obvious), but this week’s episode with Damon And Naomi covering the Everly Brothers’ “I Wonder If” amidst a 3am Paris apartment wreckage of empty bottles is an out-of-the-park stunner.
Over the course of their life span, every blog has to hit several content stereotypes. One is cat pictures. Another is “What ‘xxx’ am I?” quiz graphics. Another is band hype.
I haven’t owned a cat in fifteen years, but I can check off another blog stereotype by mentioning that an Ex-Detectives track has been posted over on the MySpace page. Yay us!
In lieu of any other kind of post at the moment, I’m somewhat traumatized after the trusty New Hampshire amp lost about two-thirds of it’s volume during last night’s practice.
1. I have to get it fixed since the only sound the Ampeg reliably makes is a 60 cycle hum.
2. Is this when I finally break down and buy an AC30? Anyone have a blue-speakered Vox they want to sell?
The Fall has always been a peculiar kind of show and it’s a useful shorthand to describe the various iterations of Fall members as a sitcom cast. The cover to the US release of Reformation Post T.L.C. extends this analogy – they actually look like a sitcom cast.
Compare with:
And of no interest and no relevant Flickr group, here’s my current guitar, effect, and amp set-up (also on an annotated Flickr page)
Someone out there has perfected the Infinite Improbability Drive because in a little under three months I’ve joined a band and all this ancient machinery lying around has been dusted off, fired up, and brought back to full power like some forgotten spaceship. I found the Jazzmaster a little over ten years ago at the much missed Black Market Music. I played it steadily back then before putting it (along with everything else) in storage. Carruthers Guitars (I can’t recommend them highly enough!) replaced the frets and cleaned out the wiring and now it feels like a brand new guitar. Unbelievably loud too.
Occasionally there’s a Vox Cheetah and a mid-70s Telecaster driving all this too.
September 10, 1967: a lovely night for an upscale dinner and cabaret show in Stockholm, Sweden. What’s the show tonight? Some underground band from Britain calling themselves The Pink Floyd…
I can only imagine the hilarity that resulted…
Next is what happens when 100 people suddenly start chasing you:
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(via Brain Damage and TV In Japan)
All the James Bond talk earlier got me wondering about who the guitarist was who played the famous theme music. The answer: Vic Flick. He’s still around and so is the guitar (a Clifford Essex Paragon DeLuxe played through a DeAmond Volume Pedal into a Vox 15 Watt Amplifier.)
Not surprisingly, his list of album credits is pretty full-on. I had no idea that he played on Serge and Jane’s “Je t’aime… moi non plus.”
James Brown on stage at Boston Gardens. April 5th, 1968 – one day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I can ‘t write anything more that could do justice to this clip.
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There’s a lot of YouTube clips and all are worthy, but one I always rather liked was Beat The Devil. Sure it’s a long hyperkinetic Tony Scott BMW commercial with Clive Owen and Gary Oldman, but it’s 100% James Brown.
[youtube]k-cbiYzlHOk[/youtube]
Following up on my earlier Tower Records post, I can now answer the question “When was the last time I bought something at Tower?” Answer: today!
I’ve reading about the great deals that people were getting at the Tower clearances, but apart from those few outrageous finds there wasn’t anything that motivated me enough to plow through the bins one last time. Frankly, I’m sick of CDs these days, but after reading Doug O.’s blog post today about his Tower finds I figured what the hell. This sentence in particular got me moving:
I bought 94 CDs, for a total of $448.25 including tax. At the bottom it says “You saved 1104.16 today!”
The Glendale Tower is down to its last three days of operation with everything at 70% off. I’ve been pretty critical about Tower’s selection which isn’t surprising at all if you’re standardized on Fingerprints and Amoeba, but I was rather shocked at what I was able to dredge up. Here’s today’s haul:
Top row:
Middle row:
Bottom row:
Total: $51.96 (I saved $104.92 today!)