Holy shit! I am practically crying, the music gods are being so good to me. Just discovered a band which is killing my brain cells and making me enjoy it! They are called The Claudettes and are out of Chicago and I am in love! Lordy, I must have somehow done something really really good. If I could only figure out what it was…
Lots of good stuff happening out there and it’s time we plugged in to some of it if only to counter the “real” musical happenings being covered by all of the sites who think that Kanye West canceling (or postponing) a show is news. I get it. No fun finding out your wife is being held at gunpoint. Just not headline news in my part of the world.
The music business has always been such that the stars become super and the rest pretty much stay in the background. A case in point would be The Funk Brothers and The Wrecking Crew and the many session men (and women) who do the grunt work while the headliners reaps the profits. Not that the stars want it that way. That is just the way it is. And maybe that’s the way it is supposed to be. The people within the music industry sure know the supporting cast by name, if the public doesn’t: the session men and the opening acts and the bands which didn’t get the chance or got the chance and didn’t make it for one odd reason or another.
Music used to be all about hits, and before that, artists, and before that, publishing. Recycling music was written into the process from the beginning, but when the LP came along, recycling became a way of life. To be fair, early reissue albums were not reissues at all but were what they termed “budget” discs, a term also applied to albums of “generic” music by artists of little known or unknown cachet. Labels such as Harmony and Pickwick and Design once filled drug store racks with albums of dubious distinction, filled with either deep tracks of a popular artist or tracks by bands put together in the studio to recreate hits of the day.
Goodnight stars; Goodnight air; Goodnight noises everywhere.
So Margaret Wise Brown ended her classic childrens book Goodnight Moon, a bedtime book for the ages. Until I received a message from Charlottesville musician, Keith Morris, he of The Crooked Numbers, I had never heard the name nor knew of the book, to my knowledge. How I missed it I don’t know because not one person of the multitude I asked later was ignorant of its existence, though few recognized the name.
Barry Diament. Odds are, you’ve never heard of him— or think you haven’t. The truth is, though, that if you have albums or CDs by Bad Company or Hoodoo Gurus or Led Zeppelin or Linda Ronstadt, you could have some of his work in your collection. Diament, you see, has mastered or remastered albums by those and many other musical artists. What is mastering? According to Hoyle (erm, Wikipedia):
After ending this last year cranking out two long columns about musicians we lost, I feel the need to counterbalance. While I know that death is a part of life (indeed, life = death according to the laws of nature), it was not all that much fun to dig through the past year searching for musicians recently passed. It was, in fact, a bit of a downer. Reliving the news that I knew was not half as bad as discovering the news I had missed. All too many musicians I admire tripped off this mortal coil without so much as a thank you, Frank, it’s been fun, and I was more than a little unsettled with each discovery. But the past is the past, whether we like it or not, and it was not all bad.
Boy, the things some of us have to do to find the free stuff, eh? I was sitting back enjoying college football Saturday when Erin Ivey busts down the door and starts screaming about this Emily Wolfe character and how I have to listen to her album and maybe I can get a free download or something. I was about to throw her out when she got to the “free” part and, well, you know me— cheapest sonofabitch in the lower 48— so I heard her out, checked out Wolfe’s music and then tossed Ivey out on her keister, after which I calmly downloaded Wolfe’s Director’s Notes. At least, that’s the way I choose to remember it and I’m sticking to it.
With apologies to Jim Carroll, of course. Had I used his actual lyrics, it would be “Those”, and until today I have to confess I had no idea what the song was about. I bobbed my head and listened to the beat more than the lyrics the many times I heard the song and I now wonder why because I am a day closer to that day, every day, and am just now seeing death for the loss it really is.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 