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There’s a Renaissance of sorts happening in the music business right now by which music we’ve lost track of, or have ignored outright, due to the current ubiquity of pop music is crawling out from the primordial ooze and is being reborn as something new. New masters, new packaging and/or new formats are moving in to replace the gaping hole left by marginilized MP3 files and the impending death of CDs.
Ahhhh….CMW….ten days that will be permanently etched in my mind, my feet, my body, my bones. What a veritable whirlwind of dinners, dancing, concerts, clubs, conferences, more dancing…. Thank you Sasha Miller and Chole Stelmanis at Audio Blood (Newly christened AB) for providing the DBAWIS team our requisite passes and wristbands to the best music conference….ever.
So, what project in your life has taken you the longest to complete? Has anything you’ve really wanted to do ever taken you 18 years? Most likely not, but that’s how long it took director Denny Tedesco to complete his documentary on a small group of musicians in Los Angeles who, from the late 1950’s through to the 1970’s, supplied the rhythm section (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, percussion, saxophone) for hundreds, if not thousands of hit records.
Welcome to the new Millennium, ladies and gentlemen, and in this case, the new Music Millennium. I don’t have to go into details to explain the situation with record stores these days (okay— “music” stores, but they will always remain record stores to me). They are struggling, even the biggest of them. Even the best of them. Even Portland, Oregon’s legendary Music Millennium. Sure, they’re hanging on and doing better since the recent vinyl revival, but hanging on is not what owner Terry Currier wants. Hanging on is the least that he wants. And he has never been one to pocket money, either. Most of what Terry has made over the past 45 years he has put either back into his store or used toward something to strengthen the music community. And not just that of Portland. He has stepped beyond that city more than once, mainly in a capacity to organize indie record stores.
A simple recipe it was. Sprinkle a few hundred radio stations throughout the United States and Canada, mix with rock ‘n’ roll and stir. Stir up would be a more apt term because when the music hit the airwaves, the shit hit the fan— the music fan, that is. Not a big deal, you say? You’re probably right. In the grand scheme of things, a handful of traditionalists screaming McCarthyisms in a world already changed beyond their understanding would turn out to be flies on a horse’s ass, so to speak, and to scream them at teens plugged into a jukebox or record player at full volume was, well, laughable, but scream them they did and, as they say, the rest is history.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 