I present to you music I have loved over the years and have written about but only a few have found. This is about music by artists who deserve more than they have gotten and are consigned to live in the shadow of what they should have been. In many ways, I wish they could have recorded back in the seventies when the music business was a real center of the public’s attention because had they, some would be stars of today.
Indiana Jones has nothing on me. That big rolling ball chasing him? That’s nothing compared to the mountain of carnivorous beasts chasing me in my dreams every night, each vying for that elusive review I promised what seems months ago. It is the music reviewers equivalent to no pants in the schoolroom, the albums fighting one another to get to me, to rip flesh from bone, to make me pay for what they see as vinyl manslaughter— vinylslaughter, if you will— an offense so terrible as to consign innocent artists and albums to a certain death, so vile as to blast dreams to smithereens, so ghastly as to be— well— ghastly.
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):
Strap yourselves in, sports fans, because this is going to get ugly. The past few days have given us a flurry of comments and actions to chew on in this fast growing chaos which is the new landscape of music.
The first time I think I even thought about death was when Hank Williams died back in 1952. New Year’s Eve it was, but I only remember the headlines. I was five years old and Hank was a regular part of my day. Dad, the curator of the famous Gutch record collection, had only a few records at that time and Never Again (Will I Knock On Your Door) was one of them. I loved that song so much that I begged and begged Dad to play it every time he headed toward the record player and, usually, he obliged. I remember Dad humming along in a grunting kind of way, almost as if the music was going to bust out of him at any moment, but it seldom did. Dad was a lot like myself in that when the music was playing, singing along seemed a lack of respect.
An Open Letter to Clive Stainton:
Your little girl’s growing up, Clive. It wasn’t that long ago that I heard Lisbee’s Firefly album (2006), her voice just beyond a child’s, her music much beyond her years, her insight astonishing. Revisiting that album, I can hear the beginnings of something amazing, but she was so young and we both know that some artists have only one album in them before the world takes them away to become teachers or scientists or whatever else their futures hold.
I swear to God, when Kim Grant is not pushing me toward something, she is. A simple post of a video in her last newsletter (see the link at the beginning of the Notes section) regarding The Grand Ole Echo dragged me in an unsuspecting direction, this time to a group out of L.A. calling themselves Stone Darling. Kim, of course, knows my Achilles Heel (Whispering Pines, for all who don’t know) and knows I cannot resist a short walk through the pines, and I’m pretty sure she posts these things just for me because I ask around occasionally and none of my friends seem to know anything (but come to think of it, they don’t know anything about anything). This time, though, I’m not sure what she’s gotten me into. Want a hint? Read this bio written by one Eric Filipkowski:
I’m tired. I mention this at the outset because this inevitably is going to turn in to one of those stream-of-consciousness tirades in which logic does not play a part. But I don’t care. I need to get something off my chest and I don’t care if you stop reading right now, but the stench of what is wrong with the music business has me gasping for air and there is little oxygen available. But before I start…..
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 