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):
There are thousands of stories in Music City and this is one of them. It involves a young musician— in fact, a young artist, as Jon Strongbow dabbled in many different arts, possibly even the occult. A musician implanted with an idea which would end up almost destroying him and yet become a central point from which the rest of life would emanate.
If that sounds ominous or convoluted, it should. Strongbow’s existence cannot have been easy, what with sidesteps into mental institutions and through mental windows while the reflection in the mirror of reality kept morphing. And yet he adapted.
Want to know how stupid we are? Us Americans, anyway? Pretty damn, as far as I can see, and all it took was sitting down and taking ten minutes to map out one day. I have had people tell me that if I really want to know what is happening, I should sit down every day and write down everything I did. Not in detail but with enough to show me what really happened and not just what I thought happened. When I did, I was stunned. See, I live on a very limited budget (What? You think we get paid for all the fun we have here at DBAWIS?) and I thought I was doing pretty well navigating through life. One days list and I’m not so sure.
With apologies to The Records (that’s the band, sports fans) and their song Teenarama. I was sitting here plowing my way through one of my more favorite albums of the past few weeks by one Sandrider and wondering what it is that makes us turn right or left when mood strikes us— to bang heads with Freedom Hawk and Sandrider and then slither into the sixties and early seventies pop garden with The Records and The Shoes. It’s a hell of a jump from “Cut down these heathens” to “C-c-c-c-c-cola is all you ever drink,” from “Hold not your blades to our sad thirsty throats” to “Teenarama/All that melodrama/Gimme gimme gimme gimme/Teenarama” but it is a jump I make all the time. It’s no wonder I’m screwed up. I can’t walk a straight line. Hell, sometimes I can barely walk!
I follow Jaimie Vernon on Facebook not because he has anything to say (kidding, Jaimie) but because he has a way of pushing buttons that bring out the worst in people. When he’s pissed or maybe just mischievous, he can bring out more of a knee-jerk reaction than an “I Love Obama” placard at a Tea Party convention. And he did. Last week. I can’t quite remember what he posted originally, but I do remember the responses, many of which make me shake my head. They weren’t pretty. His response to those was a bit of an I-get-this-kind-of-asshole-response-every-time-I-post-something-not-glowing-about-the-(insert iconic idol here). In other words, he, like myself, does not love The Beatles just because they were The Beatles and God forbid he make such a statement public.
Alcoholic Faith Mission. I put the name first because I want you to remember it, not to be cute with words. They have renewed my faith in music and, by default, the music business. I know. It’s a shade of its former self. I hear it and read it all the time. Statistics here, comments there. It is dying. It is dead. The only thing that matters anymore is format. Kids don’t hear it. Bieber, Perry, Jack White, Richard Waters, Springsteen, Minaj, LMFAO. This is cool, that’s not.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 