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MARCH, 1997 (Issue # 22)
- The Specialists -
DJ Johnson.................Editor
Wayne Burke................HTML
coLeSLaw...................Graphic Artist
Lauren Marshall............Administrative Assistant
Louise Johnson.............Administrative Assistant and
Keeper Of The Debris
- The Cosmik Writers -
Jim Andrews, Ann Arbor, coLeSLAw, Robert Cummings, Shaun Dale, Phil Dirt,
David Fenigsohn, Alex Gedeon, Keith Gillard, DJ Johnson, Steven Leith,
Steve Marshall, The Platterpuss, Paul Remington, and John Sekerka.
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SOUND CLIPS (.WAV) AVAILABLE ON THE COSMIK WEBSITE THIS MONTH
There is one clip included with the Steven M. Martin interview. The clip is
an example of the sound made by a theremin.
In the review section, you will find the following reviews:
THE BOSS MARTIANS (Surf/garage): "She's Creepy" - 354k
THE CONGOS (Reggae): "Rock Of Gibralter" - 350k
THE FREDRIC (60s psychedelia): "Henry Adams" - 293k
POISON IDEA (Hardcore/metal): "Alan's On Fire" - 218k
ROSE ROYCE (70s funk): "Love, More Love" - 370k
V/A: 3 MINUTE REVOLUTION (Power pop):
1) Swingset Police - "54321" - 289k
2) The Rockinghams - "Played A Trick" - 190k
BEN VAUGHN (Eclectic):
1) "Heavy Machinery" - 227k
2) "Seven Days Without Love" - 359k
All sound clips were sampled in mono at 11,025 hz/8 bit. This means the sound
quality isn't going to be stunning, but you also won't grow old waiting for
them to download.
If you have any thoughts on this subject and would like to share them, please
write to moonbaby@serv.net. Thank you.
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T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
EDITOR'S NOTES: DJ introduces this unusual issue of Cosmik Debris, and
announces the winners of the Brazil 2001 CD giveaway.
GADZOOKS! IT'S MOJO NIXON: From the rowdy rockabilly stage to a movie theater
near you, Mojo Nixon keeps busy! In this interview by Greg Nicoll, Mojo
covers everything from life in B movies to his collaborations with Jello
Biafra, Dave Alvin, the late Country Dick Montana, and others.
A MILLION POINTS OF REFERENCE - Building The All Music Guides: For people
who take their music seriously, the pursuit of new listening experiences
is a lifelong journey. For those people, The All Music Guides are an
invaluable set of reference books that not only tell them about an artist
and his or her recordings, but also offer advice on best first purchases,
landmark albums, and essential additions. In this interview, founder and
Executive Editor Michael Erlewine and Editor-In-Chief Chris Woodstra
discuss the AMG philosophy, the history of the series, and what the near
future holds.
LABELED - DCC COMPACT CLASSICS: DCC's audio magician, Steve Hoffman, breathes
new life into old recordings via the 24k gold CD and 180+ virgin vinyl
formats and the use of nice warm vacuum tubes in his console. In this
interview by Shaun Dale, Hoffman spells out just what he does, what these
enhanced formats do, and what it takes to get ahold of the original tapes
in the first place.
TAPE HISS (John Sekerka): It's a spooky theme! First up, Coco The Electronic
Monkey Wizard (Man...Or Astroman?) snickers and guffaws at us Earth geeks
a little, then Steven M. Martin, director of the documentary Theremin: An
Electronic Odyssey, talks about the world's most unusual and eerie sounding
musical instrument.
RECORD REVIEWS: Our biggest batch of reviews yet, in a variety of flavors
including punk, jazz, blues, ska, pop, Cajun, rap, country, folk, surf.
soul, funk and more.
BETWEEN ZERO & ONE (Steven Leith): Scientific rules? Moral issues?
Pthpthpthpthplpthtpltht!!! Send in the clones!
PHIL'S GARAGE (Phil Dirt): After hearing way too much bitching from the
"young Surf traditionalists," Phil decides it's time to set the record
straight on innovation.
STUFF I NOTICED (DJ Johnson): What's in a name? A can of worms, that's what.
At least when the name in question is E.E. Cummings!
THE DEBRIS FIELD (Louise Johnson): A whole new spread of poems, quotes,
jokes, book and movie reviews and...stuff!
HOW TO CONTACT US (OR WHERE TO SERVE THE SUBPOENAS): We love to hear from our
readers, and we love to write back. Here's where you'll find e-mail links
to everyone on the Cosmik Debris staff.
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EDITOR'S NOTES
By DJ Johnson
When people ask me what the hell we're trying to accomplish with Cosmik
Debris, I have a quick and honest answer for them. We're trying to create
something that will make a certain type of person very happy. People who
only care about one genre of music will get bored and stop reading Cosmik
in a big hurry because we don't dwell on any one genre for long. But people
who love music and want to learn everything they can about as many different
styles as they can... those are the people that spend hours at a time on our
site.
In this issue of Cosmik Debris, we're going to bring you three interviews
that aren't about making music in the traditional sense. They are about
people who help bring the music TO you in various ways.
For people who want to expand their record or CD collections without going
broke on bad albums, The All Music Guide is an indispensable tool. Among
the dozens of record guides available today, the AMG finds no challengers.
The series now stands at four separate books: The All Music Guide (which
covers many genres in its 1,400+ pages), Jazz, Blues, and Rock. And there
are more on the way. AMG's online database has enough information to fill
a book approximately ten feet thick. At the heart of all of that is founder
and Executive Editor Michael Erlewine. We talked with Michael and
Editor-In-Chief Chris Woodstra about their entire operation. You might
want to make a note to enter this month's drawing, too, as we're giving
away three full sets of the four books.
From the world of reference to the realm of sound. We have reviewed many
24k gold CDs and 180+ vinyl audiophile releases from DCC Compact Classics,
and more often than not, the reviewer has felt compelled to mention the name
of the re-mastering engineer, heaping praise for a job well done. That
engineer is Steve Hoffman. It suddenly occurred to us that we needed to talk
to this guy. Shaun Dale's interview with Hoffman reveals a man who cares
a great deal about the music he works with. It also provides some good
non-techie information about gold versus aluminum.
From sound to the screen. The second half of this month's Tape Hiss features
an interview with Steven M. Martin, director of the documentary, Theremin:
An Electronic Odyssey. Martin's film looks at the life of Professor Termen,
inventor of one of the most unusual--and at the same time beloved--instruments
in the world. The first half of Tape Hiss features an interview with Coco,
The Electronic Monkey Wizard, bassist of Man...Or Astro-Man? Among the many
topics: MOAM's use of a theremin. Small world.
Finally, we're thrilled to present an interview with musician and actor Mojo
Nixon. When freelance writer Greg Nicoll asked me if Cosmik Debris would
be interested in this interview, I flipped. They say you either love Mojo
or you hate 'im. It would seem the Cosmik staffers are all firmly rooted
in the "love 'im" camp. Greg sat down with Mojo on the set of his most
recent film, Raney, for a discussion that covered everything from life on
a movie set to his musical collaboration with Jello Biafra. We Cosmikans
thank Greg for bringing this fun interview our way.
CONTEST WINNERS! Okey doke, it's time to announce the five winners of last
month's drawing. Each winner will receive a copy of Brazil 2001's outstanding
CD, Fist Full Of Sand. Aaaaaand the winners are:
Claus Pedersen of Viby, Denmark
Steve Stokes of Los Angeles, California USA
Arthur Atrohin of Sankt-Peterburg, Russia
Kaj Olsen of Baltimore, Maryland USA
and Austin Swinburn... We're not sure WHERE Austin is from. We had some
garbled data. We do have his e-mail address, though, so we'll be in touch.
Congratulations to all five winners. Believe me, you're gonna love this CD.
That's about it. Time to get on with the March issue, our 22nd. Enjoy!
DJ Johnson
Editor
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GADZOOKS!!! IT'S MOJO NIXON!
An Interview with A Rock'n'Roll Madman
by Gregory Nicoll
The following conversation took place at the end of 1996 in Senoia, Georgia.
Mojo Nixon -- the irreverent, outspoken musician best known for novelty hits
such "Elvis is Everywhere" and "Don Henley Must Die" -- spent several days
in the little southern town, working as an actor on the set of the independent
movie Raney. It was a sunny Friday afternoon when he took time out between
scenes to speak with me, seated on a bench beside a red brick building
decorated for the movie as a small general store.
* * *
GREGORY NICOLL: When I interviewed Dave Alvin last week, he asked me to say
hello to you, Mojo.
MOJO NIXON: Dang! That guy still owes me $57!
GN: Why does Dave Alvin owe you money?
MN: Aw, it was a card game that me an' him, Country Dick Montana and John
Doe were involved in, during the last Pleasure Barons tour. Dave's a
little tight with money. He's not as free-wheelin' as I am. Me, Country
Dick and John Doe were just buyin' everything, but ole Dave just holds
onto that stuff. He's crazy. When we did the first Pleasure Barons tour
in '89, he acted like the elder statesman, the old blues guy. And he's
younger than I am! He's like 38. At the time he was 34 and acting like
he was 57! On the first tour he was sick, he was gone all the time -- in
the hospital. He claimed he was sick. I think he was just afraid of me
and Country Dick. In fact once, in Vancouver, I had Country Dick over my
head in an airplane spin and threw him into the crowd. The crazy thing
was, they threw him right back onstage! Dave didn't wanna wrestle with
us both onstage. He missed like half the shows, and once there was no
straight man, it was like the World Wrestling Federation!
GN: Tell me about acting in movies. I know you were in Great Balls Of Fire
with Dennis Quaid and Joe Bob Briggs.
MN: Yeah, and John Doe was in that too. That was the first thing I did, and
I did a coupla other things -- The Super Mario Brothers Movie. I got to
be in a scene with Dennis Hopper in that. He turned me into a giant lizard.
You know, that Dennis Hopper, he might not be on drugs, but he's still
crazy as hell!
GN: And coming from YOU....
MN: It's a compliment! [laughs] The thing is, when you got some
obsessive-compulsive person, just 'cause they're not doing drugs doesn't
mean they're, you know, straight. They're CRAZY! I mean, look at Martin
Scorsese. I mean look at that LOOK on this face -- whrrnnngh! [laughs] I
did that thing, and I just did something called Buttcrack: The Movie.
Hopefully, Joe Bob Briggs is gonna be reviewin' it. Hopefully, it's
gonna be so bad that it's good. Kinda on purpose. Otherwise it's just
gonna be so bad, it's just bad.
GN: I haven't heard of Buttcrack: The Movie. Who else is in that?
MN: I am THE STAR -- that's how pitiful things were! Hopefully it'll be
somethin' like TOXIC AVENGER, but it could be Plan Eight From Outer
Space. I did it up in Virginia last summer.
GN: So how'd you stumble onto this gig, and get this part in Raney?
MN: Chris Mills, some crazy guy here, is the one that got me involved. He
has a friend named Tim who wrote a screenplay called Mojo's Coming. About
two years ago they came to a gig and he said, "I'm writin a screenplay
about you -- is that okay?" and I said okay, as long as I'm in it! It's
about the ultimate Mojo fan who tries seven times to get to a Mojo Nixon
concert and never makes it. And it's this giant quest, and at the end of
the movie you see me playing, like, the end of "Elvis is Everywhere," and
I'm sayin' "Hi, kid!" It's all about the Mojo music, the Mojo myth, the
songs...but I'm NOT IN IT enough to screw it up! Then, about a year ago
when Chris started working on Raney, he said "let's get Mojo involved!"
One thing leads to another and pretty soon you're in bed with a monkey --
with a video camera rollin'!
GN: Tell me about your role in Raney.
MN: I play Sneads Perry, a man who doesn't bathe and runs a country store.
It says in the screenplay that his big activity is sitting on the front
porch, counting whether there's enough Fords vs. Chevys pullin' up out
front. It's supposed to be 1973 in Carolina. I grew up in Danville,
Virginia. I know exactly who they're talking about. I kinda saw it as
part Ernest T. Bass, part Rafe Hollister. I didn't shave for this, and
look how they got me dressed -- I look like I was kicked off HEE HAW for
being too dirty! I brought the hat myself, though. When I read the role,
I went to my hat box and I got this out -- my huntin' cap! I figure I can
ham it up pretty good. This film thing, if you do too much, the camera
sees it. I'm acting like I'm trying to convince somebody in the park a
half a mile away, you know, Shakespeare in the Park on acid. Whooow! I'm
sure a little bit of me goes a long way. I just got through doin' a play
in New York. It was called GRAVEL'S FINE, where I played a snake-handling
preacher. It was at this super-experimental ontological theater at St.
Mark's Church, and they brought in me as an authentic hillbilly ringer,
I guess. The damn snake BIT me, too! Didn't bite nobody else.
GN: I hope it wasn't a poisonous snake....
MN: No, but that doesn't matter. If you got the spirit, that's okay! [laughs]
As it says in Mark:16! The whole crazy thing about snake-handling preachers
and drinkin' strychnine is that it's been in the Bible since the year 400
A.D., but not until 1910 in the hills of Kentucky did some guy decide to
test it. It took Americans to find this out! Russians, English, French,
none of them! They didn't wanna try it...but WE were the country that was
strong enough -- and manly enough -- to start handling snakes! "They shall
take up serpents and they shall not be hurt." That's what it says.
GN: But you were hurt.
MN: But not seriously. I was strong in the faith! [laughs]
GN: So what's happening with you, musically speaking?
MN: Well, I got an album that's fixin' to come out on Needletime Records,
and it's called GADZOOKS!!!. It was supposed to come out last year, but
the other record company went out of business. I'm like a one-man jinx.
I could fuck up a one-man rock fight, tear up an anvil! [laughs] The
album's got all my collected shit that's not on any one album. If you
just had all the Mojo CDs, this would be the stuff you were missing --
stuff off compilations, singles, movie soundtracks. I was in this awful
Rock'n'Roll High School Forever movie. Luckily, nobody saw it. An awful
sequel to Rock'n'Roll High School. Some woman from Texas directed it, and
it's awful. I'm in it for five minutes and I'm okay, but then it just
goes back on....
GN: What about your song on the Ramones tribute album, Gabba Gabba Hey?
MN: Oh, yeah. My version of "Rockaway Beach." No, I didn't put any of the
covers on there. There's another whole album of me covering songs. On
Gadzooks!!! there IS a song me and Country Dick thought we wrote, "Are
You Drinking With Me, Jesus?" This is a true story. We were so high after
an all night card game -- we decided we were gonna write some hits! We
had to go to my house, where we had to act like we were straight for an
hour while my wife and my son got ready to go to work and to school. We
were out of our gourds, but we were gonna write some songs! So my wife
and son leave, and we fall on the floor and start writing. Country Dick,
I just kinda assumed he had half of the chorus off of some lyric sheet.
Turns out he had every word except, like, two! And the music I had
composed turned out to be almost the same as the guy who wrote it
originally had composed. We didn't WRITE this song -- we COPIED IT DOWN!
That one's on there.
GN: What else have you been up to?
MN: I did a country album with Jello Biafra. This was Cockamamie Scheme #337
gone awry. Mojo and Jello go to Texas and do a country album. It's an
okay album, but it was the most frustrating thing I ever did in my life.
I wanted to KILL the boy. I mean, I wanted to pull his head off and shit
down his neck, I did! It's just hard having two chiefs like that,
diametrically opposed. That's what made it interesting -- that's also what
made it hard.
GN: Tell me about Fish Karma. You produced two weird novelty records for him,
right?
MN: Yeah, both his albums. He's just this guy, Jerry Owens. I think he's
done being Fish Karma, and he's now a full time elementary school teacher
in Arizona. A lot of what was the first record -- and the second -- were
on tapes made a long time ago, '83 or '84. And it was, like, six years
later that I did those albums. Somehow this all came about because of
Jello Biafra. I was backstage and he had the same tapes I did, and he
said he'd put it out, so I said I'd produce it. So it was Mojo --
producing Fish -- for Jello! And Jello didn't like what I'd made, so I
put it out myself through Triple X Records.
GN: Their catalog had a whole Mojo Nixon section in it.
MN: I had a Christmas album out on Triple X. I did several things through
them with bands like the Dick Nixons that were never gonna make a record
unless somebody went and helped them. If they'd tried to deal with a
record company by themselves, they'd fuck it up. They'd be afraid, or
think they were getting ripped off, or think there should be more money
involved.
GN: They needed a mentor.
MN: Yeah, a demented mentor -- a de-mentor! And my purpose in all of that
was just to get weirdo, unheard music out there. [burps] And also, it was
doin' the same thing people did to help me, back when I first started.
You know, people heard this crazy tape with this demented guy who wouldn't
shut up....
GN: I have fond memories of seeing you on tour with the Dead Milkmen. You
opened for them, and you were an impossible act to follow!
MN: That was true on that tour a lot. Was that where we played that big
place in Atlanta?
GN: Yeah, the Centerstage Theater.
MN: Well, given my druthers, I would always pick the middle in a three-band
bill, because people get tired after three bands. The Milkmen wanted to
headline, so I said okay, fine. That was the first real tour I did with
another band. They had this non-drinking teenybopper crowd -- who LIKED
what we did, but who liked what THEY did more. Their fans were like, the
weirdest guy in high school listening to the weird record thing. Whereas
my fans are more like the drunk uncle takes you out and shows you titty
bars.
GN: Did that tour come about because you're mentioned in the lyrics of their
song "Punk Rock Girl"?
MN: We were both on Enigma Records. That's how it all happened. And we'd
known each other for quite a while. We'd met. In fact, we had Thanksgiving
at my house one time...this was years before all that. Joe, who sang the
"Punk Rock Girl" song, that really got it going. I didn't know they were
gonna do that or nothin' -- but Enigma went out of business during that
tour. They spent their last two million dollars trying to make David
Cassidy a star again. And here's this album I spent all this money
making....I got Country Dick, John Doe, Bill Davis, this whole first
post-cowpunk supergroup. But anyway, it went to hell.
[Nixon is called back to the set, where he performs in a scene involving a
Playboy Magazine. A character named Charles is about to buy it when suddenly
his wife walks up. He hastily pushes the magazine away. When the shot is
over, Nixon yells, "Pussywhipped!" Amid the crew's shrieks of laughter,
Nixon steps back outside.]
GN: Tell me about that scene you just played.
MJ: I'm selling PLAYBOYs under the counter, and ole Charles here, I think
he's a regular customer. You know, he gets 'em every month. So we been
outside talkin' and jokin' -- man stuff -- and I don't quite realize that
those two are married and that she's gonna be upset. So I'm givin' him
the magazine. Here ya go -- this month's issue! It's got Marilyn Chambers
in it, and boy, has she got some nipples on her! And he's pushin' it away.
He's embarrassed. I don't know why. [laughs]
GN: There sure are a lot of people here on the set.
MN: Oh, this is not too bad. I'd rather work on something like this where
you've got 20 or 50 people working together to make a good movie, as
opposed to 200 people and 50 million dollars, where everyone's just
coverin' their ass. In fact, I've worked on these where nobody cares
about anything but getting their paycheck -- they could be working at
General Motors. Just making a living. They don't care.
GN: Like the Mario Brothers movie?
MN: Aw, yeah. That was a nightmare. Great Balls Of Fire, same
thing. Just money. On Mario Brothers, I came to work one day and
the director was crying. I said, this is not good. He's bawling,
"Talk to my wife." It was a husband and wife team, and they were
completely over their heads. Lately I haven't worked a whole lot.
My wife had a baby, and I was home for a while takin' care of
both of them. I named him Rafe Cannonball. He's two and half now,
and he's got that name to live up to. Named after Rafe Hollister
on The Andy Griffith Show. I had a buncha deals that all fell
through. I'm about to run out of money, so I'll have to do
something.
Movie Crewman: Mojo, we need you back on the set again.
MN: Aww, I just saw the First A.D. [Assistant Director] go to take a pee, so
it's gonna be a minute.
GN: Wow, Mojo. That's business savvy. A director makes the movie, but the
A.D. runs the movie.
MN: The director's got the genius, but somebody's got to be the field
commander over these idiot troops.
GN: What happens in this next scene?
MN: I get laid at one point.
Movie Crewman: Yeah, she's puttin' her GOOD teeth in for ya!
MN: I put deodorant on the OUTSIDE of my clothes, too.
GN: So what's your position in the Ford vs. Chevy debate?
MN: Well, Ford means Fast-On-Race-Day. Friends don't let friends drive
Chevys.
GN: I'm the grandson of a Ford dealer, but I only drive VWs.
MN: HEY! We defeated those people! Listen, I went to Germany last year, and
those people are NOT our friends! I mean, the RUSSIANS are our friends!
[pauses] But then, the only things I know about Germany are from WWII
movies. You know, the Heidelberg ball bearing factory is my complete
frame of reference -- the Battle of the Bulge, the Ardennes Forest. But
the Germans are still mad about us bombing Dresden. I didn't have a good
time there. Some bands go over there and do real good, but I think my
thing is too American. I coulda swore they were beating me in my sleep
with poles while I wasn't looking!
* * *
GREGORY NICOLL is a professional journalist and freelance writer who
covers the southeastern music scene for CREATIVE LOAFING Atlanta, a weekly
entertainment newspaper with a circulation of 230,000. He also writes
fiction, and his work has appeared in anthologies such as 100 VICIOUS
LITTLE VAMPIRE STORIES, IT CAME FROM THE DRIVE-IN, SEX MACABRE, NEW
MASTERPIECES OF HORROR, and THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES. He loves
Volkswagens, raises his own chili peppers, and collects lever-action
saddle ring carbines.
E-mail address: g.nicoll@genie.com
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A MILLION POINTS OF REFERENCE: Building The All Music Guides
An interview with Michael Erlewine and Chris Woodstra
(Interviewed by DJ Johnson)
Just move forward. Good advice that Michael Erlewine followed years ago,
advice that helped him create one of the greatest collections of music
resource books on the planet. The All Music Guides provide excellent
information on artists and their recordings, but they go much further
than that. Music maps, arranged like flow-charts, show the evolution
of genres and sub-genres, and trace the chain of influences on various
instrumentalists. Essays cover everything from definitions of genres
to lists and ratings of record labels and mail order companies. The album
listings include designations for landmark recordings, essential purchases
and logical first purchases. The four existing books, Rock, Jazz, Blues,
and The All Music Guide (affectionately--and justifiably--referred to as
"the big book") are indispensable reference guides that help people seek
out new listening experiences without getting burned. With the average CD
running about $15, such a reference guide is nearly worth its weight in gold.
Beginning with his days as lead singer and harmonica player for The Prime
Movers Blues Band, Michael Erlewine's thirst for knowledge led him down some
interesting roads. Thirty years into his journey, he is the center of
Matrix, a company with many diverse interests including astrological
software, new age information, and large databases bursting with information
on movies and music. To ensure that no minute of his day can be called
"spare," Michael serves as director of The Heart Center Karma Thegsum Choling,
an organization that translates and publishes the teachings of the Karma Kagyu
lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. As his All Music Guide vision comes to fruition,
the Executive Editor is quick to give credit to the Matrix staff, and
particularly Vladamir Bogdonov (who is the technical wizard that makes the
website what it is) and the Editor-in-Chief, Chris Woodstra.
Chris' resume is impressive, to say the least. He holds a B.S. in physics
and mathematics, spent years as a disk jockey hosting programs focusing on
nearly every musical genre, has a record collection that boggles the mind,
and has edited, and written for, several publications. Working for Michael,
Chris finally found a place to put ALL of his knowledge to good use.
We caught up with Michael and Chris at an exciting time, as their newest
book, The All Music Guide To Country, had just been completed and sent
off to the publisher. True to their workaholic reputations, they didn't sit
back and celebrate long. Work has already begun on the 2nd edition of the
rock book, and initial preparations are underway for the project that will
immediately follow that. Just move forward.
* * * *
Cosmik: You know, I just spent a major portion of the day crawling around
the website.
Michael: Oh, our website?
Cosmik: It's incredible. It's so complete.
Michael: Yeah, I think that we have more music data than anywhere else.
Cosmik: What came first, the books or the website?
Michael: The books were first.
Cosmik: How was the idea born?
Michael: The idea came from myself... It was pretty simple. I had been a
musician in the 60s, and had been in and out of music in different ways.
Then I got to be into software as a software engineer, and run a company
and all that jazz. When CD players came out, I started buying music
again. I had sold a lot of my music. I'd had rooms full of it, and
then I didn't have so much vinyl anymore. So I started buying stuff, and
I kept getting stung. You know, I thought I was getting Jerry Lee Lewis
or Little Richard, but it turns out to be Little Richard thirty years
later, but it wasn't clearly marked. I really got irritated. I've
probably got hundreds of CDs that I've paid full price for that are
essentially worthless to me. So I got irritated by it. I knew quite
a lot about the industry, so I started looking at all the magazines and
stuff, and that was kind of helpful. Then I started contacting some of
the people that I knew, and meeting some new people that were music
writers just literally for them to tell me about this or that thing,
believe it or not. And I began to compile that data, because I'm an
archivist, and at some point I just said "gee, other people besides me
need this information."
Cosmik: You had all this data, then... Was it enough to plug straight into
the book, or did you have to organize teams of writers...
Michael: Oh no, I had to do all that. I had to organize all the writers and
everything they wrote. The writing itself went through various re-writes,
getting someone to cover this and getting someone to cover it better. It
just gradually grew. And trying to find all the errors, and trying to
get people to contribute...
Cosmik: Now that you have a full staff and editors, what's the process like?
For example, what was involved in deciding what bands would be included
and what bands wouldn't?
Chris: Well, we have to consider space. We can't put everything in the
printed books that we have in the database . So it's mainly our in-house
editorial staff deciding what should go in. We try to have obscure and
cult bands on kind of a rotating basis just to get as many people covered
as possible. A cult band that shows up in the first edition of the rock
book may not make it into the second edition in favor of another one.
Cosmik: I was thinking that it would be hard enough to get all the bands that
AREN'T cult bands in.
Chris: (Laughs) Yeah, it is. It's very hard. Narrowing down who goes into
the books is probably one of the hardest parts at this point.
Cosmik: Is that something that might inspire arguments among the staff?
Chris: Yeah, quite a few. Lots of late nights sitting around and arguing
about it. Sometimes at the last minute we have to drop things, and that
becomes painful, too. They're very carefully considered. We try to give
even coverage to everything.
Cosmik: How huge a task was it, and is it, to track down the errors?
Michael: Huge. It still is. It's incredible. Nobody really has clean data.
They all SAY they do, but the fact is it's almost literally impossible.
And certainly money can't just solve it. It's only solved by having
people who really care about the music--and these are mostly collectors
driven by their own pride and wanting to show you how wrong you
are--correct you and point you in the right direction on errors that you
would never get to. We each have our favorite artists, but we don't
personally love everyone. Yet every artist is loved by somebody. So get
them fired up so they want to help you improve that coverage. We've done
a lot of that. In fact, we were written up in an early Wired magazine,
and we talked about what I coined as "interactive data cleaning," a
convection-like cleaning. You know, the whole thing cleans itself
gradually. Most people who organize this kind of data do it in a linear
fashion where they pass over it once, checking it against a source, and
that's it. Where you invite people to constantly criticize and comment,
you get a constant convection-like process of people going over the data,
and if you post something that's wrong, even if it came from a user,
someone else is pretty quick to point it out and rub your nose in it.
Cosmik: If somebody on your website sees a list of musicians on an album, and
they say "hey, this isn't the guy that played bass on that album," they...
Michael: ...they'll tell us.
Cosmik: And then you'd go research that information?
Michael: Yeah, we would go research that... but not always. Now, again, this
is fairly revolutionary. Our approach is this: if we can find anything
about it, we'll research. But if we can't, our tendency--especially if
we know the particular contributor, and we do get to know these guys--is
to post it and let somebody else point it out if it's wrong. And if they
don't, then no one even cares. The idea is simple. None of the sources
out there, none of the big companies check things more than once. It's
not like somebody's out there fact checking. And if they were, they don't
have access to the product. Hundreds of thousands of items. So how are
you gonna get these things checked? And obviously we are moving through
here huge quantities of CDs where we either keep them or we have them
for a time. Those, we can be pretty sure of. But what about the stacks
of vinyl out there that you and I are never going to get our hands on?
Somebody comes in and says "Bob so-and-so played bass on that." Well,
what are you gonna do with that piece of information? Until you have
something better, you might as well post it. Yeah, it's a dangerous way
of approaching it, but it gives us a lot more data than we'd be able to
get in any other way, and it gradually refines itself.
Cosmik: Does that go for everything?
Michael: Not on new stuff. Anything new on CD, we've actually had the CD
here, and you can be pretty darned sure of that information. It's only
the obscure stuff or...we're trying to document 78s and other stuff you're
never going to get your hands on. So it's either trust somebody or don't
list it.
Cosmik: I tested out the scope of your database by popping in some names that
I consider pretty obscure. I tried The Heats and was really surprised
when some data came back. I mean, they were a great band in the late 70s
in Seattle, but they really only had regional success, and yet there they
were. I added a review, too.
Michael: Oh good! We'll probably use the review if the editorial board
approves it.
Cosmik: How many reviews do you get from the public?
Michael: Not a ton. And we don't usually take them. You may get an e-mail
back asking permission to use that review online, or they may use it to
re-write it in our own language so we won't worry about you suing us down
the road. There are different avenues. Someone will probably pass it on
to an editor who actually knows who that band is, and they'll decide if
what you've written is reasonable or not. There's just a hundred ways to
go about it.
Cosmik: It's an interesting idea. It advances the ideal of the Internet
Community, too.
Michael: Yeah, we work with two or three hundred writers that are freelancers
that write for music magazines. We get them kind of on a downcycle and
willing to work for less or wanting to cover something in particular.
We always pay right on time, which is something. Writers don't usually
get paid well. We get 'em when they want to do some special work, or if
they have some time that otherwise they're going to get zip from. That's
a lot of... the way we've done it. Now that we're getting better known
and we're part of a larger company, we have a larger budget and we can
get more and more stuff done. We just want to keep covering music
thoroughly.
Cosmik: How did the database get online?
Michael: At some point the database became a gopher site as part of a local
university here called Ferris University. We had it as a gopher site for
a while, and now it's available in a lot of forms.
Cosmik: How much traffic does the site get per day?
Michael: On our site, we get about 500,000 page views per day.
Cosmik: Wow.
Michael: And that's with no advertising of any kind other than listing it
in our books.
Cosmik: Why don't you advertise?
Michael: We will. We just haven't gotten around to it. We've been so busy
doing other stuff that it wasn't imperative. It wasn't crucial to us.
We didn't have to.
Cosmik: Does it make money in any way now?
Michael: Not really, other than the references. There are some pass-through
references for purchasing to some other people that use our data, and we
get a percentage of their sales.
Cosmik: That would be like CD Now, CD Universe...
Michael: Exactly. We get something from that, but it's really almost an
afterthought. But we will be doing all that. We still think of this
whole thing as young. Not AMG so much as just the whole Internet selling
thing. We're waiting for MicroCash and stuff like that to happen.
Cosmik: Do the writers that are off-site use the Internet to send reviews
back and forth, Chris?
Chris: Yeah, that's actually made life a lot easier in the last few years.
The Internet, and e-mail, have made the transfer of data so much easier.
We don't have to deal with disks or scanning typewritten pages or things
like that. The process has been pretty streamlined. I make assignments
through e-mail and get the work back that way. And they can also check
to see how their work comes out. They can just look at the site and
make corrections, and also find the gaps that they need to fill.
Cosmik: If someone does a review for, say, the jazz book, and they
send it to you over the Internet, do you have it proofed and plugged
straight into the online database ?
Chris: Most of the material would be available on our site before it comes
out in a book. You know, the books are nice because it's such an easy
thing to browse through. The site is still not perfect for boiling it
down to country artists and browsing through it like a book. I think
there's always going to be a use for a book.
Cosmik: And then there's the esthetic value of a book...
Chris: Yeah, it's nice to be able to hold a book in your hands, or read it
before you go to bed. I still prefer reading things on a page to reading
things on a computer screen, as high tech as we are here. And you can
carry a book into a record store, too, and make your decisions that way.
Cosmik: What goes into keeping the database running smoothly?
Michael: Our technical guy here is Vladamir Bogdonov, and he's just a
tremendous technical design genius.
Cosmik: He's a software engineer, isn't he?
Michael: Yeah, but he's a whole lot more than that. He's got a Ph.D. in
mathematics and statistics. He's designing a lot of the ways of
recommending movies, combining data in odd ways, coming up with ways
of relating things one to another, building clusters of things. It's
quite a creative staff here.
Cosmik: He's got a lot of data to deal with, too.
Michael: We've got about thirty people just entering data in one of our
buildings. Last time I looked, just the north wall had 30,000 classical
CDs stacked up against it waiting to be entered.
Cosmik: Ah! Classical? There's going to be a classical guide?
Michael: Getting ready to launch our classical solution pretty soon.
Cosmik: That answers one of my questions I was saving for later. That's
going to be a monumental task.
Michael: A friend of mine who played keyboards in my band in the 60s,
Robert Sheff--who now appears under the name of Blue Gene Tyranny--is
an avant-garde classical composer. He does our classic avant-garde
section for the big book. He came out and spent a couple months here
and recorded the main themes from almost 20,000 classical compositions.
PLAYED it into MIDI files. So we're going to have those available so
you can hear the theme from literally every Beethoven quartet and every
Mozart piece you can think of. It took a couple months of very dedicated
work. He didn't play the whole thing... just the theme. Almost 20,000
of them!
Cosmik: That's incredible.
Michael: It IS incredible, and I think you'll be seeing them pretty soon.
You'll be able to download them as .WAV files, real time audio... a lot
of people will be interested in them.
Cosmik: Talk about monumental tasks!
Michael: Yeah, THAT was a big task. One of the things I've learned is not to
be afraid of big tasks. Just do them one step at a time and pretty soon
you're done. Or else you're so deep into it you can't get your butt out.
Cosmik: I guess if you didn't have that philosophy, none of this would have
happened.
Michael: No, you can't be afraid of a big mess. (Laughs)
Cosmik: Blue Gene Tyranny, huh? That's a great stage name. He was in The
Prime Movers, right?
Michael: Yes, he was.
Cosmik: Some of our readers would never forgive me if I didn't ask you about
that band. First of all, that was a band that had Iggy Pop on drums,
correct?
Michael: Yeah, Iggy Pop was on drums. I was the lead singer, and I played
amplified Chicago-style harmonica.
Cosmik: I've never heard the band, but I've been told you played very
authentic electric blues, like Paul Butterfield Blues Band did.
Michael: Yes, we were good friends with Butterfield. I was a friend of
Mike Bloomfield's.
Cosmik: I interviewed Mark Naftalin [Paul Butterfield Blues Band's keyboardist]
recently.
Michael: Oh yeah, Mark and I are friends, too. Some of the stuff he just
released, I recorded. He's been releasing some Butterfield stuff that I
recorded back in the 60s.
Cosmik: You mean Strawberry Jam and East-West Live?
Michael: Well, I recorded one of the East-West pieces on the Live album.
It's nice to hear it again. Actually hearing that stuff in person was
beyond belief. Bloomfield was a monster and a very kind person to know.
Do you have our blues book?
Cosmik: Sure do!
Michael: I wrote the thing on Butterfield there, and the thing on Mark Naftalin.
Cosmik: You write about the blues with a lot of passion.
Michael: Back in the late 60s, I interviewed--either video or audio--just
about every black blues performer you could think of. I met people like
Sun House, spent whole nights drinking whiskey with Arthur "Big Boy"
Cruddup and Big Mama Thornton and all kinds of people. I'm very
blues-oriented. Our band was very authentic. We had some talented
people. We just never recorded, which was mostly my fault. We were
courted by Motown at one point to be like a white group doing black
music... but I wouldn't do anything they wanted us to do. I was so
obstinate. They were driving us around in limousines, but I wouldn't
do the tunes they wanted us to do. We would only do the ones we wanted
to do, from the heart, you know? I wouldn't bow to them, so they weren't
interested in us, and I didn't blame them. They had their own idea of
what they wanted us to do and I didn't care. It would have been selling
out.
Cosmik: Didn't you ever record for yourselves?
Michael: Yeah, we did, but I don't know what ever happened to the tapes.
Cosmik: So this is all lost in time.
Michael: Oh well. You know, nothing's really lost. I think William Blake
said "nothing of equal value is lost."
Cosmik: I'd go crazy if all my music was lost in time. Okay, back to the
books. Once you had the idea together, you had the writers together...
what was involved in the coordination process? Who was going to do
what, when, and so on?
Michael: Was, or is? How did it come about, or how is it now?
Cosmik: Oh, there's a difference?
Michael: The difference is simply that before, it was just me, period. There
wasn't anybody else. Then I got some of the staff at my software company
to work on it, and gradually we got a real staff. The way it works now
is probably more interesting than the way it did, because the way it did
then was just any way I could MAKE it. What we have now is a series of
in-house editors, and some editors off site, through which we funnel data
or lists of things. Let's say we have so many lists to cover. We have
people who cover each of the major genres, and we tend to shuttle
information to that editor, whether he's on-site or off-site, that's a
specialist in that data. One of our cardinal rules is that, in general,
we try not to have anyone review music that they don't like.
Cosmik: THANK you!
Michael: That doesn't mean they like every piece, but if they don't like the
genre, then they shouldn't be writing about it. We still have stuff that
we're constantly trying to get out of our database. We had a guy who
didn't like fusion. A jazz writer. And every time he'd get anything that
was at all fusion like, he would just be cutting the hell out of it. We
try to remove that kind of bias. There's no point in it. Our whole
approach is that for any artist, we'd like to show you the BEST of that
artist, not argue that, say, Pat Boone should be doing anything at all.
Certainly he should, because he did. There's a lot of people who listen
to him. And I grew up dancing to his music, so it's no use trashing him
to me just because he's a honky or whatever. That's not the point for us.
The point, for us, is if you're going to listen to Pat Boone, where are
you going to get burned, and what's the best stuff he ever did?
Cosmik: And that explains why a band that is widely disliked, or critically
shunned, might have a four-star album in your books? Because judged
against the rest of their work, the album rates four stars?
Michael: That's exactly right. We're not comparing apples to oranges. For
this band, or for Pat Boone, or whichever you want... this is his best
stuff.
Cosmik: I've never seen anyone else using that approach.
Michael: We also have a system of rating artists that's more conventional,
that gives you more of an idea of their relative [importance]. But there's
really not a lot of percentage... because you have a few huge figures like
Dylan, and tons of middle figures and tons of low figures, and your
statistical graphs are not going to look very good, if that's your
approach. Because the curve is all lower, not higher. And if you rate
everyone against themselves--which is what we all do in our own lives
anyway, supposedly--then you see the best work of The Eagles or the best
work of Led Zeppelin or whatever it is. We have a lot of essays and music
maps that show the derivation of this and that, so in that way, it's
pretty clear to see who the main figures are. We're not trying to hide
that. We're just saying there's no point in rating all of Pat Boone's
records one star because he's being compared, for the moment, to Bob
Dylan or Little Richard.
Cosmik: The Rolling Stone Record Guides drove me nuts because it at least
seemed like they would trash whole genres. They'd say every Black
Sabbath album was uniformly worthless. And almost anything else in the
metal genre.
Michael: Well, it was fashionable then. And they didn't like Pat Boone, for
example. (Laughs)
Cosmik: Didn't they? (Laughs) So you're careful about who you assign to what.
Who makes those decisions?
Chris: A lot of times, specialists will come to us and offer their services
for a small number of bands that they know very well, and we'll take that
into consideration. But the jobbing out is done, basically, right there
in my office. Myself, and Steven Thomas Erlewine, we're a little more
hands-on at this point. We look at each artist and decide who the best
person would be for that. All of our writers have their own strengths
and areas of interest. Some people are 60s garage rock experts, and we
send them bands that are more in line with what they're into.
Cosmik: Which is great for someone like me, who didn't discover real garage
music until a few years back and needs to be pointed in the right direction.
Michael: Another thing we do besides just rating the albums is we have a
thing called "first pick" to show you roughly where to start. Let's
say your dad likes Frank Sinatra, or your dad wants to buy a Duke
Ellington album for you but he knows nothing about it. This helps him
find out where the good ones are. So he can go in and figure out, you
know, out of three or four hundred albums that Ellington might have...
how do you know what you're listening to is representative? Are you
listening to a good Ellington album, or is this one of his off-albums?
In which case maybe you can't make a decision on whether or not you like
Ellington because you don't know if this is the stuff they mean when they
say listen to Ellington.
Cosmik: For each artist, you designate landmark albums, but they're not
always, or even often, the ones designated as recommended first purchases.
Michael: Well, that's often true. A good example would be Pet Sounds by The
Beach Boys. It's a landmark album, but it's not typical of The Beach
Boys. You wouldn't want to tell someone that that's The Beach Boys, get
that one album and you'll have tasted them. Because that's not really
typical. So you would send them to one of the collections that is more
typical.
Cosmik: Who made the decisions as to which albums would be first purchase,
which were landmark... Well, landmarks are easier to figure out, but
first purchase designation is more subjective...
Michael: We have many editors, who are experts, go through lists and mark them,
and then we compare the lists and come to some kind of consensus without
degrading the consensus to a mere average. One kind of jazz that I
particularly like is called original funk, also called soul jazz. In
soul jazz, we might have a lot of jazz people rating it, but we have one
guy, Atlantic producer Bob Porter, who has actually produced a lot of this
stuff and knows it inside and out. We'd give his ratings greater weight
than all the rest of the jazz guys, because he knows the stuff better.
So we try to find consensus, but then we offset the consensus with someone
who is a specialist in that style.
Cosmik: Online, if you look up an album, there's actually a radio-button
survey after each review that asks the public to rate the album, and asks
if it should be designated a good first purchase, a landmark, and so on.
Michael: That's just for our information. We do that just because we're
interested. We don't actually use those unless it's something we know
nothing about at all. We have it carefully marked in our database so
we know where it came from. As opposed to having nothing, again. We're
asking a lot of different kind of information there. Obviously, everyone's
going to be rating Green Day or someone... that loves them, so we get a
hundred "best of everything" ratings, but that's not what we want. But
if somebody's [writing about] some obscure Brazilian artist that we can't
quite get any information on, then we may look very carefully if they
bother to go through, and we may actually put some of that up.
Cosmik: I'd think you'd find the hardcore Internet music community would be
looking at a lot more of the obscure stuff. Wouldn't that be the case?
Michael: Yes, and we're trying to recruit those people. We're reaching out
into different music news groups, and slowly we want to go into all the
pockets of music and find those people. There's a lot of people who know
music that are languishing with no one listening to what they have to say.
We try to find those people, put them to work, pay them something, let
them get their names in print, and actually pass on their thoughts to
others.
Cosmik: And that helps you, too, as you continue bringing in new genres. Is
there anything you don't wish to cover?
Michael: There's nothing we don't WISH to cover, but there's stuff that's
HARD to cover. Like we're trying to get into Latin American music, which
is a growing phenomenon and a huge subset of music. We've got all the
cutsie stuff that you and I might know covered, but we don't have the raw
stuff that's popular in Latin America covered yet. That's a challenge I'm
trying to figure out, and we're trying to GET it covered because...well,
it's interesting music, for one.
Cosmik: Is that something you're looking to put out in book form?
Michael: Well, SOMEONE should. We're not even close to book on it because
we don't have enough data.
Cosmik: There's nothing available out there.
Michael: There's not anything available. Yeah, I'd love to do a book on
Latin American, Afro-American or Latin pop, because there's nothing out
there.
Cosmik: I understand there's a lot of desire on your part to do a world
music book.
Chris: We actually had that scheduled a couple different times, but we just
weren't able to pull it together in the standard that we had for the other
books, so we've pushed it back once again. But I think we'll probably
have it by early next year.
Cosmik: I'll tell ya, I'd sure love to see an All Music Guide to Reggae and
other Caribbean music.
Michael: That would be cool, too. Reggae has so many areas to it.
Cosmik: And such a rich history, too.
Michael: It is. We've worked with some good reggae people.
Cosmik: Now you're working on a country book... or it's basically done, isn't
it?
Chris: Actually, I just sent that off last week, and now we've switched gears
into the second edition of the rock guide.
Cosmik: How much time was spent on putting the country book together?
Chris: Oh... I would probably say a concentrated year. We take on different
projects. We have a lot of things going on at once, so I'll just divide
my time and set certain people aside to do just country.
Cosmik: Will the country book follow the same format as you've used before?
Will there be essays and maps?
Chris: Actually, we put together about 25 new essays, and each one has a new
map with it, as well. That's sort of the direction we go. We try to
improve each book. This one was really a labor of love for all of us here,
because we're all big country music fans. And there has just never been
a book out that did it justice, or treats it as a serious music. So we
finally got a chance to do that. It has a strong history, and I'm hoping
we covered it well.
Cosmik: You're right. There's nothing out there. There's no great reference
book. And the thought of having an All Music Guide to Country, with your
method of steering people to the right starting points, is very exciting.
Chris: Yeah, it's especially true in country music, where it's so hard to
sort out these guys' discographies. They have 300 albums and they'll
change labels and rerecord their hits, which won't be quite as good as
the originals, and that'll be all that's available... I collect George
Jones, and sorting out his discography is almost an endless task. Finding
the original song on CD that you're looking for and all that. So a lot
of research went into this book to help sort those things out.
Cosmik: George Jones has done hundreds of recordings.
Chris: Yeah, I think I have 200, myself. And the funny thing is, on the back
of each album that I have, there are two more albums pictured that I'm
never able to find.
Cosmik: And it drives you nuts, right?
Chris: Yes. It's endless.
Cosmik: How many artists are covered in the country book?
Chris: I think it's about 1000 artists. It's going to be around 700...750
pages.
Cosmik: When do you expect it to be out?
Chris: Could be out in the next month and a half, if there's not problems
on the publisher's end. I turned the book in last Friday, and I already
have a rough printed version of it in my hands. I got it yesterday.
Cosmik: Is this point in a project always pretty exciting?
Chris: Yeah, and there's a sense of relief when you can actually say "wow,
we did it."
Cosmik: I can't wait to see the music maps in that book. I find the maps to
be fascinating. It's a great way to explain lineage and influence. Was
that another area that was difficult to put together originally? In
the jazz book, there are so many.
Michael: I know. Yeah, I did most of those, originally.
Cosmik: You did those yourself?
Michael: In the beginning, but I don't know how much of that's reflected now.
Gradually, people who know a lot more than I do have gone over them, but
the whole concept came from me. We also have movie maps coming out, which
are fun.
Cosmik: Movie maps?
Michael: Well, like the history of Japanese cinema. They should be available
soon.
Cosmik: I haven't had a chance to check out the All Movie Guide yet. What is
that like, scope-wise, compared to the music side?
Michael: The same.
Cosmik: How long has it been going on? As long as the music guides?
Michael: Almost as long, but not quite.
Cosmik: Do you have books for that, too?
Michael: No, we haven't really come up with... There are so many movie guides
out there. We're trying to come up with our unique approach and we're not
quite there yet. But we will.
Cosmik: I know about your music background with The Prime Movers and all, so
I see where the music guides come in, but I didn't know about the movie
thing. Is that your second passion?
Michael: I was never a movie maker or anything, but I was a musician. Music
is something that I know a lot about. I'm not an expert on film, I'm just
a dangerous amateur...
Cosmik: ...you know what you like.
Michael: Yeah. I've seen a ton of stuff. I have a whole staff that does that.
I'm not as attached to it as I am to the music. We're slowly getting more
and more control of it and we're getting experts in there that feel the
same way about it that I do about music. I mean, I'm passionate about
watching it. I'm a great consumer, but I'm not an expert.
Cosmik: Your website is really diverse. Movies, music, new age things,
astrology...
Michael: These are just all my hobbies, basically. We're the largest
astrology software company in the world.
Cosmik: You can get lost for hours on that site. I got lost for hours just
playing with the music database. Now I've got to check out the rest of it.
There seems to be enough data for a dozen more music books, at least. Do
you have ideas about new things you'd like to bring in to the books,
Chris?
Chris: Yeah, the books only scratch the surface of the data that we have.
There's so many other ways to manipulate the data and put it on the
printed page. It comes down to a matter of space. I know that with the
last general guide, we could just barely fit all the artists we wanted
into it. Adding another element would have just made the book swell more.
But we always have other ideas for books. We'll do specific style books,
or books of lists. You've been through our site and seen all the formal
information we have, like who played on what album?
Cosmik: I had a blast in there looking up albums, clicking on each sideman
and seeing what else he played on, looking for reviews...
Chris: Great! That's good to hear. Yeah, there's so much we can do with it.
Cosmik: What were the biggest stumbling blocks for you, specifically, in
putting these books together? I know the obstacles would be different
for each of you, because you came into this at different times.
Chris: Just having the standard problems where things aren't coming in on
time. When you use this many writers, it's hard to get everyone to come
through at the right time, but for the most part we've been pretty lucky.
And it's a massive amount of data. The smallest piece of information
needs to be checked and made consistent. When you're dealing with this
much data, it's difficult to cover everything. Just a simple thing like
the label names and keeping them all consistent. Is it Columbia? Is it
Columbia Legacy? Is it CBS, or Epic? That sort of information seems sort
of trivial when you see it on the page, but each one of those little pieces
is a huge project unto itself.
Cosmik: Doesn't sound trivial at all, especially to someone trying to track
down a release who has been given the wrong label information, right?
How about you, Michael?
Michael: Well, the biggest stumbling block was... everyone has up and down
cycles, and when you're in a down cycle and you find yourself in the
middle of an enormous impossible task, the obstacle is [the urge to]
give it up. The idea of "gee, what am I doing? Nobody knows me, the
music writers don't know me..." And they just laughed and said "who are
you," to begin with, and "who do you think you are? WE'RE the writers!"
And I said "yeah, I just want to organize you, right?" But I'll tell you
a little story about how I got through that. Another thing that I'm
involved in is... we have a whole center here [at Matrix] that translates
Tibetan Buddhist texts into English and transcribes them. I've been doing
that for years. Buddhism isn't a religion, it's basically a psychology.
A way of looking at and handling your own mind. Early on, I was trying
to put the first All-Music Guide book together and having a lot of trouble
because no one would really help me. It's the old chicken and the egg.
If I were well known, they would help me. But I wasn't. I had nothing
to give THEM at that point.
At that time, I had a friend of mine that was a translator, and I'd given
him some money to support his parents in India because they were poor.
He was traveling with one of the very high Lama's... Not the Dali Lama,
but someone LIKE that. He was visiting this country. And this particular
man was the meditation master of this whole lineage. Aside from being a
meditation master, he also had a gift for doing this thing called a "mo,"
which is kind of like an oracle... A divination. And my friend called me
and asked how I was doing, and I told him "I'm okay... I'm not doing great.
I'm trying to do a book thing but I keep thinking 'am I totally stupid to
be doing this, am I just wasting my time?'" And he said "I know what I'll
do, I'll have this great meditation teacher do a divination for you, even
though he never does this for people... He'd do it for me. I'll ask him
what he has to say about this All Music Guide that you're doing." He
called me back a few days later and said "This is what the Lama said."
He said he can see that this particular enterprise will be extremely
successful way beyond my imagination, and that I should not look to the
right or left. I should just keep on going. And I had complete confidence
in this particular person because he's a great teacher. That really had
a huge effect on the project in terms of making me NOT look right or left,
NOT give up, but just move forward.
Cosmik: What's your ultimate vision for The All Music Guide, books and database
alike, Michael?
Michael: Just exactly what the title says. All Music Guide.
Cosmik: Everything.
Michael: Everything. Just eventually more and more detailed. A wonderful
place to roam and to learn about music. Part of our goal is to
eventually have some AI [artificial intelligence] techniques, which
Vladamir's an expert on, helping you to go from the things you know now,
the music you like now, to something you THINK you might like, and help
you get there without embarrassment. Like I'm having trouble being crazy
about rap...probably because I'm so old and everything. But somebody
introduced me to the Murk Artists. It's kind of a version of rap stuff,
but it's like dance music, and I do like dance music. It's helping me
get there. Rap's not my favorite music, and I don't find myself putting
it on to relax. But at the same time, one of my good fortunes is that
I've been able to appreciate almost all kinds of music, and I really
value that trait. I really love country music... early country music,
especially. So when there's a kind of music I DON'T like that I know is
likeABLE, then I would like to get there. Sometimes I have to be educated.
So one of the things we try to do is help people get from here to there,
like a spider crawling across a great web handhold by handhold. To me, a
lot of what music is about is overcoming the fear of the unknown and always
discovering something new.
-*-
Miller Freeman Books 6600 Silacci Way, Gilroy CA 95020.
1-800-848-5594 plus one overseas +1 408-848-5296
email mfbooks@mfi.com
URL: www.books.mfi.com
The All Music and All Movie databases can be found at www.thenewage.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
LABELED: DCC COMPACT CLASSICS - GOOD AS GOLD
Steve Hoffman Interviewed By Shaun Dale
Some nine years ago, DCC founder Marshall Blonstein hired a young engineer
away from MCA to take on the mastering duties at the DCC studios. In that
time, Steve Hoffman has played an integral role in assembling one of the
finest re-issue catalogs in the music business and in creating some of the
most technically outstanding recordings you can find anywhere.
I caught up with Hoffman by phone while he was in the middle of a fight
with the flu, but he graciously took time to talk about music, recording,
the business generally and DCC in particular. I only wish it was possible
to translate his infectious chuckle and enthusiastic, cooperative tone into
ASCII. His insightful answers to my questions will have to do, and here
they are...
* * *
Cosmik: Hi, Steve.
Hoffman: Sorry about this raspy voice I have, but of course I have
this LA illness...
Cosmik: Up here (I spoke with him from the luxurious Cosmik Annex in
Seattle) we call it the Puget Sound crud. Everybody in town has it.
Hoffman: Well, so do I.
Cosmik: Well, I appreciate you taking the time through that to talk with me.
Hoffman: No problem.
Cosmik: This interview is for a semi-regular feature called "Labeled" that
looks at record labels and the people working for them. To me DCC is,
in a major way, Steve Hoffman.
Hoffman: Well thank you.
Cosmik: Looking at this stack of gold discs on my desk, the name Steve
Hoffman is on all of them, and no one else from the label has their
name on all of them. How big an operation is DCC? What does it look
like if you go there?
Hoffman: Well, it's run from the men's room of the 76 station on sunset...
Cosmik: I've been to that men's room!
Hoffman: That's a great one. Actually, there's about 20 of us. We're in
Chatsworth, which is in the San Fernando Valley. There's sales people
and manufacturing people and legal people and creative people. It's
like any record company. You know, people to do the artwork and the
guys in the warehouse. It's small, but everybody has their own job and
it's quite a nice place, really. I've almost been there ten years. I
don't know how that's possible, but its just a nice place to work. A
lot of industry veterans are there that can't seem to get along in the
corporate world of music.
Cosmik: With all those people, it's hard to see where the musical people fit
in and how many of those there are. Do you literally master every release
for the label or do you get a break now and then?
Hoffman: The label founder Marshall Blonstein is the chairman of the board,
and Marshall and I go over all our favorite music in our fevered little
brains (and I do mean fevered at the moment). Basically Marshall and I
decide what we're going to release and then he goes to work negotiating
and I go to work. He does what he does so expertly and then I start.
After we procure the master tape from the record company, I take it from
there. That's where it actually begins for me.
Cosmik: So you're very involved in the selection of the music the label
releases.
Hoffman: Uh huh, although Marshall Blonstein has the last word. Our musical
tastes are pretty much in sync. We both have an astonishingly wider range
of things we like to listen to - old jazz and pop stuff and modern stuff.
We're just like two kids in a giant candy store when it comes to picking
the music.
Cosmik: Having access to the Riverside catalog through Fantasy...
Hoffman: Is great!
Cosmik: Do you work with Joe Tarantino at Fantasy in making selections?
Hoffman: No, we know that catalog pretty well. We have a list of everything
they have. It's not all the artists and music. A lot of it, especially
with gold CDs, has to do with "How did this sound? How was it recorded?
Can we improve it in any way?" and are both of us really happy.
Cosmik: Well, I've approached the label mainly as a jazz writer. I'm aware
of the classic rock stuff and sometimes I get mad when that never comes
to me, (Hoffman laughs) but it's hard to complain when the complete
catalog of the Miles Davis Quintet is sitting in your review stack. But
I'm always impressed with the jazz releases you do for two reasons - first
the taste in the releases. Everything I've heard has been really enjoyed
and I'm always declaring something the jazz re-release of the decade.
Some of my readers must think I work for the label.
The other thing is the sound. It's always sharp and clear and I'm
thinking that some of the masters you work with must need a lot of work.
Some of this stuff was recorded in conditions that transcend the word
primitive, yet you make them sound very fresh and alive. What kind of
source material do you get to work with?
Hoffman: It varies from album to album. I have the same taste in how I listen
to music as I had in high school. I like it to sound a certain way and I
have little tricks and tools to get it to sound that way. But I have to
say that a lot of the vintage material from the 1950's and 60's is
incredibly well recorded, not in spite of the technology but because of
the technology. All vacuum tube microphones, very simple mike set ups,
hardly any signal processing...it's like when you go to a club, and
there's live music playing inside and you're standing in front of the
club and you go "Wow, there's a band in there." Well how did your ear
know that that's a band instead of a P.A.. There's just that certain
signal that says that's live music. A lot of those old master tapes had
that because, for example, a lot of the Miles Davis were done in Rudy
Van Gelder's living room. If you've visited a modern recording studio
you know that if there are any live people there, they're isolated. One
guy's behind this screen, one guy's behind that screen. Well, in the old
days they didn't know about that so they just stuck them all in a room.
The sound was bouncing off all the walls, and it just sounds more
natural that way. So it's a little bit me, it's a little bit them and we
try to make it sound as lifelike as possible.
Cosmik: And it sounds great, which makes you wonder why they don't use more
of those techniques more often now...
Hoffman: I think it's because the performers themselves start to panic unless
there are 18 microphones on the drums. I think it's just ingrained now
that more means quality.
Cosmik: Well, I think it's chops that mean quality.
Hoffman: Yeah. Guys with those don't ever seem to care how many mikes are on
them. Are you a musician?
Cosmik: Yeah, I play - or play at it. So you've been with the label about
ten years. What did you do before then?
Hoffman: Nine years. And I was with MCA records before that, pretty much
doing the same thing. I got that job right out of school, so I've been
pretty much locked into the same kind of job since 1982.
Cosmik: You were doing re-issue work at MCA?
Hoffman: Yeah. The term that we came up with there for it was catalog
development, which at the time sounded like hell, but for me it was
like, well, I have seventy years of history here that I can play with.
Elton John and Buddy Holly and Brenda Lee - everybody who was on any
MCA owned label was all mine, so I had a good time there.
Cosmik: Doesn't sound like an awful thing at all.
Hoffman: No, it was a lot of fun actually.
Cosmik: So now you've got this terrific jazz catalog to work with. What
kind of decisions go into what kind of rock music gets the DCC treatment?
You're drawing from a broader array of sources.
Hoffman: Yeah. Basically, we have a strong and loyal following. People write
us and fax us all the time what they think we should release. Sometimes,
you know, their ideas spark a little memory like "Oh yeah, that album.
I wonder who owns that now." But it's a double edged sword. Everyone
wants Sgt. Pepper on gold CD, but it's a tremendous legal morass. That's
the usual problem. In the old days, like the 1950s, it was easier
because the contracts the artists signed with the record labels were so
much simpler and they're easier to negotiate now. In the 70s and 80s,
artists contracts became 90 to 100 page monstrosities, so in order for a
record company to license us, this young upstart, to do one of its prize
albums it takes a lot of grueling paperwork and time. So that has a lot
to do with what we release. A lot of people will go "Well, why don't you
release the first Led Zeppelin album. Didn't you think of that yet." No,
gee, never thought of Zeppelin. Sorry.
It's just that there's lawyers and Atlantic's not the owner, they're
only the licensee in this country and who does own it and nobody's sure
and how much money do they want and blah, blah, blah. All that stuff is
not my end of the business, but that's the end that tells me what I'm
going to be working on, so it's not as easy as it might appear.
Cosmik: I'm sure it's not. You mentioned people wanting Sgt. Pepper on a
gold CD. From your perspective, what's the difference between a gold CD
and a regular release, and what does that allow you to do technically
that produces the added value in a gold CD.
Hoffman: The advantage of the gold is twofold. Take one of your aluminum
CDs, hold it up to the light and through the label you'll see that there
are pinholes in there. Hold up one of our CDs and there are no pinholes
Every one of those pinholes is something that your CD player has to hide.
If your CD player is very good at hiding it, then you probably won't
notice it. On our CD, the surface is completely pitless. It's a
completely smooth CD. Your CD player doesn't have to hide anything. It
can concentrate on reproducing the sound normally and naturally. That
leaves me full reign to focus on each album without time constraints.
So it's a combination of a really smooth surface and a lot of time. So
that's what you're paying for. It's really half and half. Half for my
time and talent in remastering and also for the gold surface. Incidentally,
the gold actually comes from a gold ingot from Fort Knox. They actually
deliver the gold ingot to the manufacturing plant, they use it to make
our gold CD run and then they return it to Fort Knox. That's hard to
imagine, but it's really true.
Cosmik: They return the leftovers, huh?
Hoffman: They have to...
Cosmik: You do some high quality vinyl as well.
Hoffman: Absolutely.
Cosmik: We've all got stacks of old records and all of a sudden when we
want to buy a record it's become an exotic audiophile item. What are
you doing with that vinyl that we weren't getting when we were buying
nothing but records?
Hoffman: The things you'll notice about the new vinyl formulation is it's
pure virgin vinyl, it's clean, there's no surface noise, no squish, it's
180 plus thickness, it's thicker, it won't bend, it doesn't warp as
easily. It's a lot harder to press that way because the vinyl is so
thick. There's stringent quality control. It's quite a complicated
mechanical process and there's only one or two plants in the entire
country that actually handle it. It's actually much harder to make one
of those LPs than it is to make a CD of any type. It's a real pain in
the butt to do it the old fashioned way. That's why they're a little
more than one might remember from the old days of Licorice Pizza or
whatever record store may have been around. Of course, these albums
are mainly geared toward audiophiles and these people have very expensive
equipment and they can hear a hair if it's out of place, so they're who
we're actually selling these to and they're happy because they have this
expensive equipment and they don't have anything to play on it except
their old Bad Company albums. But a lot of audiophiles aren't happy with
Creedence Clearwater. They'd rather have some unknown classical ensemble,
but we're not interested in furnishing that type of music. That's not
what we do.
Cosmik: So you're doing audiophile music for the masses...I'm not an
audiophile. My system is pretty much cut and paste and I probably don't
appreciate all the nuances. I appreciate the fact that the music is
available.
Hoffman: Exactly.
Cosmik: The gold CDs that I have, the format is not the most important thing
to me - the tunes are the most important thing to me. It's interesting
to see your selections because when I think of "audiophile" I figure
that's going to be music that's fairly inaccessible and that I probably
don't want to hear, although it may be recorded beautifully.
Hoffman: (laughs) Exactly. So what we're trying to do is to educate the
audiophile and to get them to unbend a little bit. Some of these
audiophiles have to collect everything, so they have no choice, they
have to buy the gold CD of Hotel California. But sometimes they'll
actually play it and say "Hey, I like that song." It may be some song
that you and I have heard five thousand times but they're just hearing
it for the first time and they go "Hey, I like this" and that's good.
We try to spread the word that it's about the music and it's not about
the equipment.
Cosmik: Of course, the other side of the coin is convincing the jazz fan
like myself that it's worth thirty dollars to go buy the new Miles Davis.
Hoffman: One of these times take the gold album out of your pile there and
just go down to the record store and buy the 998 version and compare
the two. You'll hear the difference, even on your cut and paste system.
If you love a certain type of music and you want to hear the most - I
mean if you love the movie Casablanca, do you want to watch it on a
19 inch screen or do you want to watch it on a big giant screen? It all
depends on what you want. If that film or that album is important in
your life, then you'll spend the extra money on it. I'm not saying that
everyone should, I'm saying that if it's important enough, then you will.
Cosmik: I think the value is there. Of course, without knowing too much of
the technical side of it, I give you full credit for that value and
ignore the gold.
Hoffman: (laugh) Thanks.
Cosmik: A lot of the releases are classic albums of whatever genre, done in
their original packaging with their original notes and the glossy covers.
They're done beautifully, but I don't suppose you're too involved in all
that...
Hoffman: Oh no, that's all me.
Cosmik: You make those decisions too? Great.
Hoffman: It all comes from me. I do everything visually and audiolly (sic).
I mean, I want the CD buyer to have the same album, the same experience
as the person who used to buy the LP. It's not fair that you can't see
the original album art, or the original record labels. As a kid I always
loved looking at the labels and all that stuff so I try to incorporate
that in our CDs.
Cosmik: That's one of the things I really enjoy. I have a fairly good sized
collection of jazz albums from the 50s, and a lot of what I know about
jazz comes from what Leonard Feather or someone might have said on some
album in 1956...
Hoffman: Absolutely.
Cosmik: Without those things a lot of the value would be lost for me. The
packaging is always exceptional. That's one of the things I always
appreciate about DCC. But you do some other things as well. There have
been some interesting compilation pieces. I was talking to my editor,
DJ Johnson, about the "Monster Rock and Roll Show," for instance.
Hoffman: Yeah, that's a great one.
Cosmik: There are some interesting things there. You know "Monster Mash" is
going to make the cut, because it's got to, but there are other things,
like a Five Man Electrical Band piece that no one was probably looking
for...
Hoffman: That's right.
Cosmik: Were you involved in the track selection for that project?
Hoffman: In that particular case, no. It was our friend Alan Warner who
came up with the concept. He's an English historian who knows oldies
and it was his idea to mix the old advertisements with song. All of us
had a say in it by saying, like, I want "Purple People Eater" or I want
"Monster Mash" or this or that, but basically that was Alan. It was my
job, of course, to find all the original tapes. That was the hardest
part because its not easy to find a good sounding stereo version of
Monster Mash. It's not one of those songs that's real handy in the
vault so it took a lot of tracking down.
Cosmik: I imagine there were some legal complications in getting all the
permissions too.
Hoffman: Absolutely. That's the name of the game. Every time you do a
compilation you have to get the OKs You have to be patient. It takes
about a half a year to get everything. But the record companies want to
help you, it's not that they don't. Its just slow going, because, well,
MCA's working on their current offerings. Its not their priority to drop
everything and hunt around for a contact on some 1960s Bo Diddley
record. They do what they can, and they're usually helpful. It just
takes patience.
Cosmik: You did a three disc series for Sony Special Products, the "Groove
On" stuff, which I enjoyed a lot because there were some obvious tracks
but there were a lot of non-obvious tracks there.
Hoffman: That's for sure.
Cosmik: Was that commissioned work? Did they pick them out and hire you
guys to do this?
Hoffman: That was done by one of our consultants, George Nazar. He just
basically picked the songs that he liked, and I listened to them and
said, "okay, okay, sure." That was one of our smoothest projects. It
was one of our easiest to manufacture and to master because the music
was fairly current, for a change, so it was easier to find all the tapes.
Cosmik: The only DCC release I've seen that doesn't have your name on it was
"Politics As Usual." I guess you weren't involved with that...
Hoffman: No, that was a bunch of radio guys who had fun doing that. Of
course, I mastered it, which didn't mean anything. I mean, I wasn't
involved in it creatively, so I can't comment on it except that it made
me chuckle.
Cosmik: It was an interesting blast at everybody during a political year...
Hoffman: Yeah, that's what you do in an election year.
Cosmik: Made it pretty hard to figure out the ideological bias of the people
at DCC.
Hoffman: (laughs) Yeah...
Cosmik: So maybe you can walk me through your process a bit. Say you decide
to do "Chet Baker in New York". You know who has the tape, so you get it
and listen to it and do what?
Hoffman: OK, the first thing I do is listen to every copy I can find out
there in the real world. I check how the original LP sounds, the way
the current CD sounds, the way the Japanese import LP sounded, just to
get an idea of how it's supposed to sound. Then I'll go through the
original tape and I'll start messing around. I'll try mastering it this
way and... I use a lot of vacuum tubes in my console and I'll add some
layers of tubes to hear what it sounds like that way and I'll try it
several ways. I have the luxury of taking my time, of course, because
that's one of the advantages of working for a small company. We have
about four releases or so a month as opposed to Warner Brothers Records
that has about 39 releases a month. So then, after I hear how it sounds
in my car, how it sounds here, how it sounds there, then I'll finally do
the final mastering and it will be made into a CD or an LP. If it's
going to be an LP I'll do the actual lacquer cutting and see what it
sounds like there. If it sounds good, we'll release it. If it doesn't
sound as good as I think it could, I'll start over. That's it. Every
single time.
Cosmik: So is the LP something that creates a particular problem for the
sound, and having to start over, as opposed to a CD?
Hoffman: Well, yeah. A CD gives can be 80 minutes, almost. On an LP, once you
get past 20 minutes a side, you're in big trouble. As the stylus goes
toward the center, the groove diameter gets smaller and smaller. If it's
too loud it will mistrack, if it's too quiet there's surface noise. If
there's a loud dynamic part the stylus might fly off the record, so its
always harder. In the old days, in the 80s and the 70s and the 60s, in
order to avoid those problems the cutting engineer just compressed
everything. He shaved off the low end, he shaved off the high end and he
reduced the dynamic range. For our LPs, we want to preserve all the
excitement of the original take, so that makes it very hard. It's a lot
harder to do an LP than a compact disc.
Cosmik: Especially when one of the great things about the CDs, especially on
my jazz discs, is hearing some of the alternate takes as bonus tracks,
which just run the playing time longer. Do those go on the LPs as well?
Hoffman: Sometimes they do, if I have room. If I don't have room, then no,
because if you put too much on a side of an LP, you really start losing
sound quality.
Cosmik: So that's a sacrifice that the LP collector has to live with
sometimes...
Hoffman: Yep, but the LP collector usually cries tears of joy that he can
hear his favorite album again sounding great. Because a lot of those
fifties jazz LPs, although they're really nice to have, they don't
really sound that great.
Cosmik: True. I know that now that I have these, I don't play those that
often.
Hoffman: None of them do. Because, you know, LPs by their very nature were
always a compromise, but with CDs, not so anymore.
Cosmik: When you make that decision to put the bonus tracks on the CD, what
kind of decision process is that? I would guess there's often a whole
lot more than you could use, or even would want to, because even in the
good old days of people recording live in someone's living room, they
didn't do everything in one take. There must be a lot of tape around
from some of those sessions.
Hoffman: There's some around. Not as much as you might think. If it's an
alternate take that's interesting, if it doesn't embarrass anyone, if it's
fun to listen to, I'll consider it. I'm not a real big fan of alternates
anymore. I used to be. In the eighties, I'd think, well, you want to
hear everything. In some cases, there's just more songs than they could
squeeze on an album. So they chose the ones that they liked and just left
the others in a can. Now, there's more space. The songs are perfectly
good...it all depends on how old it is, and what's the license of it and
how many different things there are. It could be very easy to put seven
or eight different takes of a Wes Montgomery song on there, but after
awhile, the final approved take is the one you keep coming back to,
because that's the one they thought was the best and it usually is. It's
kind of anticlimactic to end an album with something that's mediocre, so
its not my favorite thing to do.
Cosmik: Sometimes there's a treat, though. On the "Sound of Sonny", by
Sonny Rollins, the "Funky Hotel Blues" was recorded for some other
project at the same time. I don't know what that project was, or where
it went, if it's available, or if it will ever be available, but it's
nice to have the track.
Hoffman: Absolutely. Actually, that was a song that was in the can and
they had a compilation album of various saxophone players in about 1964
and they said "Oh yeah, we've got that left over Sonny Rollins song" and
it was just an extra song, and it was a great song that was on the original
tapes. At a lot of labels, if it wasn't on the original album, it was
razor bladed, so not every label kept their alternates and their outtakes.
Only some did.
Cosmik: In another case, on "Chet Baker in New York" the "South Winds" cut
was not an alternate cut of something on the album but something from
the session that was put out on another compilation...
Hoffman: Right, "New Blue Horns." That was an extra song he felt like
recording that day that was so long they couldn't squeeze it on the album,
so they held it and since they paid him, they figured some day they would
use it, and they did. But it would be a shame to leave that off the album.
It's as valid as any other song on there.
Cosmik: So do you think he recorded it with the thought that it would be on
the album?
Hoffman: I don't think he even thought of that. I think he just wanted to
record that extra song. It's like when you're in the studio and you hit
a groove and you just plug ahead. I think that's probably what happened.
Of course, I don't know, because he's dead...
Cosmik: We'll have to call the psychic hot line and find out...
Hoffman: (laughs) Yeah, get Dionne on the phone and ask her.
Cosmik: So what do you listen to when you don't have to listen for a project?
Is jazz the music you prefer, or do you like the rock stuff?
Hoffman: Actually, I've listened to a lot of Al Jolson recently. I have very
quirky musical tastes. I enjoy my job so much that usually the music I
listen to in my off hours is the music I'm working on. I love the
oldies. I love sixties and seventies. I love jazz and classical,
almost anything. I'm one of those kind of guys, you know, Shaun.
Cosmik: I know what you mean. I've probably got about 3500 recordings
round here that run the entire gamut.
Hoffman: And you never know from hour to hour what you're going to want to
hear.
Cosmik: Right. That's part of the Cosmik Debris thing. I've got about a
dozen reviews coming up in the next issue that range from Italian
baroque love songs to free jazz.
Hoffman: That's good. You may be steering some loyal magazine person into
some brand new form of music that they may never have experimented with.
Cosmik: That's always a hope, that someone will check in to find out what we
think of the latest surf punk release and will find out about Italian
baroque love songs sung by contraltos. Is there anything coming up at
DCC that you want people to know about? Is there an Al Jolson album in
the future?
Hoffman: I don't think so. It's hard to believe, but his original artist
contract from the forties is one of the most iron clad. For us to
actually license him, it would be like a nightmare. Even though I think
about it in fun, in actuality it would be easier to license another
album by the Doors. So I don't think Jolson's going to be one of our
releases this year, but one can always hope.
Cosmik: Anything exciting on the horizon you're free to talk about now?
Hoffman: I've been struggling over Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" for awhile and
that will be out soon. Some great jazz releases - Benny Carter, Earl
Hines, Wes Montgomery's live album "Full House" with three bonus tracks.
That's going to be good. The tape just sounds so wonderful. We're
going to do an Art Pepper jazz thing, "Intensity", with three unissued
tracks. In the world of rock, another Badfinger, Bonnie Raitt's "Luck
of the Draw" is coming out this week. John Coltrane's "Lush Life" is
coming out this week. That's what's happening.
Cosmik: One last thing. I noticed the Miles Davis Quintet releases were on
DCC Jazz, while the other releases were all DCC Compact Classics. Is
that something you tried and gave up, or what?
Hoffman: There is an aluminum $10.98 DCC Jazz line, with some Mel Torme and
a bit of this and that in there. They thought they should use that
label, but basically it's the same thing.
Cosmik: So they're still using that label for the aluminum CDs?
Hoffman: Yeah, and for some of the gold jazz. It depends on whose in charge
of what that day.
Cosmik: Hey, I though you were in charge of everything all the time!
Hoffman: (laughs) not *everything*...
Cosmik: Well thanks for leaving your sickbed to share some great insight into
DCC, Steve. I'll let you go take whatever the doctor prescribed and get
some rest, but I really appreciate you're taking the time...
Hoffman: Well, thank you.
With that, Steve Hoffman left the line, headed, I hope, for a speedy
recovery so he can get back to the console and produce some more great
sounds for turntables and CD changers. Check out the Cosmik reviews this
month for new Miles Davis, Bill Evans Quintet, and Nat King Cole 24k gold
CDs. And watch for more DCC Compact Classic releases as their
terrific catalog and Steve Hoffman's impressive body of work continue to
grow.
[DCC releases can be ordered by telephone at 1-800-301-MUSIC.]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
TAPE HISS
By John Sekerka
[The following interviews are transcribed from John Sekerka's radio show,
Tape Hiss, which runs on CHUO FM in Ottawa, Canada. Each month, Cosmik
Debris will present a pair of Tape Hiss interviews. This month, we're
proud to present interviews with Coco, of Man...Or Astroman, and Steven M.
Martin, director of the documentary film THEREMIN.
* * *
MAN...OR ASTR-MAN?
That is the question. futuristic time traveler, electronic whiz and the
Man...or Astro-man? android, Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard spills the
goods from his super secret laboratory via crackly transmitter.
JOHN: What planet are you from?
COCO: You've gotta stop looking at life with blinders on. Everything doesn't
exist in a concrete form like a planet. Think about it: a planet is a
silly thing. A sphere has the least amount of surface area of any object.
So you're living on an object where you cram as much stuff as possible on
the smallest available surface area for that given amount of mass. Kinda
crazy. We don't exist on a planet. We exist on a vaporous form out in
Grid Sector 26-B9. It's quite a ways from here. We really shouldn't be
here.
(WOOF!)
JOHN: That sounds like Astro dog in the background.
COCO: Yes we conduct all kinds of experiments in the lab.
JOHN: Do you consider Man...or Astro-man? to be a rock'n'roll outfit?
COCO: We're scientists, we just happen to play rock'n'roll on tv.
JOHN: Can you reveal what you are working on in your super secret lab?
COCO: I can't be too specific. The records and music are just a by-product
of what we're really doing down here.
JOHN: According to my information, you Coco, are a cybernetic life form
built by your cohorts Starcrunch and Birdstuff.
COCO: This is true. As much as I'd love to forget it, I can't separate myself
from the past. I was constructed primarily out of spare Atari 2600 parts.
They did a pretty good job, probably a little better then they'd like to.
The only thing lacking is a joy-stick, so I'm not anatomically correct.
The joy-stick is on the drawing board, but we've got so many projects on
the go, it's on the back-burner for now.
JOHN: I was surfing the Man...or Astro-man? web page and found a section
outlining assemblage of a Tesla coil.
COCO: Aha!! That information wasn't meant for public consumption, you must
have been digging since it's carefully hidden. We are taking a Tesla coil
on the road. It's a nice addition to the brain washing devices that we
currently have. We usually wield this thing out at the end of the show
and throw a little lightning around the stage. It's a great combination:
alcohol, loud music and about 200,000 volts.
JOHN: Being a big theremin buff, I have to ask when and how did you first
get your hands on that crazy music contraption?
COCO: My very first theremin was built by an off-shoot research facility
located in Atlanta. It was very primitive. In fact it only had volume
control, ran off a 9 volt battery and could fit in a large pocket. It
had a limited range of inaudible low to inaudible high frequency. One
movement of a hair on your finger would cause an octave change in the
pitch. Now I have a solid state model which can be thrown around the
stage.
JOHN: What do you think of the recent theremin revival?
COCO: I think it's great. I hope it'll stick around and not suffer the same
fate as the first time around. The skill factor in playing ability is
quite high - I can barely play a melody. I hope it won't deter people.
It takes a lot of practice and a good ear to master.
JOHN: Coming from the future, it seems strange that you'd be obsessed with
analogue, rather than digital technology.
COCO: I don't think I'm obsessed. It just so happens that in our use, the
tonal qualities of analogue equipment are more pleasing to our ears. A
bit of digital technology sneaks in though: you can always sample some
great analogue sounds and reproduce all the hisses and cracks.
JOHN: You are one of the few groups releasing a large amount of vinyl.
COCO: We gotta be the in thing. If you're gonna sell records, you gotta be
the in thing and that's what Man...or Astro-man? is all about: selling
millions and millions and millions of records, getting really rich and
leaving your planet. We have no use for your silly Earth money; we just
wanna get outta here. If we could find the parts to our ship, or
fabricate them, we'd be gone.
JOHN: So this is Gilligan's Island to you?
COCO: Basically yes, but that would make me Gilligan...
JOHN: You have a 5" single that I can't play on my turntable because the
tone-arm switches off automatically.
COCO: You have to fix your turntable: there's a return switch that I suggest
you take right out. Then it'll play everything - right across the paper
label. We're thinking of putting out records in inch increments. The four
and six inch formats have never been properly exploited.
JOHN: Enlighten me on the 'Maximum Efficiency Buddy System.'
COCO: In order to increase efficiency to near 100%, we have one current
member of the staff along with three video partners take the stage. Thus
we can play four different venues simultaneously. Another option is 'The
Franchise.' That's when you and three of your friends pay us $1000 a
piece, we train you for a couple of months, and you hit the road as
Man...or Astro-Man?. Maybe the West coast, or Australia, meanwhile 5 or
6 other groups would be touring as well. That way we can knock out several
shows a night while we sit back and make some records.
JOHN: Wait a minute. I'm paying $1000 and then touring for you, so you can
make more money?
COCO: Exactly. It's a beautiful plan. Sleep on it.
JOHN: Why is there a question mark at the end of Man...or Astro-man?
COCO: That's the eternal question. It is a beast from outer space born of a
woman yet recreated by outer space. It loves like a man, but is it
Man...or Astro-man?
..tape hiss
* * *
AAAaaaoooOOOOoooOoowwWWWWwwoooooO.....THE THEREMIN
Sweeping this fad-starved continent is a crazy antique musical instrument
best known for emitting the eerie sci-fi sounds that laced fifties b-movies.
The theremin is a wondrous contraption of wires, coils and tubes, that is
played by waving your arms before two protruding antennas - one for volume,
one for pitch. The instrument is never touched!
A brief blow-by-blow history capsule:
Lev Sergeivitch Termen was born a Leo on August 15, 1896 in St. Petersburg,
Russia. In 1918 while working on alarm devices for the government, Termen
(later Anglicized to the user friendly Leon Theremin) invented his magical
music box just as the civil war broke out. This was in fact, the origin of
electronic music. Ten years later he was granted a US patent and the theremin
was licensed by RCA. Theremin toured with his instrument, playing it for
enthusiastic audiences. His love interest at the time, and chief theremin
virtuoso, Clara Rockmore played the instrument like a fine tuned violin,
whipping off classical pieces to the amazement of America's upper class.
Theremin enjoyed the fine American life, living in New York, building a
studio, and marrying a black American dancer. In 1938, on orders from Stalin,
the NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB) kidnapped Theremin from his Manhattan
apartment and forced him to work on bugging devices. No one knew what
happened, as the professor simply disappeared off the face of the earth. His
wife died not knowing of her husband's fate. Little was heard until Theremin
resurfaced in the late eighties when the iron curtain came tumbling down.
Through Clara Rockmore's and Steven Martin's efforts, Leon Theremin returned
to the United States for a brief stay before his death on November 3, 1993
at the age of 97.
The recent rediscovery of the theremin can be chiefly attributed to the
fabulous documentary "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey" - now available at a
hip video outlet near you. Here's a chat with director Steven M. Martin.
JOHN: Growing up, were you kidded about your name?
STEVEN: It was the most boring name on earth when I was a kid. The next
thing you know Steve Martin turned into a phenomenal blockbuster. The
only thing that would be worse was a name like Jerry Lewis. I've had to
endure twenty years of "excuse me". There's also a famous animal trainer
in LA with the same name. Now I'm Steve Martin, the theremin guy.
JOHN: How did you come across the theremin? It's a pretty obscure instrument.
STEVEN: I always liked the sound of a theremin. When I was a kid I really
liked science fiction and monster movies, so I really liked that sound.
The first time I consciously heard it was when my father let me and my
brother stay up late to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still on television.
We flipped over it. That movie's got everything: robots, Patricia Neal, a
guy from outer space and the theremin. We started running around the house
doing theremin noises. It was also a sound your parents hated. I always
liked that sound and kept hearing it as I got older. I wasn't even
planning on making a film about it, I just wanted to use it in the score
of a movie I was making. I had never seen a theremin before. It's not
like they're a household appliance. Trying to find someone who could
actually play, as opposed to just making noise, led me to Clara Rockmore.
I mentioned my problem to my attorney and he said, "that's funny, my
mother's best friend is the world's greatest theremin player". So she set
up a tea for us to meet. Clara turned me down. She was reticent and had
no interest in playing on a score. In the course of the tea, the idea for
the documentary was hatched.
JOHN: The film features a great sequence of wild characters with wonderful
stories. Did you stumble upon this gold mine of links, or was there a lot
of research involved?
STEVEN: There were no books on the theremin, thus there was no such research.
I gathered a collection of theremin fans and fanatics, cross-referenced
everything they knew, and put together a little information from a lot of
places that yielded the big picture.
JOHN: Do you own a theremin?
STEVEN: Oh yeah, autographed by Professor Theremin himself I might add. And
I just got a kit which Bob Moog [synthesizer guru] manufactures. This
film has started a bit of a revival. There's a big demand from a
generation of musicians who want to get back to more authentic electronic
instruments.
JOHN: The theremin has been featured quite a bit over the past couple of
years in alternative music circles...
STEVEN: I like how Jon Spencer Blues Explosion use it. Portishead* also use
it, and Bruce Wooley, of all people.
JOHN: Yeah, from the Camera Club days: "Video Killed the Radio Star". I found
the best source for theremin info to be on the Internet. There are several
good web pages on the history, music, kits, and even those nutty
Theremaniacs.
STEVEN: I couldn't be happier. I made the film to honour Professor Theremin
for his contribution. We've created Theremania. It's terrific to resurrect
something that's been long dormant for no other reason than people didn't
know about it. Now it's out there.
JOHN: The theremin might fall into the kitsch aspect of the lounge scene. Do
you think it has staying power, or will it be a fad?
STEVEN: I think it'll stick around because it's a stand alone musical
instrument like a violin or a trumpet, it has its own particular tone
colour and its own musical characteristics. It just happens to be
electronic and played by moving your hands in the air around it. I hope
we'll have another virtuoso like Clara Rockmore.
JOHN: How about Lydia?
STEVEN: Lydia Kavina is Theremin's great niece. She plays the title music
for Ed Wood, and she worked at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Robert
Wilson and Tom Waits on their version of Alice In Wonderland. She's a
good musician, but what Clara does is something else. I mean four octave
staccato runs on a theremin? It's theoretically impossible!
JOHN: She plays it like a violin.
STEVEN: Absolutely. Her musical expression is unparalleled. It's funny,
people want a theremin so they can sound like Clara. If you put a
Stradivarius in my hands, it would still sound like Jack Benny.
JOHN: Not only is she a musical virtuoso, she's also a radiant screen star
with a real presence.
STEVEN: She's one in a million. You can see why Theremin was so crazy about
her.
JOHN: My favourite part in the film is after one of her interviews, Clara
turns to the camera and cooly says "cut."
STEVEN: There were times when I wondered who the director was.
JOHN: Was it tough getting Brian Wilson for the film?
STEVEN: Initially. Layers of management... but I wrote him a personal letter
and he said sure. Working with him was very intense, exciting and easy.
If you're looking for a wild story, there isn't one. He's a really nice
guy. Say, did you like the Jerry Lewis bit in the film?
JOHN: Oh yeah. I was a rabid Lewis fan as a kid, but I didn't remember that
theremin scene. I think this'll spur people on to check out some of those
old videos, especially The Day the Earth Stood Still.
STEVEN: I hope so.
JOHN: Are there other theremin type stories out there, or was this a once in
a lifetime find?
STEVEN: I think there are a lot of stories like this. There's a real tendency
in western Civilization to wait until someone dies to laud them. Ever
heard of Raymond Scott?
JOHN: Yes indeed, there's a doozy of a story.
STEVEN: I may be doing a documentary on Michel Vicevitz. He's a real cool
Dutch performer/musician who takes Theremin's ideas a step further in
that he wires up his whole body with mercury switches and sonar so as he
moves his body becomes a theremin. We introduced Theremin to Michel in
Amsterdam and hooked up these devices to the professor. He was thrilled,
like "wow, finally," here's this 95 year old guy wired up, moving around,
making sounds only he could have dreamed up. It was pretty cool. In the
thirties Theremin built a dance platform [the terpsitone] which the
dancer could use as accompaniment because each movement was translated
into a sound. We're going to build one at Harvard. Bob Moog from MIT said
he'd help out.
JOHN: I know that Hal Willner produced the music for your film. Will there
ever be a soundtrack?
STEVEN: We're hoping. Before the movie was done there wasn't much interest,
but I think all that has changed.
...tape hiss
* * *
(* Portishead have confessed that they don't use an actual theremin, but
simulated the sound on a Roland SH-101.)
LIKE TO HEAR THE THEREMIN? You probably already have. Here's a quick source
guide.
� The Auteurs: "Back With the Killer" (single)
� The Beach Boys: "I Just Wasn't Meant for These Times" (Pet Sounds ),
"Good Vibrations", "Wild Honey", "She's Goin' Bald" (Good Vibrations )
� The Bonzo Dog Band: "Noises for the Leg" (Keynsham)
� Captain Beefheart: "Electricity" (Safe as Milk)
� Neneh Cherry (live)
� The Coctails: "Wood Bee" (Lounge AX compilation)
� Dinosuar Jr: "Outta Hand" (Without a Sound)
� Esquivel: "Cabaret Manana"
� Julianna Hatfield: "Dumb Fun" (Only Everything)
� Led Zeppelin: "Whole Lotta Love" (II), "In The Evening" (In Through
the Out Door )
� Lothar & the Hand People: Space Hymn, Presenting.
� Luna: "Sideshow" [credited but "Double Feature" sounds more plausible]
(Penthouse )
� Man...or Astro-man?: various tracks on Project Infinity and Experiment
Zero
� Marilyn Manson: "Dope Hat" (Portrait of an American Family)
� Mercury Rev: See You On the Other Side
� Monster Magnet: Dopes to Infinity
� The Muttonbirds: "The Queen's English" (Salty)
� Pere Ubu (live)
� The Pixies: "Velouria" and "Is She Weird" (Bossanova)
� Pram: "Meshes" (single)
� Harry Revel Orchestra: "Music Out of the Moon" (conducted by Les Baxter),
"Peace of Mind" (theremin is overdubbed three times)
� The Rolling Stones: "200 Light Years from Home" (single)
� Todd Rundgren: No World Order
� Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: "Greyhound" (Orange with a theremin on the
cover graphic)
� Matthew Sweet: "Lost My Mind" (100% Fun)
� Tesla: Bust a Nut
� Paul Weller: Stanley Road
SOUNDTRACKS:
Ed Wood
It Came From Outer Space
The Lost Weekend
Music For Films
The Red House
Rocketship XM
Spellbound
The Thing
HOW DO I GET MY HANDS ON A THEREMIN?
Electronic whiz Robert Moog started manufacturing theremins (before he came
up with the synthesizer) and his company (Big Briar: 554-C Riverside Dr.,
Ashville, NC, 28801, 1-800-948-1990, BigBriar@aol.com) is the chief source
for theremins to this day. Classic stand up theremins can run up to $3000 US,
but a nifty kit which includes Clara Rockmore's CD and an instructional video
tape can be had for $229 US.
WHERE ARE ALL THE COOL THEREMIN WWW SITES?
We dunno. We know where SOME cool sites are, but not all of them. Try these
URL's for size, and you'll probably find links to others once you get there.
www.nashville.net/~theremin/ - The Theremin Home Page
www.he.tdl.com/~enternet/teci/teci.html - Theremin Enthusiast's Club
International
www.lm.com/~dshu/theremin.html - Bob Moog's Theremin site
www.ccsi.com/~bobs/theremin.html - Bob Sexton's Theremin Page
ftp.ecn.nl/pub/misc/theremin - Dutch Energy Foundation: You'll find plans
and photos here.
www.shift.com/shift/reverb/theremin - Shift Magazine: Historical articles
and information on how to actually play a theremin.
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ADOLESCENTS: Adolescents (Frontier - distributed by Epitaph Records)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale
Everything you need to know about Orange County (CA) teenage angst is
here - two albums and an EP worth. That's the Adolescents self titled
1981 debut, the three track EP Welcome to Reality and guitarist Rikk
Agnew's solo effort All by Myself. Actually, on All by Myself, Agnew
became guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, drummer and vocalist.
This is high powered punk and the Adolescents were a band lucky enough
to have the one ingredient needed to make the music work - a capable
vocalist. Tony Cadena was able to deliver the lyrics of songs like "I
Hate Children" and "Kids of the Black Hole" convincingly. Too many punk
bands of the period were more dependent on vocal enthusiasm than ability,
which is why so many of them are so hard to listen to now. This music
continues to sound fresh - in fact, it would be easy to mistake it for a
new release, and a good one at that - largely, in my opinion, because
the vocal tracks are worth hearing over and over.
Which is not to dis the instrumental talents of the band. With Rikk
Agnew and his brother Frank on guitars, Casey Royer on drums and Steve
Soto on bass, they were as able a unit as the music required.
Considerably more able than that at times, actually. Certainly more
able than many of their peers.
Rikk Agnew had moved on by the time the Welcome to Reality EP was
produced, but he hadn't disappeared. He needed all his time, I suppose,
to produce All By Myself which he did, indeed, perform all by himself.
His solo effort is a little more complex, lyrically, than the band's
music, but it fits in well here, continuing in a straight ahead hard
punk mode.
This 26 track CD is a valuable document in the history of Southern
California punk, but it's more than that. The music is as vital today
as it was 16 years ago and it should be heard by people who were just
being born when it was recorded as well as some of us who were all grown
up by then and maybe not so likely to be found in the clubs it was born
in.
Track List:
Adolescents: I Hate Children * Who is Who * Wrecking Crew * L.A. Girl *
Self Destruct * Kids of the Black Hole * No Way * Amoeba * Word Attack *
Rip It Up * Democracy * Creatures
Welcome To Reality (EP): Welcome to Reality * Losing Battle * Things
Start Moving
All By Myself (Rikk Agnew): O.C. Life * "10" * Yur 2 Late * Everyday *
One Shot * Falling Out * Surfside * It's Doing Something * Fast *
Section 8
CHET BAKER: The Prestige Sessions (Prestige/Fantasy)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
These three CDs puzzled me at first. Each has its own name: Stairway To
The Stars, On A Misty Night, and Lonely Star. Each is sold separately.
Each has the exact same liner notes. Except for one tiny paragraph written
very recently, the text is a compilation of liner notes from each of the
five Prestige albums Baker stocked in a three day marathon recording
session in August of 1964. Those albums, Smokin', Groovin', Boppin', Cool
Burnin', and Comin' On, are long lost in time, so this collection is very
exciting to Baker enthusiasts. What puzzled me was the running order. Why
was the original running order of each album not followed here? Was this
the actual order in which the songs were recorded? Finally, I called
Fantasy Records and asked. Mystery solved. It's that damned 79 minute
limitation of the CD format again. So the tracks are all here in the order
in which they would fit.
The sessions were something special. Baker had just recently switched from
trumpet to flugelhorn, and by this point he was feeling very comfortable
with the new instrument. His performance is solid throughout, and his tone
is superb. Swing man Baker put together a quartet of bop specialists for
these sessions. Pianist Kirk Lightsey had done some good work, but hadn't
really earned his wings yet. These sessions would change that in a
hurry. Drummer Roy Brooks had spent the previous five years with Horace
Silver's band, and had worked with Yusef Lateef prior to that. I'm not sure
where bassist Herman Wright cut his musical teeth, but he was certainly up
to the task at hand.
What makes these recordings particularly satisfying is the fact that Baker
was comfortable enough with his own status to give the green light to another
member of the temporary quintet. Tenor saxman George Coleman makes such an
impact and solos through so much of this material that one might think it
was his session. These recordings were made not long after Coleman quit the
Miles Davis Quintet, and he may have felt he had something to prove. His
solos are daring and complex, often dizzying and always impressive. Baker
makes his points as well, matching Coleman jolt for jolt on several tracks
and even outdoing him on a few. One such track is "Cherokee," which opens
the Stairway To The Stars disc. After Coleman's fast and fluid solo, Baker
equals his speed but does it in warmer, richer tones. The same can be said
of "Go-Go," a fast stepping number from On A Misty Night. Baker's tone is
full, with just a touch of grit, offering a sharp contrast to Coleman's
smooth lightning runs.
Aside from those and a few other tracks, the music is mostly low key and
serene, a definite contrast to what Baker felt in his daily life. He
was a drug addict and was in constant turmoil all through his life. This
music soothes the soul. Maybe it did the same for him for a while. Running
order aside, it's nice to have all this music together for perspective,
not to mention pure enjoyment.
BARE NAKED LADIES: Rock Spectacle (Reprise)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale
Live recordings can be a real hit or miss proposition. While the
technical side of recording has long since solved most of the problems
of reproduction that plagued live recording in the past, there are some
performers who definitely benefit from the studio. Going to the show
might be fun, even exhilarating, but for sheer listening the traditional
studio recording is often preferable.
Rarest of all is the live recording that makes you want to see the show.
Real bad. Now.
"Rock Spectacle" drove me straight to the web in search of touring info
on Bare Naked Ladies. (Damn - they're in the middle of a Northeast US
swing - Go West Young Men!)
Noted for lyrical as well as instrumental improvisation onstage, Bare
Naked Ladies deliver up performances that alternately amaze and amuse.
Principle song writer Steven Page can tell a story as well as Harry
Chapin could, make you laugh as hard as Tom Paxton can or just sit you
back in your seat saying "Wow - wish I'd written that!"
Mixing up double bass, accordion, keyboards, drums and bass, electric
and acoustic guitars into a succulent instrumental stew, the band sells
the songs with great taste. The song *is* the thing for these guys, and
the songs are great.
"Brian Wilson" captures that sense of ennui that so often affects the
creative in a unique way. "Straw Hat And Dirty Old Hank" is a
Chapinesque look at a celebrity stalker. "Hello City" makes you want to
jump up and run downtown. "If I Had $1000000" is funny as hell, and the
audience has as good a time with it as the band does. The rest of the
tunes here are just as good, delivering a new favorite cut with each
listening.
While they have a large and fervent following, both in the States and
in their native Canada, I hadn't heard their previous work. I'll be
tracking it down now, though, and watching for the next one, too.
And I'll be seeing the next show near me.
Track List:
Brian Wilson * Straw Hat And Old Dirty Hank * Break Your Heart * Jane *
When I Fall * Hello City * What A Good Boy * The Old Apartment * Life,
In A Nutshell * These Apples * If I Had $1000000
BEAUSOLEIL: L'amour ou La Folie (Rhino)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale
Hoo Boy! Five new Michael Doucet tunes, a variety of tried and true
Cajun standards like "Valse a Pop" and the "Eunice Two Step" and some
marvelous guests and surprises...and I got it just in time for Fat
Tuesday!
You may get it a little later, but you should get it. Beausoleil may
be the definitive Cajun band on today's scene. Their commitment to the
tradition (and their facility with it) doesn't hinder their willingness
to take a few liberties with it, though. In fact, their well deserved
position of esteem in Cajun country may be what allows them to invite
Richard Thompson aboard for a ripping electric guitar lead (on "L'amour
ou la Folie) or Tex-Mex legend Augie Meyers in for a swamp-pop scorcher
("Can't You See (Tu Vas Voir)).
The departures from the Cajun canon are fun, but they also point up just
how well grounded this band is in the heart of the bayou tradition.
Michael Doucet's voice and fiddle lead the way, delivering the French
lyrics in a manner designed to touch even the heart of Anglophones like
me and leading one of the finest instrumental ensembles to be found in
any genre.
Michael Doucet is a fine flat picker in a band where the rhythm guitar is
an essential element of the sound. Jimmy Breaux is as good an
accordionist as you could want. Add Al Tharp on bass and banjo, Billy
Ware on percussion and vibraphone and Tommy Alesi on drums and you've got
one great band.
On top of all that, there's a roster of nine guest artists (including
Thompson and Meyers) adding touches of guitar, keyboards, clarinet, lap
steel, dobro, sax, mandolin, Hammond and piano - all done up just right
in all the right places.
Enough already. I'm gonna hit the replay button. You go buy the disc...
Track List:
Newz Reel * Les Blues de Creve Faim * L'amour ou la Folie * It's A Sin
To Tell A Lie * Eunice Two-Step * Charivari * Boudreaux * Valse a Pop *
Can't You See (Tu Vas Voir) * Les Blues de la Prison * Danse Caribe *
Valse J'Aime * Courir avec Walker * Ma Vie S'est Arretee
BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonatas: No. 30 in E, Op. 109; No. 31 in A flat, Op. 110; No.
32 in C Minor, Op. 111. Alfred Brendel, Piano. PHILIPS 446 701-2 [DDD] 66:01
Reviewed by Robert Cummings
This release marks the completion of Brendel�s third recorded cycle of the
thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas. His second one, spanning the 1970s, was
also for Philips, and his first, from the 1960s, was for Vox. Brendel has
also recorded the five Beethoven piano concertos three times. Has there been
another pianist to have thrice traversed these monumental sets? To my
knowledge, there hasn�t. It is well known that Brendel has devoted much time
to Beethoven away from the recording studio as well, having on occasion
played the complete sonata cycle over a period of several successive
concerts. He has also studied and written extensively about Beethoven�s
music. What I guess I�m saying, albeit in a rather circuitous fashion, is
that Alfred Brendel must be regarded as one of the world�s foremost
authorities on the performance and analysis of Beethoven�s piano music.
Auditioning the disc under review confirms his preeminence in this hallowed
corner of the repertory.
Brendel�s account of the E Major Sonata is a tad faster than his earlier
Philips rendition, but does not take a significantly different interpretive
stance. The newer performance is both high-caloric and muscular, and more
often looks forward to the Romantic movement than backward at the Classical
period. The earlier Philips recording is clearly a more pristine, leaner
rendering of the work, yet is rooted in the same pianistic framework of
judicious tempos, scrupulous adherence to the composer�s directions, and
facile technical control, while eschewing the least hint of virtuosic
grandstanding. Either version is good, then, but I�ll opt for the newer,
somewhat more substantive reading.
The A flat Sonata is played with virtually the same arsenal of pianistic
virtues and, again, is superior to the earlier, slightly superficial Philips
account. Here Brendel catches the beauty, the lightness, the depth, the
humor, all in proper measure and all in a rich, gorgeous tone that has
evolved over the years from the leaner, less legato-laden style of his
earlier years.
Speaking of his earlier years, Brendel�s Op. 111 rendition on Vox seems
quite typical of his pianism then, and offers considerable contrast to the
newer version. It�s a performance that certainly is compelling, if a bit
less probing than his latest account. Even though there�s much to commend
in his youthful first foray--and in the first Philips effort, as well--I
personally favor the newer reading. When you listen to the sublime fifth
variation and recapitulation of the main theme in the second movement, you
notice greater depth, greater monumentality, a sense that you are being
transported to the profound spiritual planes that so clearly occupy the
final pages of Beethoven�s last piano sonata. And try the fourth variation
(track 9; 6:44), where Brendel�s dexterously inflected, adroitly agitated
enactment of this rather threadbare, yet miraculously rewarding thematic
digression points up its auguring of much of the syncopated music of the
twentieth century. (Did Beethoven here foreshadow rock-and-roll?)
There have been many fine pianists who have recorded the Beethoven sonatas
with acclaim, including Richard Goode (a pair of his releases didn�t impress
me favorably, though), Vladimir Ashkenazy (about whom I�ll refrain from
commenting until I review his new London re-release of the last five sonatas
in the next issue--stay tuned), and the justly praised Artur Schnabel.
Brendel certainly takes his place among the greatest Beethoven interpreters
of any time, and this disc finds him at his most inspiring. Philips supplies
sumptuous sound and informative notes. Strongly recommended.
BJORK: Telegram (Elektra)
Reviewed by Keith Gillard
Bjork's new album is a collection of remixes and new versions of material
from her last album, "Post," plus one new track. I was expecting great
things from this disc, and looked forward to it immensely. However, although
some of the new versions are brilliant, many disappointed.
Bjork says that she looks on remixes as her doing a duet with the remixer.
I do not subscribe to this opinion, in much the same way that I do not accept
Natalie Cole's "duet" with her father, or the recent Frank Sinatra "duets" as
duets - many of the artists involved never met Sinatra until after the piece's
completion. Some of the pieces on "Telegram" are indeed duets, in that they
are new versions of the pieces done with different producers or arrangers.
But most of these pieces are just remixes: Someone has taken samples of Bjork
and used them as raw musical material for their own piece. Not that there is
anything wrong with that, but it's not a duet!
But this is not the place for long diatribes. Here's what I liked about
"Telegram":
The one new song on "Telegram" is "My Spine," a duet with percussionist Evelyn
Glennie. Glennie plays mostly exhaust pipes on this piece, bringing melodies
and percussive beds out to support Bjork's vocal to wonderful effect. This
is a fascinating piece, probably the best on the disc, but don't expect to
hear it on the radio.
"Hyperballad" was my favourite track from Post, and here Bjork reprises it
with the Brodsky Quartet. This lovely song works very well in a minimalist
acoustic arrangement. The range of sounds the Brodsky Quartet are able to
produce and use musically within the piece is remarkable, particularly in the
final verse. I particularly appreciate that this piece has been compressed
very little, leaving it with a very large dynamic range.
The new version of "Isobel" is very nice, arranged in a Brazilian style by
Eumir Deodato, who was responsible for the gorgeous strings on the Post
version. Here, it is presented with a more conventional ensemble: Guitar,
bass, drums, percussion, strings, voice. The feel is funky, with bossa nova
undertones. The press release adds that it is a live recording, which is
also appreciated. I would not say that this arrangement is superior to the
brilliant version on Post, but it is certainly its equal.
Drum'n'bass specialist Dillinja did a great job on his remix of "Cover Me."
Dillinja has taken drum samples from a variety of sources and switches between
different drum kit sounds from time to time. This is a great effect, as most
drum'n'bass producers acquire all their drum sounds from the same source.
Here, although the reconstructed beats are very simple (in comparison to many
of the drum'n'bass beats released recently), Dillinja has created a sense of
fragmentation using sound rather than rhythm.
"Army of Me" is remixed by Graham Massey of 808 State, which is only
appropriate - he wrote the piece with Bjork in the first place. I have
never heard anything by Graham (or for that matter, anyone in 808 State)
that I did not love. In this mix, he takes "Army of Me" further than on
Post, although it lacks the vocal. Thankfully, he has substituted the
Led Zeppelin "When the Levee Breaks" drum loop of the original with another,
equally-heavy but less identifiable loop.
What I didn't like about "Telegram":
"Possibly Maybe" is remixed by Mark Bell of LFO fame. Very disappointing.
The premise is simple: slow-swung heavy drums, disturbing electronic
atmospheres, and vocals pitch-shifted into complex chord shapes that make
the melody almost unrecognizable. But the premise isn't enough. It goes
nowhere.
Outcast have remixed "Enjoy" into a dismal distorted soup. The first two
minutes are interesting enough, but by the time you've listened to them,
your ears are better served by moving on to the next track. Almost nothing
is left of the vocal line, and the arrangement is simply not strong enough
to support itself.
"I Miss You" is redone with Dobie, in a '90's New York R&B/rap style. If
it weren't for the rap in the middle, I would probably prefer this version
to the one contained on Post (or the version for the brilliant video,
directed by John K.). Not that I don't appreciate rap, but I find this
"let's-stick-a-rap-in-the-middle-of-the-tune-for-cross-genre-radio-support"
approach to arrangement and pop promotion distasteful for the most part.
If the piece actually did call for another voice, it would be fine. But in
these lyrics, Bjork is alone: "I miss you, though I haven't met you yet."
Why would she be joined by a male voice rapping about also missing this
mysterious "you"? For those of you who love the earlier version, don't
worry - it's a bonus track.
In addition to music, the packaging requires comment. The only place the
track listing appears is on the CD itself. The tracks are not named or
numbered on the case nor in the inset. So, if you're lucky enough to be
able to see through your CD player AND read tiny text spinning several times
a second, then you can know what you're listening to as you listen to it.
Clark Kent, you're in luck.
As you can see, I really like half the pieces on the disc, and actively
dislike three. As for the other two, indifference. Unfortunately, for all
the brilliance shown in the five good tracks, the number of disappointing or
even insulting remixes forces me to not recommend Bjork's Telegram. Perhaps
her next remix project, e-mail, will be better.
TRACK LIST:
Possible Maybe (Lucy Mix by Mark Bell) * Hyperballad (Brodsky Quartet
Version) * Enjoy (Further Over The Edge Mix by Outcast) * My Spine (duet
with Evelyn Glennie) * I Miss You (Dobie Rub Part One - Sunshine Mix) *
Isobel (Deodato Mix) * You've Been Flirting Again (Flirt Is a Promise Mix
by Bjork) * Cover Me (Dillinja Mix) * Army of Me (MasseyMix) * Headphones
(0 Mix by Metri) * I Miss You (Original Mix)
Songwriting: 6/10
Production: 6/10
Performance: 7/10
Overall: 6/10
BLACKHAWK: Strong Enough (Arista)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
Sure is nice to know there are still bands in Nashville that have their
roots in classic country and not in early-80s Journey. While so many
other acts subscribe to the theory that all you have to do is wear a
cowboy hat while playing wimpy pop and you're a country star, this trio
sprinkles the rock and roll like a fine spice over a solid country base.
Strong Enough is alive with outstanding gospel-influenced vocal harmonies
and classic country instrumentation.
The songs are about love, loss, and human weakness--not exactly new ground
for country music, but here it's done well--and even the occasional small
moment of victory. In "King Of The World," for instance, the mood is
cautiously optimistic: "I didn't need no money, I didn't need no time. I
didn't need nothin' but my own piece of mind. And to know that a voice like
a whisper is bound to be heard, for just one moment, I'm the king of the
world." Quite a contrast to "Hook, Line and Sinker," which begins with "The
first thing she done when they set her free from the women's correctional
facility..." See, that's what's fun about good country music: they write
about some seriously twisted situations.
The musicians that backed the trio are all buttkickers with great country
chops. Instead of following the Nashville formula (hiring session dudes),
Blackhawk recorded with its own road band, and that probably has a lot to do
with the strength and energy of Strong Enough. Good decision.
PAT BOONE: In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy (MCA/Hip-O)
Reviewed by Steve Marshall
Unless you've spent the last few months under a rock, you probably know that
'Mr. Clean' himself, Pat Boone recently released a new CD of hard rock classics.
Boone's long time fans aren't quite sure what to make of it. For those of you
who may not have this CD yet, it's uhh . . . well, it's interesting. Are there
really screaming guitars on the songs? Some of them, yes. Is it really a 'metal'
album? Of course not. Imagine songs by the likes of Judas Priest, Deep Purple,
AC/DC, Metallica, Guns N' Roses, and Led Zeppelin done big-band style, with an
occasional electric guitar solo thrown in here and there, and you'll get the
idea. The whole album was recorded live to two-track in the studio.
Is it as bad as everyone has said? It depends on what you're expecting from it.
Some of it is truly entertaining (though not necessarily in a positive way).
Boone is backed by an excellent band of musicians, some of whom played on his
earliest material. Then there are the special guests: Ritchie Blackmore and
Dweezil Zappa play guitar on "Smoke on the Water." Ronnie James Dio heard that
Boone wanted to record "Holy Diver." Once Dio found out the song was going to be
recorded on his birthday, he couldn't resist stopping by to contribute backing
vocals.
One of the most memorable tracks on the CD is Van Halen's "Panama." The lyrics
on this one were cleaned up a bit. Instead of the line where David Lee Roth
sang about how he wanted to 'reach down.. between my legs.. and ease the seat
back,' Boone wants to "reach down, and put my seat belt on." Let's say
(hypothetically, of course) that you make it through "Panama." What else is in
store? How about a big band version of "Enter Sandman"? I have to admit, the
band really cooks on this one. This song is one that's gotten the religious
community up in arms. But wait--there's more!
"Paradise City" is another 'highlight.' The band really gets a workout on this
one. If you like big band jazz, you may actually enjoy this version. Unless, of
course, you're not into screaming guitar solos. Boone slows it down on a couple
of the songs. "Love Hurts" isn't really that different from anything else he's
done over the years. He also does a cover of "The Wind Cries Mary." When you
consider that the song's a ballad to begin with, it's not that bad. If you think
about it being a Hendrix tune, that's another story. If you've managed to make
it this far, you're in for a 'reward.' Boone saved the 'best' tracks for last.
How can you do an album of metal covers without doing an Ozzy tune? Prepare
yourself. Boone does a swinging lounge version of "Crazy Train"--complete with
backup singers going "crazy, crazy train.. choo choo!" Tom Scott (sax)
contributes an amazing solo on the track, and several others on the CD as
well. The disc winds up with Boone's orchestrated version of "Stairway to
Heaven." Just imagine Sammy Davis, Jr. crooning on these two tunes and you'll
get the idea.
In a Metal Mood takes rock to a new level. Not even William Shatner can go where
Pat Boone's gone on this album. He approached the songs with a real sense of
sincerity (even if the idea did begin as a joke). Boone put together a killer
band for the album, and should be commended for taking a chance. Is it something
that you'll to want to hear more than just as a novelty? Probably not--but if
you're a fan of any of the bands covered on the CD, you owe it to yourself to
check it out.
THE BOSS MARTIANS: 13 Evil Tales (Dionysus)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
Evan and the boys are back with 13 excellent tracks that run the gamut from
instro-surf to hot rod vocal tunes. I've been a fan of this band since the
first time I saw them play live in 1995, but I've never thought of their
music as having an edge or an attitude. I've always thought of it as very
well played and carefully controlled surf. Well, nothing on 13 Evil Tales
threatens to lose control, but there is a definite attitude to the instro
tracks--a bit of menace--that makes this album even more satisfying than the
rest.
Vocal tracks like "Gonna Have Fun Tonight" and "C'Mon Jenny" are classic
Martians, but the menace creeps into other vocal tracks like "Tombstone
Track," "Mean Model A," and especially the soon to be classic "She's Creepy."
Now there's a track that has the cool factor and mysterious vibe to blow away
Nuggets-style garage aficionados. The fun factor is bumped up by "Long
Haired Lenny," a mischievous little high-speed variation on the Suzie-Q riff
supporting some very funny lyrics.
Three spins later, this is definitely my fave Boss Martians record. Evan's
guitar playing continues to mature. How much better can it get?! Film at
11. (Dionysus Records: PO Box 1975, Burbank, CA 91507)
DAVID BOWIE: Earthling (Virgin)
Reviewed by Steve Marshall
David Bowie has never been one to conform to what other artists are doing.
He draws upon whatever musical influences he's into at the time, then
transforms them into something new and unique. You want a disc to test your
sound system? This is the one. The songs on Earthling are hard hitting and
aggressive. The industrial blast of "Little Wonder" practically explodes
out of your speakers to start off the disc. Bowie came up with a great hook
on the chorus, and Byron Allred's drumming on the track is spectacular.
One of the best tracks on the CD is "Seven Years in Tibet." The eerie vocals
on the verses quietly slither from the speakers, only to knock you out of
your seat with the aural assault on the chorus. "I'm Afraid of Americans" is
another great song, with a major Nine Inch Nails influence. In an unprecedented
move for a major artist, Bowie debuted the first single ("Telling Lies") on
the Internet last summer. A different version of the song appears on the new
CD. Bowie is clearly stoked on this CD, and deservedly so. Earthling contains
some of his best and most innovative work to date.
BR5-49: Live From Robert's/BR5-49 (Arista Nashville)
Reviewed by Steve Marshall
One of the hottest groups on the country circuit these days is BR5-49. The
band took its name from the classic Junior Samples skits on Hee Haw. Live
From Robert's, the band's debut, was recorded at Robert's Western World in
Nashville--a combination boot emporium/drinking establishment. The members
of BR5-49 all bring a multitude of influences to the group. While their
roots are firmly planted in traditional country--Hank Williams Sr., Merle
Haggard, Johnny Horton, Ernest Tubb & Bob Wills--there's another group of
influences that bring a definite edge to the music. How many groups can
claim to be into the artists mentioned above - plus surf, punk, ska, James
Brown, and Sonic Youth?
Live From Robert's is a fine debut. Rather than writing stereotypical songs
about women, pickup trucks, and getting drunk, BR5-49 injects a keen sense
of humor into their material, as showcased on "Me 'n' Opie (Down by the Duck
Pond). Yes, it seems the boys are also big fans of The Andy Griffith Show.
"Me 'n' Opie" is a song about the show's 'lost episode' - a hilarious story
of "drug abuse and sexual deviance." This tune alone is worth the price of
the CD. Also, don't miss "18 Wheels and a Crowbar." It's got a percolating
Duane Eddy-like riff that just won't quit. This is one of those songs that
keeps going through your head from the first time you hear it.
Originally released last September (on Hank Williams, Sr.'s birthday), the
band's self-titled full length CD is highly recommended too. The bluesy
shuffle of "Even if its Wrong" starts off the disc. The song features some
fine pedal steel work by Don Herron. Up next is the track that earned the
band its first Grammy nomination, "Cherokee Boogie." It's an old Moon
Mullican cover, performed here in updated Johnny Horton style. "Little
Ramona" is a catchy tune about leaving your punk rock roots for good ole
hillbilly music, and has been getting some major airplay on the east coast
these days.
There are a few covers on the CD--including a rocking version of Mel Tillis
and Webb Pierce's "I Ain't Never." "Chains of This Town" is a Tex-Mex tune
that's also been getting a lot of airplay. The chorus on "Are You Gettin'
Tired of Me" has a curiously strong resemblance to the recurring Hee Haw
skit with Grandpa Jones about bad luck ('if it weren't for bad luck, I'd
have no luck at all,' etc.). "One Long Saturday Night" brings the CD to a
close with its raucous surf/rockabilly guitar licks. All too soon, the disc
ends as it began--with the sweet sound of vinyl, in all its scratchy glory.
BR5-49 is a band to keep your eye on. Their musicianship allows them to
achieve a true, authentic country/honky tonk sound, and their outside
influences and offbeat sense of humor should keep things fresh and
interesting for years to come.
BROOKS AND DUNN: Borderline (Arista)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
This is the 4th go-round for Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn, whose first album,
Brand New Man, is still on the Billboard country charts five years after it's
release. In that five years, they have become one of the premier live acts
on the country circuit. Here's a quick tutorial for newbies: Brooks is the
one with the big black cowboy hat, while Dunn wears no hat. I guess it's
just that he's a little bit country, while HE'S a little bit rock and roll.
Dunn stands still and sings. Brooks runs around like Jerry Lewis just gave
him a hotfoot. Dunn looks serious. Brooks looks downright dangerous.
There, now that you can tell 'em apart, we can continue. Ronnie Dunn stepped
up his legend a bit with his absolutely perfect performance of "My Maria."
This is the first cover tune they've ever done--the original was done about
20 years ago by the late B.W. Stevenson--and it's hard to imagine a better
fit. Aside from that tune and the honky tonkin' "Mama Don't Get Dressed Up
For Nothin," Borderline is much too pop-ballady for my tastes. What they
do, they do very well. I'd sure like to hear these boys do a whole album of
kickin' honk, though.
JUNIOR BYLES: Curly Locks - The Best Of Junior Byles & The Upsetters
1970-1975 (Heartbeat)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
Reggae history buffs and collectors absolutely need this CD. Junior Byles
made some of the best reggae records of the early 70s, but many of his
deepest and most powerful sides are long lost... or WERE long lost. Rescued
at last, these 22 tracks sound fantastic. Clean sound, great bass presence,
only occasional distortion. Lee "Scratch" Perry produced these sessions and
The Upsetters provided the backing. Always a nice combination that translated
to great reggae grooves with a little bit of soul for flavor. The simplicity
of each track--usually just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards behind the
vocal--adds charm to an already moving collection. In the past year, I've
made a point of complaining about the liner notes (or lack thereof) on many
Heartbeat releases. I'm VERY happy to report that the notes for Curly Locks
are interesting, educational and thorough, right down to a track-by-track
description of the music. When releasing music of such historical importance,
a label has a responsibility to pack as much information as possible into
the liner notes. After reading these notes, you'll have at least a basic
understanding of Junior Byles the vocalist, the man, and the tragic figure.
The music itself is absolutely essential.
NAT KING COLE: Love Is The Thing (DCC 24k Gold CD)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
While it's the King Cole Trio's jumpin' swing that really gets me going,
I think you'd have to be a pretty cold hearted SOB not to get goosebumps
from an incredible vocal album like this. Love Is The Thing was recorded in
1957, and it is definitely a pop album. But what a pop album it is! Nat's
voice--arguably the most beautiful male voice in pop history--is smooth as
honey on these twelve original and three bonus tracks.
Love Is The Thing has been run through the presses a few times since its
initial run, but due to a studio mishap a few tracks no longer exist in
stereo. Since the world was extremely focused on stereo in that era, the
mono mixes of these songs weren't even included. Consequently, Love Is
The Thing hasn't been seen in its proper length and running order since
that first run. Until now. The pristine mono tracks, "Maybe It's Because
I Love You Too Much" and "Love Letters," sound superb. The three bonus
tracks, "Someone To Tell It To," "The End Of The Love Affair," and "If
Love Ain't There" were recorded in 1963 for Where Did Everyone Go, and they
seem right at home on this disc. And there's a nice little gift hidden,
mystery-track style, at the end of the set: "Stardust." This is the same
recording as track 2, presented here without any embellishment on Nat's
voice. No reverb, just a touch of EQ. This track shows that Nat King Cole's
voice was the genuine article.
DCC's Steve Hoffman has done another stellar job with the master (see our
interview with Hoffman in this issue of Cosmik). I haven't had the original
album for almost 20 years now, but if I remember correctly, it was a noisy
and problematic recording. After the DCC treatment, there is still some
serious microphone pop (hey, Nat was a breathy singer, whattaya gonna do?),
and a few odd electronic interference noises that were probably the product
of archaic stereo recording equipment. Despite these problems, the overall
sound quality is extremely high. Gordon Jenkins' studio orchestra sounds
vibrant and clean, with acoustic bass so present you can feel it. Best of
all, Nat's voice sounds so full and rich it's like he's in the room. Which
is actually just a bit spooky. Not to be morbid, but... hearing him sounding
this alive makes it seem very odd that he's been gone for over thirty years.
"And even though our castles crumble and fall, we have the right to laugh
at them all. For love is still king. Love is the thing."
BOOTSY COLLINS: Ah...The Name Is Bootsy, Baby (Warner Bros)
BOOTSY COLLINS: Ultra Wave (Warner Bros)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
It took a long long time, but labels are starting to focus much deserved
attention on their funk catalogs from the 1970s. Warner Brothers has been
particularly active lately. The amazin' Bootsy Collins collection has begun
to trickle down.
Ah...The Name Is Bootsy, Baby was first released in 1977, when disco was
king and I was nauseated. Funk fans weren't exactly strangers to Bootsy,
as he'd played with James Brown, Funkadelic and Parliment. Bootsy's Rubber
Band made its debut in 1976, with this album coming the following year.
There's no way to adequately describe Bootsy's elastic bass playing to a
BootsyVirgin, but I'll give it a shot: it grooves, it stretches, it slides
and it spanks, turns corners, does flips, loop-de-loops, and it cranks.
The music is a mix of poppin' funk, sci-fi street sounds, and love ballads,
with the one constant being that bass. I mean... it's that BASS, man! This
album should be required listening for all young bassists.
Ultra Wave was originally released in 1980 as the R&B world was going through
a brand new identity crisis. Disco was washed up as a fad, but there was as
yet no outcry for the return of roots funk. Bootsy didn't even blink. Ultra
Wave was by no means his strongest album, nor was it even close, but it had
cool grooves a plenty. While everybody else was trying to find a fallback
position somewhere between genres--call it fusco, call it dink, it's all the
same--Collins and company came out groovin' just like the good ol' days.
Critics weren't exactly universally kind to Ultra Wave, but the fact is that
"Mug Push," "It's A Musical," and "Sound Crack" all ignite with that Bootsy
groove, and that makes this release well worth picking up.
THE CONGOS: Natty Dread Rise Again (RAS)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
Here's dedication. The Congos formed in 1975, and after hooking up with Lee
"Scratch" Perry, they recorded an influential album called Heart Of The
Congos. After the famous fire that wiped out Perry's Black Ark Studio, the
members of The Congos went off to various solo projects and studio gigs, but
they never formally disbanded, despite all appearances to the contrary.
Natty Dread Rise Again arrives as a contender for a few different award: it
may take the award for "Longest Studio Time To Create An Album," because they
recorded the first tracks 14 years ago! As my grandfather always said, "if
you want to do something right, take your time. If you want to do something
wonderful, take all the time you need." That seems to be true, as the other
award this album deserves is a Grammy. It also deserves the lasting respect
of those of us who long for conscious roots reggae. Their music is deep in
the way that Marley's music was deep, commenting on oppression and injustice,
and pledging undying faith in Jah.
The tendency of the uninformed may be to cast The Congos as throwbacks, so
make sure you tell those people The Congos are authentic. They're from
that time, and much of this album was recorded in that bygone era. Good
news from RAS, by the way: The four original Congos--Cedric Myton, Watty
Burnett, Congo Ashanti Roy, Prips and Watty Burnett--are together and strong,
and they are touring the United States. Mark that concert as a must-see.
MILES DAVIS QUARTET: The Musings Of Miles (DCC)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
Recorded on June 7th, 1955, The Musings Of Miles presents Davis at an
important juncture in his career. One year after kicking heroin and
just months before hooking up with John Coltrane, Musings displayed an
emerging star with a new confidence. The Quartet was a fantastic unit:
Philly Joe Jones on drums, Red Garland on piano, Oscar Pettiford on bass
(until Paul Chambers arrived on the scene shortly thereafter) and, of
course, Davis on trumpet.
His own composition, "I Didn't," displays a newfound confidence and a
quickly maturing tone that would soon make him the most influential
trumpet player since Louie Armstrong. A terrific track, "I Didn't"
features wonderful interplay between Jones and the always amazing
Pettiford, with Philly keeping up a train-shuffle with brushes.
While Davis may have learned from his old boss and pal, Dizzy Gillespie,
and moved on, he was still more than happy to acknowledge the man: "A
Night In Tunisia" sparkles under Davis' direction, swinging from
Pettiford's finest and most unusual work of the set. The bass part in the
intro is the closest thing to Pettiford's own unique style that you'll find
here. Elsewhere on the album, he plays extremely well, but within the Miles
Davis framework.
The final track, "Green Haze," swims in luxurious 12-bar blues, stirred
to perfection by Philly Joe and his brushes and punctuated by Pettiford's
wistful bass solo. A perfect ending.
The sound throughout this CD is appropriately warm. DCC's 24k gold
treatment, and Steve Hoffman's usual high standards in the mastering
process, make this an indispensable item for anyone attempting to build
an extraordinary jazz CD library. The inclusion of original liner notes
and the use of high grade paper for the insert--both of which are the rule
with DCC releases--is frosting on the cake.
THE DERAILERS: Jackpot (Watermelon)
Reviewed by John Sekerka
Easy to spot these boys, for lead Derailer Tony O. Villanueva owns the
slickest do in the biz - greased back sides with a jet black wire spike
brush cut on top. It looks like something a golfer might find mighty
tempting - to brush off his cleats that is. Appearances, as important as
they may be, are not everything, and The Derailers offer a swell listening
time as well. A smooth mix of traditional twang, a bit of swing and an
honest delivery. Songs of love, heartache, hurt and longing, this is weepy
country folks, but a good half hour cry does everyone good. The good news
is that The Derailers keep the beat up so you can do-se-do while mending
that broken heart. With former Blaster Dave Alvin at the production helm
this platter has the quality stamp of approval. Don't mistake Jackpot for
the sugary country pop slop that soaks up commercial airwaves. This is what
new country should be. Get your cowboy boots and hankies ready.
BILL EVANS QUINTET: Interplay (DCC Jazz)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale
This re-issue of the 1962 Riverside release finds pianist Bill Evans,
whose greatest fame as a sideman probably came with Miles Davis in the
"Kind of Blue" period, leading a quintet made up of himself and four of
the giants of the contemporary jazz scene of the time.
Freddie Hubbard was moving from his relatively mainstream period with
the Jazz Messengers into the era which would make him one of the most
notable free jazz players. Guitarist Jim Hall had played everything
from swing with Goodman and Ella to hard bop with Sonny Rollins. He had
previously worked with Evans in a duo setting.
Percy Heath was best known as the bass in the Modern Jazz Quartet,
which added another component to the quintet's sound as he brought that
groups lyrical, neo-classic feeling to the rhythm section. The drummer
on hand was "Philly" Joe Jones and he, well, he was "Philly" by Gawd JOE
JONES!
The five came together to produce this set of five standards and one
Evans original ("Interplay") that could be a standard in anyone's
repertoire to good advantage. The CD release includes, as a bonus, an
alternate cut of "I'll Never Smile Again" which could well have been the
official take on the original release.
The combination of Evans spacious, lyrical style combines perfectly with
Hubbard's muted but adventurous contributions. Hall's swing sensibility
in taking what might ordinarily have been the sax parts with his guitar
lends a richness to the sound. That richness is important when the
melody trio is set against a rhythm section with the strength and
inventiveness of Heath and Jones.
This is a landmark album, catching five of the finest at a pivotal time
in the history of jazz. DCC has given it well deserved landmark
treatment, producing it in their 24 karat gold format with mastering by
the always able Steve Hoffman. Once again, DCC provides a must have
recording for collectors which deserves to be more than collected - it
deserves to be heard often and widely.
Track List:
You And The Night And The Music * When You Wish Upon A Star * I'll Never
Smile Again * Interplay * You Go To My Head * Wrap Your Troubles In
Dreams * I'll Never Smile Again (Alternate Take)
ARETHA FRANKLIN: Love Songs (Rhino)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale
Rhino's latest dip into the Atlantic Records R&B catalog has produced a
disc destined for "desert island" status for fans of the Queen of Soul.
Not a "greatest hits" collection (though there are many *great* hits
included), this is a compilation of some of Aretha's more upbeat
material from the years 1967 through 1976. A similar collection of her
matchless heartbreak songs from the same period would be a perfect
accompaniment (are you listening, Rhino?). I'm tempted to say that that
combination would be all the Aretha you'd ever need, but there's never
enough Aretha Franklin.
Did I mention I'm a fan?
Among the 16 tracks on the CD are some must-have performances that even
those only casually acquainted with her recordings will know as Franklin
classics ("Baby I Love You" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural
Woman," etc.) but there are also a variety of less often heard
gems here. Her cover of Sam Cooke's "You Send Me" is a revelation.
It's said that Cooke's original was the record that moved Aretha from
straight gospel work to the R&B arena. If Cooke had heard this track
when he was still with the Soul Stirrers, well, Aretha might have
reversed history and moved him out of gospel instead.
While there is abundant tenderness and sensuality in many of these
performances, Aretha provides considerable evidence that a love song can
rock hard. Even at the softest moments, there is an energy and a depth
that most singers can only reach at the top of their form. Aretha
Franklin *lives* at the top of her form, and you should grab these 16
pieces of proof as soon as the store opens.
Track List:
Baby I Love You * I Say A Little Prayer * You Send Me * (You Make Me
Feel Like) A Natural Woman * Day Dreaming * This Girl's In Love With You