Category: Music

Forget any of that “spend it on the economy” malarkey, I contributed some of it to the Irish-American Drone Rock Reunion Fund and the rest on our own 2008 travel fund.

Cthulhu knows how this is all going to turn out. The online fever pitch going into these shows is matched only by Kevin and co.’s secrecy. Apparently Papal elections are easier to get into than MBV rehearsals.

Stars Of The Lid are touring the US right now, and if the Echoplex show was any indication you would be well served to check it out. And Their Refinement Of The Decline was on my 2007 top ten and there’s very few ambient groups out there who bring something interesting to their live shows.

Some clips for you:

R.I.P.

Ned says it much better than I can. I recall that my first real exposure to Neu! was from one of those KUCI cassette tapes.

Why are the gentlemen below grinning?

1. Because they’ve monetized the advance leak of their own album
2. Because they threw a stink bomb into the morass of major label fear, uncertainty, and doubt
3. Because they’re in possession of real data as to what people will/will not pay for downloadable albums
4. Because they’ve steered the discussion about album downloads back to, well, complete albums, not just piecemeal tracks
5. Because they’ve made album release dates exciting again
6. Because they’re taking bets on which journalist/blogger/whatever will come up with the most preposterous story as to What It All Means (by the way, hey Pitchfork – an ARP is also a type of synthesizer)
7. All of the above

So last week I pulled the trigger on the electronic version of In Rainbows as soon as the announcement was made. While waiting for the download announcement to arrive last night, the mood about the music boards was kinda old fashioned – it felt like everyone was waiting in line outside Tower Records for the midnight sale. When I finally received the download link, I got a respectable 415 KB/s download speed. Overall an unbelieveably easy transaction.

In the interest of full disclosure: I paid 50p per track. If the dollar wasn’t so crap against the pound, I would have gone for the full vinyl and CD package. I’m not a Radiohead superfan, but I do want this experiment to succeed.

Meanwhile, Thom – meet Trent. Thom, Trent… Meet Tim.

Tony Wilson interviewed by the NME in 1986:

NME: There’s a quote about being misconstrued: ‘Irony is lost on pinheads’. I think Elvis Costello said it about The Clash, when all those, um, anti-violence songs caused the audiences to start slugging each other.

TW: The only way we can have peace in the world is by having lots more riots. There will be riots down the line before we get peace. A good old fashioned rock and roll riot is a movement towards truth; it’s the forward motion of history.

NME: Even if the rioters aren’t freedom fighters, but simply a bunch of assholes?

TW: Oh certainly. The urge to destroy is a creative urge. It’s never static. You only get old when you decree ‘all revolutions are over’, when you say the dialectic is finished. That’s why Russia is an old nation, because it has called a halt to change.

NME: What happens to pop when the rioting stops?

TW: I saw Malcolm McLaren last week in Los Angeles, and his theory at the moment is that it will never happen again. He’s saying that there are now so many avenues open to music that there’s just no chance. I said to him,’Just like fucking Lenin, right? There’s a continuous dialectic going on until you’ve had your bit. As soon as you’re in charge, that’s the end; no more world revolutions’. Speaking of Malcolm, I’ll have to tell you my How Malcolm McLaren Fucked Himself In The Ass Theory.

RIP. Like Ned, Factory has always meant Manchester first and Warhol second. I hope the funeral gets a FAC number.

Oh good grief…

A lot of questions come to mind – mainly as to whether Ashcroft has expunged all the ham and oatmeal from his system and whether McCabe will be interested enough to really cut loose. This could either be embarrassingly bad or spectacularly good. Probably both at the same time.

I’d probably be just as happy if it was one of those “Don’t Look Back” shows where they could play A Storm In Heaven in it’s entirety.

I’ve run across three different mentions of Johnny Watson in the past twenty-four hours and I need no further signals to fish out Larry Williams & Johnny Watson’s 1967 album Two For The Price Of One and that absurdly amazing album cover. “Mercy Mercy Mercy” is the one song that most people know (though it’s probably the Buckinghams’ later cover), but the winner is the titanic “Too Late” – two minutes twenty of warp speed LA soul that gave those Wigan kids a kick in the head.

Office Naps posts Williams & Watson’s “Nobody” – one of the early psychedelic soul experiment and/or exploitation tracks that followed in the wake of the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today.” Williams & Watson teamed up with none other than David Lindley and his fellow sitar and saz hippies in Kaleidoscope. I had no idea this record existed and my world is significantly better for it. Even odds says that Tarantino is going to mine this (or anything off of the Okeh label) for a future soundtrack. Hell, their story even sounds like a Tarantino movie. Copy/pasting from the Office Naps post:

Larry Williams’s career began in the early ‘50s as a session pianist at Cosimo Matassa’s New Orleans recording studios. He briefly joined Lloyd Price’s band, and thereafter earned a name for himself as an R&B shouter with late ‘50s hits like “Short Fat Fannie,” “Bony Moronie,” “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” on the great Specialty label. In the early ‘60s, Williams relocated to the West Coast, there working as a producer and A&R man for Okeh (Columbia Records’ R&B subsidiary) and a handful of other California labels. Never quite able to revive his early successes as a recording artist, Williams lived out the sort of disreputable life that you expect of the echt R&B musician, succumbing to a gunshot wound in 1980 that, depending on who you ask, was not necessarily self-inflicted.

When Williams’ friend, the multi-instrumentalist Johnny Watson, arrived in early ‘50s Los Angeles, he’d already gigged with Houston bluesmen like Johnny Copeland and Albert Collins. Still in his teens, Watson toiled in Los Angeles as a session guitarist and, a year or two later, he’d begin making – now as Johnny “Guitar” Watson – a string of gutsy R&B singles. These included, amongst many others, the stratospheric 1954 instrumental “Space Guitar,” his autobiographical “Gangster of Love” (re-recorded in 1963 and again in 1978), and his biggest ‘50s hit, the swamp pop-flavored “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights.” Watson would continue recording and performing in the ‘60s in a more uptown, sophisticated soul style. It wouldn’t be until the ‘70s that Watson would finally find his enduring fame, however, with his funky Southern blues persona: the “Gangster of Love.”

In the mid-‘60s Williams and Watson joined briefly together for a few fine duet releases on the Okeh label. There were obvious similarities in their career trajectories up to this point. Both were hardened, Gulf Coast-born R&B musicians. Both maintained ties to the criminal underworld: as a musician, Watson earned money on the side as a pimp (or vice-versa, according to Peter Guralnick), and Williams had a criminal record for dealing drugs and extensive involvement, it was rumored, in prostitution.

While looking for information to post to the recently revived Watson thread on ILX, I ran across a Metafilter post listing some goodies on YouTube – the best being this unreal version of “Gangster Of Love” (the YouTube poster disabled embedding on this, so you might need to go to the page directly)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk31242CnkU[/youtube]

Do not try to apprehend – simply say “it’s cool.”

Watson died in 1996 while on stage in Japan. Apparently, he said that where he wanted to be when it happened.