Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 16, 2009, at 12:39 pm
For years, the annual Warped Tour has been more or less a knucklehead boys club on wheels — with music in between — but in recent years more female-dominated bands have been cracking the lineup. Count among them Meg & Dia, the two easy-on-the-eyes, Utah-bred sisters Frampton (no relation to Peter) — Meg, 23, and Dia, 21 — and their three male bandmates.
The group has been on three Warped jaunts, including this year’s.
Meg & Dia is supporting its first major label release, Here, Here and Here (released April 21 on Sire), an accomplished collection of confessional and sometimes confrontational (and irrepressibly catchy) modern rock that takes more stylistic liberties than most bands in the pop-punk/emo realm.
Dia (foreground in photo), who sings lead and splits songwriting duties with Meg and the other band members, called from the tour bus and proved to be a lively, open interviewee. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.
What are the good parts and the bad parts about Warped?
(Coughs) Well one of the bad parts is getting sick and not being able to get better. We don’t have a hotel, a place to take a hot bath. I’ve been cleaning out my nose with a netti pot. I’d give anything for a hotel right now, a quiet room. Yesterday I had a crazy fever.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 14, 2009, at 1:53 pm
It was not all that long ago that a self-imposed eight-year hiatus by an R&B singer was tantamount to quitting the game. Labels wouldn’t have it; fans would forget.
Singer Maxwell’s retreat for most of the decade into “pedestrian life” has done nothing to hurt his career. BLACKSummer’snight, his first release since 2001’s Now just entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1 with sales of 316,000.
Maxwell’s re-arrival happens at a precipitous time, amid a listless modern soul scene where hardly anyone can resist the Auto-Tune button. We’ll call BLACKSummer’snight a solid return, especially welcome considering contemporary R&B’s current state of affairs.
The 36-year-old Brooklyn-bred artist is a genuine singer in the classic mold of a Marvin Gaye. His stock-in-trade is smoldering restraint, but he can grasp for the rasp and turn up the passion when called for.
They saved the not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house part for the very end. As the Michael Jackson memorial stretched just past two hours this afternoon, after a series of speeches and several emotional music performances, Jackson’s daughter approached the microphone, aunt Janet steadying her. Choking back sobs, 11-year-old Paris said, “Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. I just want to say I love him so much.”
If that didn’t get to your tear ducts at least a little, you’ve got a pretty chilly heart.
The second-most famous Jackson, Janet, clad in a black dress and beret, was sad- or stone-faced every time on camera. She neither spoke nor performed. Michael’s brothers Jermaine and Marlon offered tributes, and Jermaine sang a teary rendition of what speaker Brooke Shields said was Michael’s favorite song: the Charlie Chaplin chestnut “Smile.”
Maybe I’ve reached Michael Jackson overload, but I stayed dry-eyed until Paris’ comments at the end. Read the rest of this entry »
It was fated that one day they’d collaborate. Audioslave (and former Rage Against the Machine) guitarist Tom Morello and Boots Riley, rapper for the Coup, are two of the most stridently radical musicians to ever plug in. Get ’em together and you get Street Sweeper Social Club, 11 songs and nearly 40 minutes of unremitting agitprop set to thunder beats and monster guitar riffs.
Every song rails against something: bosses, politicians, capitalism, materialism, the System. Virtually every song advocates the violent overthrow of oppressive forces, the gathering of guns, the whole ain’t-taking-shit-NO-more thing.
Unless you’re planning to cause trouble at the next G8 summit, this kind of rhetorical and musical onslaught can wear your ass out. But give Morello and Riley big ups for commitment — and big up Stanton Moore for providing the crushing funk-rock grooves.
Rap-metal is a worn-out subgenre, and to some extent the Morello/Riley team (along with drummer Stanton Moore) sags under the weight of stylistic orthodoxies. There are only so many new ways to approach a heavy guitar riff, only so many variations on funk-rock beats. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 7, 2009, at 12:07 pm
No TV at the job? No worries. We’re streaming the Michael Jackson memorial here via Hulu. The stream starts at 12:55 p.m., so leave the window open or check back with us. Comment, comment, comment. I’ll be watching and weighing in.
Ten days after his death, Michael Jackson is the biggest story in the entertainment world. Some of you may be crying overkill, but I’m still keeping tabs. Here’s a series of the latest links I’ve come across.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 3, 2009, at 12:58 pm
Most pop singers from the ’60s and ’70s who are fortunate enough to still be touring resort to what I call vocal cheats. That’s when they get to a point in an old hit that has a particularly high note they can’t hit — a note that especially resonates with the baby-boomer audience — so they either drop it an octave or turn it over to the background singers.
There’s nothing really shameful about these vocal cheats — it would be worse, for instance, if Daryl Hall tried to hit that big release note in “She’s Gone” and failed miserably. Or if Roger Daltrey attempted to render the big scream in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and sounded like a frog.
I tell you all this because I saw Boz Scaggs last night at Ruth Eckerd Hall and he didn’t resort to any vocal cheats. He’s 65 years old. Very impressive. When, on “Lido Shuffle,” it came time for the “Lido, whoa, whoa” part, he was right on it — with the backup singers helping, yes, but not drowning him out and thus protecting him. Scaggs came up a little short or a little thin on some of the high notes, but he went for them all.
It wasn’t just the lack of vocal cheats that made Scaggs’ 75-minute set in front of a near-sold-out crowd a success. His voice still has that full, creamy texture of the old days, and his delivery and phrasing brimmed with nuance. (more photos below; all are by Tracy May)
Jeff Tweedy doesn’t sound any happier. I’ve always found the Wilco leader’s apparent discomfort in his own skin to be one of the reasons the band was capable of compelling music (although by no means always).
On “Solitaire,” one of the many somber, introspective tunes on Wilco’s self-titled seventh studio album, Tweedy sings in his trademark laconic style, “Once I thought without a doubt/ I had it all figured out/ The universe with hands unseen/ I was cold as gasoline/ Took too long, to see, I was wrong, to believe, in me/ Only.”
Does that suggest that Tweedy is now playing well with others? Or has he finally found the others that are willing to follow his vision. I’m guessing it’s the latter.
In any case, Wilco’s approach on the new album hews more closely to standard song structures than some of the avant-garde-leaning work of the past. Only a handful of songs really stick to your ribs, though, and only one will have you singing it in Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 1, 2009, at 11:07 pm
Hip-hop seems adrift, with no particular faction dominating the pop psyche (or the charts). Bling-rap isn’t resonating as much lately, these being trying times and all. The current landscape is perfect for a multi-facted, thinking artist such as Mos Def, whose fourth studio album, The Ecstatic, continues his impressive body of musical work.
The 35-year-old Brooklyn native — who has, perhaps more than any other rapper, made a mark in film, TV and theater — has never had much use for rules. And even though Mos Def is a middling music star, he still approaches his recordings with a decided indie hip-hop aesthetic.
That shows in his choice of producers —Madlib, Preservation, Mr. Flash, J Dilla — who collectively let the rhythm tracks breath, allowing room for Mos Def’s relaxed, conversational flow. Complementing the urban scrapyard of sounds, snippets of found dialogue and arcane samples are various jazz elements like vibes and horns and a handful of Middle Eastern-type chants.
Mos Def, a Muslim, avoids clichéd ’hood themes in favor of utopian ideas (“Revelation”) and commentary about everyday life (“Workers Comp”).
The album has moments of clever irony — like, on the intro the “The Embassy,” where a captain addresses his passengers and describes in detail the guns they have in the cabin. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 1, 2009, at 12:37 pm
The hip-hop bible Vibe magazine, founded by uber-producer Quincy Jones in 1993, has folded. Jones, who sold the publication in 2006 and was unaware of its dire situation, has vowed to bring it back.
Jones said: “[Owner Wicks Media Group] just messed my magazine all up, but I’m gonna get it back. You better believe it, I’m'a take it online because print and all that stuff is over.”
Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 1, 2009, at 10:53 am
Audio Visions South, the Tampa Bay area’s premiere, locally owned, high-end stereo and video store, will throw the second edition of its two-part event called “The Future of Music All Age Access Audio” on Sat., July 25, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The store’s acoustically exquisite listening rooms will buzz with activities.
The gathering will give music lovers a bunch of useful tips on gear, vinyl, accessories and more, and focus on how to maximize your music experience: AVS invites you to bring your digital media, CDs, LPs, iPod and laptop with you. Here are some of the event’s features:
• A Nitty Gritty LP cleaning station will be set up so your albums will be at peak performance levels when you learn to rip them to your computer.
• You will also learn the best way to rip CDs. Once ripped, you can load all your favorite tunes to your iPod and then we’ll help you figure out how to integrate your iTunes library with your in-home Hi-Fi system.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 1, 2009, at 10:16 am
This just in from our pal Woody at Live Nation:
Brad Paisley brings his “American Saturday Night Tour 2009” to the Ford Amphitheatre on Friday, October 16.Dierks Bentley and Jimmy Wayne will round out the bill.
Tickets are $57.75 and $47.75* for Reserved Seats and $29.75* for the Festival Lawn.There is also a Festival Lawn 4-Pack available for $99.00.Tickets will go on sale Saturday, July 11 at 10am exclusively atwww.LiveNation.com, Ford Amphitheatre Box Office or charge by phone 877-598-8698.
It’s just like the old days. Michael Jackson is ruling the charts.
According to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks record sales, Jackson’s solo albums sold 415,000 units last week, mostly in the time between the Friday after his death and Sunday night, when scanning for the week closed. 58 percent of the sales were digital downloads.
Because Jackson’s titles are not eligible for the Billboard 200, they are relegated to the Pop Catalog chart, where he holds the top nine positions. Three of his titles — Number Ones, Thriller and The Essential Michael Jackson — exceeded 100,000 in sales, outpacing Black Eyed Peas The E.N.D. (88,000), which claims No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It’s the first time that a catalog album has outsold the No. 1 on the 200, the survey of current albums. This week, Jackson has done it three times over.
Additionally, Jackson titles hold the first four positions on the Digital Albums chart, and six of the Top 10
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 30, 2009, at 12:35 pm
Uh oh, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is about a month and a half away. Did you remember? If not, it’s probably due to the distinct lack of buzz, seeing as there is no official concert scheduled, although boosters keep adding “as yet” in hopes that original co-producer Michael Lang will manage to put together a show in New York’s Prospect Park.
A handful of mostly lame events are planned for different parts of the country, and a tour called Heroes of Woodstock — featuring Mountain, Jefferson Starship, Tom Constanten (repping Grateful Dead) and others — has 16 dates on the books (none in the Southeast). In all, though, it would seem as if folks have other things on their mind than memorializing the watershed cultural event.
That doesn’t mean it’s a complete wasteland. Sony Music has released a well-thought-out group of reissues called The Woodstock Experience, five two-CD packages pairing a classic 1969 album and a complete Woodstock performance. Sony catalog artists Santana, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Jefferson Airplane and Sly and the Family Stone got the treatment.
Thirty-three acts performed at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair from Aug. 15-18, 1969, including such long-forgotten names as Quill, Sweetwater, Keef Hartley Band and Bert Sommer. (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, The Byrds and a handful of lesser-knowns declined invitations. Jeff Beck, Iron Butterfly and Joni Mitchell canceled.)
Only a handful of the performances have been immortalized, mostly via the 1970 film Woodstock and its soundtrack. And Sony can legitimately boast three of them in this collection: Sly, Santana and Joplin. Winter did not make it into the movie and while Jefferson Airplane were represented with two songs in celluloid, their set has not earned the same historical cachet as the top three.
Let’s have us a closer look at these twofers. I’ve ranked them on their merit as live performances. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 30, 2009, at 8:28 am
According to industry insiders, three Michael Jackson albums — Number Ones, The Essential Michael Jackson and Thriller — each sold 100,000 copies last week. The sales tracking week ended at the close of business on Sunday (June 28) night and will be reported today. That means the bulk of the sales took place in the three days after Jackson’s death.
Those six-figure tallies would’ve put the three discs at Nos. 1, 2 and 3 on the Billboard 200 —slightly ahead of the Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D. — but catalog albums are not eligible for the album sales chart, so Jackson will instead dominate the Pop Catalog survey.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 29, 2009, at 12:31 pm
First Levon Helm survived throat cancer, then, improbably, he started singing again. And then, astonishingly, he returned to form. While his voice is thinner than during his days with The Band — he is 69, after all — Helm still brings the grit, that marvelous blend of Ozark country, blues and gospel.
His first album after recovering, 2007’s Dirt Farmer(Vanguard), was a treasure, an absolutely genuine slice of Americana that won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.
Its followup, Electric Dirt, is another triumph, extending the reach of Farmer while retaining its rustic character. The new disc, released Tuesday, June 30, is not simply a plugged-in extension of its predecessor. Although electric guitars pop up now and again, it’s still largely an acoustic album. The addition of horns on four tracks — two arranged by Allen Toussaint and two by Stephen Bernstein — gives the new one an added dimension, some extra oomph.
The horns get into the act right way with a springy version of the Grateful Dead’s “Tennessee Jed,” which has a decidedly Band-ish feel and kicks off the disc with a great deal of exuberance. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 28, 2009, at 7:48 pm
Billboard reports:
On the table for consideration is a Janet Jackson/Jackson Brothers tribute tour to celebrate the life of Michael Jackson, according to sources.
The proposal is either that the Jacksons fulfill some of Michael’s London shows, or do a U.S. tour where they would perform his hits and theirs with him. Janet would be the star of such a show, substituting for Michael since none of the brothers would be remotely capable of being
the lead performer.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 26, 2009, at 12:55 pm
Two years ago, Jonathan Berlin was in a bad place. He was the lead singer and songwriter for a band called Bernard that had a distribution deal through East/West, a division of Warner Bros. The trio, whose drummer was his longtime collaborator and best friend Jared Bowser, had played 300 shows on tour.
Photo: Ian Witlen
So what exactly was the problem, you might wonder?
“With Bernard, we worked our asses off to make it happen,” Berlin, 25 (at right in photo), says in a phone interview. “As it turned out, it just wasn’t fun. I always loved writing songs, but after we got hooked up with Warner Bros, I started writing and I couldn’t do it. It was like, ‘I’m writing a record for Warner Bros. This has to be good.’ The whole thing wasn’t really awesome.”
Given those circumstances, a lot of artists would’ve continued to flog it, but Berlin decided to walk away. The Bernard split led in part to a four-month rift between him and Bowser, 23.
Berlin decided to rethink this whole music career thing. And he came up with something of a novel solution: He had to basically stop trying. So Berlin retreated to his loft in downtown Jacksonville and started making music for himself.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 25, 2009, at 9:56 pm
Never has so much triumph dissolved into so much tragedy.
From kid star to King of Pop to punchline. And now dead. Michael Jackson was 50 when he died earlier today of a heart attack. A shock — but, then again, when it came to Michael Jackson, nothing was.
Some people will dismiss Jackson’s death as a fitting end to a twisted caricature of a life. They might even get a chuckle out of it. I won’t. I’m hit. This is one of those celebrity deaths that I’ll remember where I was when I heard about it. (As it turned it, it was at Cirque de Soleil; I left soon after.)
I’m upset, more than I guess I thought I’d be. But I’m focusing on memories. I was there, watching, when he wowed the country with his pre-adolescent charm on Ed Sullivan, his skin the color of milk chocolate. I was there, watching, as he turned into a man, still with childlike charisma.
I was there in 1979, in an arena in Honolulu, when he performed with The Jacksons, but the most riveting material was from his new album, Off The Wall. I was there, in front of the TV, when he first did the moonwalk on Motown 25 and folks talked about it for days, months. I was there, a newly minted music critic, giving Thriller all of three stars.
And yes, I was there when he gradually sanded his skin to the color of chalk and remade his nose into a button. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 23, 2009, at 3:44 pm
Six months after she triumphantly joined forces with Jon Bon Jovi on Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” at the Obama inaugural, Bettye LaVette drops this 23-minute digital-only EP, which includes a studio version of the Sam Cooke milestone and five other classics that she’s performed over the years.
The 63-year-old vocalist, whose career was rescued from obscurity by 2005’s I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise (Anti-), breaks songs down to their narrative essence. Her voice is weathered, full of cracks and breaks, kind of like Tina Turner in bad need of a lozenge. It’s a lived-hard voice that, while not adept at soaring melody, is capable of communicating a song’s deeper meaning.
LaVette has the uncanny knack of making you consider anew lyrics that you’ve heard hundreds of times (and perhaps forgotten) . When she sings, on the title track, “I used to go the movies/ And I’d try to go downtown/ Somebody was always there tellin’ me/ ‘Little girl, you cain’t come around,’” stretching the words as a pleading lament, it personalizes the song in a way that I’d not heard before.”
Backed by a piano/bass/drums rhythm section and subtle strings, LaVette rounds out the program with some challenging material, mostly because the songs have been so often rendered and their definitive versions established. She interprets “’Round Midnight,” “God Bless the Child” and “Lush Life” as blues-drenched jazz ballads, her voice pulling ears closer with pregnant pauses and conversational asides.
Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” backed only by percussion, sounds like she’s walking down a city street telling a girlfriend about her romantic woes. The set closes a lighter note, with a strutting version of Jimmy Reed’s “Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 23, 2009, at 12:53 pm
The crowd cheers as a tattooed man with shaggy hair and a British accent belts out Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath tunes. An hour later, a blonde singer tears through a set of Motley Crue classics while his bandmates pound their instruments into submission. An hour after that, a grown man in a schoolboy outfit duck-walks across the stage and his cohort growls from under his cap while AC/DC riffs blast through the speakers.
Is this a dream team concert lineup of rock ‘n’ roll legends? Not quite, but the crowd is enthusiastic and it sounds pretty close to the real thing. In fact, the only part that’s completely unrealistic is the price, since admission to see all the bands ($10) cost less than parking at major rock concerts.
On June 30, three tribute acts performed at Jannus Landing at the Monsters of Mock show while fans sang along to the familiar sights and sounds. It’s not the real thing, but according to Martyn Jenkins, frontman for AC/DC tribute act Highway to Hell (and the evening’s headliners), the next best thing is pretty satisfying in its own right.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 22, 2009, at 4:13 pm
The Killers will play UCF Arena in Orlando on Thursday, October 1.
Tickets are $52.00 for the General Admission Dance Floor, $38.00 for Reserved Lower Bowl Seating and $35.00 for Reserved Upper Bowl seating. They go on sale Saturday, June 27at 10 am at LiveNation.com, charge by phone 877-598-8698 and all TicketMaster outlets.Day of show the price increases to $55.00 for GA Dance Floor, $41.00 for Lower Bowl and $38.00 for Upper Bowl.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 22, 2009, at 1:35 pm
This album looks great on paper:
Legendary organist and Stax Records session mainstay Booker T. joins forces with the Drive-By Truckers, whose Patterson Hood is the son of Muscle Shoals bassist David Hood. Add Neil Young’s lead guitar into the mix, and the result? Gritty instrumental R&B gold, right?
Not really. Potato Hole sounds like a set of 10 rhythm tracks in search of songs — melodies, vocals, that sort of stuff. As a result, while some of the music has a certain scrappy energy, the whole affair ends up being tedious.
Versions of “Hey Ya” and Tom Waits’ “Get Behind the Mule” fare best, mostly because the aggregation has a melody to dig into.
Booker T. is not an improviser, a soloist of any particular skill. (Just listen to the Booker T & the MG’s 1962 hit “Green Onions” — it’s a quick, grabby riff with a good groove, and little else.) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 22, 2009, at 11:45 am
Boz Scaggs performs at Ruth Eckerd Hall Thurs., July 2
To casual music fans, Boz Scaggs is that smooth dude from the ’70s with those disco-ey hits “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle.” They might even know about his 1976 smash album Silk Degrees, which included those tunes as well as “Georgia,” “What Can I Say” and “Harbor Lights.”
Although Scaggs’ days as a major hitmaker ended in the early 1980s — in large part because he took a self-imposed hiatus for most of the decade — he has made estimable music in the 1990s and, especially, this decade. And he’s done so by turning to a familiar riff for recovering rock stars: singing old standards.
That news might cause eyes to roll — especially if you think Rod Stewart — but it would absolutely not apply in the case of Boz Scaggs. His But Beautiful (2003) and last year’s Speak Low are among the best examples of a veteran pop star delving into such old chestnuts as “What’s New?” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Easy Living,” “I’ll Remember April” and “Speak Low.”
He sings the material in a supple, torchy style, burrowing into the lyrics, caressing phrases with his round, throaty tenor. Scaggs has a natural knack for seducing you into these literate, urbane numbers culled from the legendary writers of the American Songbook. Read the rest of this entry »
Entertainment industry trade publication Venues Today announced that Ruth Eckerd Hall ranked #10 in the world in venues having 5,000 seats or less.With that same ranking, Ruth Eckerd Hall is #2 in venues having 2,500 seats or less.
This ranking is based on concert and event gross from April 16 to May 15 2009, with 11 performances during that period.Ruth Eckerd Hall ranked higher than such prestigious venues as the Arie Crown Theater in Chicago, the Bob Carr Performing Arts Center in Orlando and The Balboa Theatre in San Diego, California.Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 22, 2009, at 8:44 am
In the late 1980s, Living Colour broke down the color barrier in rock radio with their hit album Vivid. The all-African-American band’s style of razory metal with tinges of funk and the an avant-garde proved that pigmentation didn’t matter when it came to power chords and thunder beats.
Living Colour broke up circa 91, then reunited in 2000. They have a new studio album, The Chair in the Doorway, set for release on Megaforce Recordson Sept. 15. For those of you who lived through the days when hair metal ruled the rock airwaves, it wasn’t only Nirvana et al that brought down that wretched reign. Living Colour and other bands played a part as well. Here’s the full text of a press release sent out about the new record: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 19, 2009, at 8:43 am
“I got to play with Bruce. That’s my hero.”
Trey Anastasio said that. After Phish jammed with Springsteen at Bonnaroo. The unlikely pairing joined forces for the R&B classic “Mustang Sally” as well as Springsteen’s “Glory Days” and “Bobby Jean.”
Added Phish bassist Mike Gordon, after witnessing Springsteen’s three-hour set at the festival, his first time: “It’s great to know that it’s not all hype or anything, there’s such a solid musician and songsmith standing there, and then to be so nice and such a gentleman at the same time.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 18, 2009, at 10:30 am
Bonnaroo has averaged just under one death per year during its eight year run. Last year there were no fatalities. This year, a body of a man in his 20s was found by the cleaning crew on Tuesday after the festival. The body showed no signs of trauma, and police speculated that the man’s death was either drug-related or from a pre-existing medical condition.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 11, 2009, at 2:13 pm
For its July issue, Spin is pulling out all the stops celebrating the silver anniversary of Prince’s landmark Purple Rain, and count me as among those who are stoked. Spin will have a comprehensive oral history of the album and film. Prince and Morris Day declined to be interviewed, but that’s no surprise.
As a bonus, Spin is offering a free downloadable tribute album, titled Purplish Rain, that features nine bands doing song-for-song covers of the Purple Rain’s tracks. The biggest coup was recruiting Apollonia, the one-time Prince protege who starred in the film, to sing a cover of “When Doves Cry” that she cut with Greg Dulli and his band the Twilight Singers.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 11, 2009, at 1:15 pm
Twitter may be the hottest thing in social networking at the moment, but count NIN mastermind Trent Reznor as a recent convert to the naysayers.
According to Rolling Stone, Reznor “recently contributed a post to the official NIN.com message board in which he confesses his disappointment in the overall negativity of online communities, writing, ‘We’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience..’”
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 10, 2009, at 10:13 am
For nearly an hour last night, the New York Dolls played to type as an aging, reunited rock ‘n’ roll band living off their legacy: solid but not inspired, willing but a little fatigued. Then something kicked in. “Muddy Bones,” from their new album Cause I Sez So, a song pulled from the early Stones playbook, seemed to energize David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain and the other, newer, Dolls. The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd on the floor of the State Theatre picked up on it. (Photo by Tracy May)
For the show’s remaining 40-or-so minutes, the New York Dolls conjured up their rambunctious early-’70s selves, sans the drag attire and the heroin and with far better chops. Extended versions of early tunes “Jet Boy,” “Personality Crisis” and “Trash” — which alternated between the early punk version and the reggae take on Sez So — brought the set to a loud, satisfying crescendo.
(The show’s latter portion was powerful enough that only once did I slip out into the lobby to check on the Magic/Lakers game, and thanks to the Dolls hitting the stage just after 9, I was able to catch the fourth quarter on my couch in front of the 57-inch.) Read the rest of this entry »
For the last dozen or so years, Elvis Costello has switched genres like he was trying on shirts at the outlet mall: orchestral works, New Orleans R&B with Allen Toussaint, stately ballads with Swedish messo-soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter, a writing collaboration with Burt Bacharach and a jazz summit with Bill Frisell. He even managed to squeeze in a bit of rock ‘n’ roll.
While his musical bed-hopping sounds like fun, it has served to render his artistic vision a bit fuzzy. The “what will Costello come up with next?” question started to grow tiresome a few outings ago.
Which brings us to Secret, Profane & Sugarcane — his first for Starbucks’ Hear Music imprint — wherein he calls on producer T Bone Burnett and gets the full-on T Bone treatment. Yup, acoustic guitar, Dobro, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass, banjo, accordion, mountain music arrangements, the tunes configured into contemporary takes old-timey Americana (matched by the CD packaging).
You may recall that Burnett was at the helm for Robert Plant and Allison Krauss’ Raising Sand, a serendipitous convergence of talent that went Grammy wild. Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine you’re one of three brothers four years apart who ride around the country in a van that’s tricked out with a sleeping loft. You stay at campgrounds and cook out most nights. You pull the van over on a whim for a hike or to check out whatever catches your attention, be it the Grand Canyon or a roadside taco stand. Now imagine that most nights you get to turn your instruments up real loud and play your own heavy music in front of people who paid to see you.
That’s touring the Pontiak way, and doesn’t it sound like a pretty good time?
Pontiak @ New World Brewery, Thurs., June 11. $7
Somehow van tours have become synonymous with misery, but the three Carney brothers — drummer Lane, 26, aptly named guitarist Van, 29, and bassist Jennings, 30 — see it more as a chance for nonstop discovery. And fun.
“We get along really well,” says Lain by cell phone while driving the van. “There’s the usual bickering. Any time you get three men in a moving capsule, you might fight over the last four Cheetos. But we get on real well. And we smell pretty good.”
Yesterday afternoon, I put up a post that discussed the fate of Jannus Landing, seeing as the man who runs it, Jack Bodziak, was arrested last week on charges that he failed to pay to the state more than $200,000 in sales tax he collected from customers. Additionally, three concerts were pulled from the venue by outside promoters.
I interviewed several insiders on the local concert scene, who all agreed: It’s highly unlikely that Jannus Landing will close in the near or short term. And concert activity should remain active. Initially, Bodziak did not respond to requests for comment. He has been steadfastly silent with all Bay area media. He did call me a little while ago, and offered a prepared statement. His lawyer had advised him not to talk freely about the tax case or business at Jannus Landing.
A cloud hangs over Jannus Landing. The man who runs the concert courtyard,Jack Bodziak, was arrested last week on charges that he failed to pay to the state more than $200,000 in sales tax he collected from customers.
Since that bombshell dropped, three concerts have been pulled from the Jannus Landing docket: The Hold Steady, Gogol Bordello and Taking Back Sunday.
The question on everyone’s mind: What will become of downtown St. Petersburg’s beloved concert venue? Very few people want to talk about the situation on the record — Bodziak didn’t return phone calls or an e-mail — but I interviewed a few insiders and pieced together an overview of the venue’s plight and possible scenarios for its future.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 3, 2009, at 11:20 am
Last time Miley Cyrus played Tampa Bay it set off a Ticketgate, with moms of young daughters up in arms about being screwed out of the opportunity to buy tickets. Many of them dropped several hundreds of dollars as to not run afoul with their progeny.
Let’s hope there’s not another ticket fiasco this time. Actually, the best thing that could happen is that Miley-mania has calmed down the extent that MILFs aren’t breaking the household budget to take 11-year-old young Brittany to see her heroine.
Here we go:
Miley Cyrus will perform at the St. Pete Times Forum on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 7 p.m.
More important, though:
Tickets for this event go on sale next Saturday, June 13th at 10am only at www.ticketmaster.com/mileycyrus and by Ticketmaster’s charge-by-phone number 800-745-3000. Tickets are priced at $39.50, $59.50, and $79.50. Prices do not include service charges.
We’re getting cranked up for Best of the Bay — yes, already — and this year more than ever we want your input early in the process. We just had a brainstorm meeting to choose award categories for the Readers’ Poll, which we’re expanding this year. We’re in the process of fine-tuning our choices, and we don’t want to miss out on any great ideas.
As usual, we’re going to have a bunch of Readers’ Poll categories in Music. Our list includes some perennials — Best Local Band, Best Concert Venue, Best Singer/Songwriter — and some new ones (Best Jam Band). Here’s your chance to suggest a category you’d like to see. (Best Autoharpist, Best Tuvian Throat Singer, whatever. Maybe even something more sensible.)
We’re finalizing the categories next Tuesday, so the deadline to add suggestions in the Comments section below is Mon., June 8 at 5 p.m.
And just to be perfectly clear: We’re not looking for who you think should win, just the category itself. Thanks!
Rock history is rife with bands whose legendary status is all out of proportion with the amount of tangible success they had in their heyday.
New York Dolls @ State Theatre, Tues., July 9. $25.
There is no better example of this trope than the New York Dolls. They are revered as proto-punks, early players on the lower Manhattan scene that produced The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads et al. Their look fell somewhere between androgynous and full-out drag, and for that they are credited as a major influence on glam-metal.
The Dolls released only two albums during their initial run: 1973’s self-titled LP and the following year’s Too Much Too Soon. Both were critical darlings and commercial stiffs. The band broke up in ’75.
The original Dolls were plagued by abject drug abuse — the late guitarist Johnny Thunders was a classic junkie — and dysfunction, but, according to frontman David Johansen, the main reason the Dolls packed it in was that they were broke and hungry. Read the rest of this entry »
Mainstream America’s embracement of Latin music really took hold in the latter half of the 1950s with the “mambo craze.” Despite its faddish overtones and eventual disintegration into novelty (”Mambo Italiano”), this particular craze inspired some terrific music, none better than Tito Puente’s Dance Mania, which in 2000 was named one of the 25 “most significant albums” of the 20th century by the New York Times.
Puente, a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage, was a brilliant percussionist (especially on timbales), composer and arranger, all of which are on display in this two-CD expanded edition that includes the original album and 1960’s Dance Mania Vol. 2 (both with bonus tracks).
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 26, 2009, at 3:09 pm
Now that the first wave of rock legends has passed that used-to-be retirement age of 65, a new crop of important artists is closing in on 60. Over the last few months, it surprised me to discover just how many prominent rockers were 59. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder, to name a handful.
I got curious if this was a particularly good age for rockers. Rather than telling you how many rock artists are 59 at this very moment, I did a search and unearthed which ones were born in 1950, the height of the post-WWII baby boom. Quite a few, as it turns out. Here’s a chronological list of pop artists born in 1950. A pretty good year. The list is extensive but not all-inclusive:
January 9, 1950, David Johanson (New York Dolls, Buster Poindexter)
January 5, 1950, Chris Stein, (Blondie)
January 21, 1950, Billy Ocean
January 23, 1950, Danny Federici (E Street Band)
January 23, 1950, Pat Simmons (Doobie Brothers)
February 6, 1950, Natalie Cole
February 12, 1950, Steve Hackett (Genesis)
February 20, 1950, Walter Becker (Steely Dan)
March 2, 1950, Karen Carpenter (The Carpenters)
March 4, 1950, Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top)
March 21, 1950, Roger Hodgson (Supertramp)
March 26, 1950, Teddy Pendergrass
March 27, 1950, Tony Banks (Genesis) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 20, 2009, at 5:44 pm
Having proclaimed 1959 “Jazz’s Greatest Year,” Sony Legacy will release three multi-disc, expanded-edition sets marking 50th anniversaries next Tuesday, May 26: Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Charles Mingus’ Ah Um/Mingus Dynastyand Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain. The label stole some of its own thunder by last year releasing the landmark album of ‘59, Miles’ Kind of Blue in several lavish editions.
This troika of diverse albums certainly belongs in any discussion of jazz classics. Personally, I find Sketches of Spain the least satisfying of Miles’ four orchestral collaborations with arranger/conductor Gil Evans. Its neo-classical centerpiece, the 16-and-half-minute “Concierto de Aranjuez (Adagio),” kind of crawls along through atmospheric movement after atmospheric movement.
Overall, the album includes tons of gorgeous horn textures, but never finds much rhythmic traction, and Miles’ trumpet work sounds a bit unfocused outside of a swing setting. An extra disc of outtake does not provide much in the way of revelations.
Brubeck’s Time Out famously explores different rhythm signatures, and includes Brubeck’s signature tune “Take Five.” This disc is not on my list of favorites either, but I admire its chamber-like subtlety, Joe Morello’s simpatico drumming and Paul Desmond arid-toned alto sax. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 19, 2009, at 4:23 pm
He was the bespectacled white kid from the suburbs trying to sit in with musical legends in New Orleans. But instead of getting the cold shoulder, drummer Stanton Moore was welcomed on the bandstand by any number of prominent players. And the crowd dug him, too.
Stanton Moore Trio, Thurs., May 28, 8 p.m., Crowbar, Ybor City. $10.
“To tell you the truth, when I was coming up and they’d let me sit in, the regulars at the bar would be, ‘Listen to the white kid,’” Moore says by cell phone on his way to a recording session in the Crescent City. “They’d be dancing and egging me on. They were real supportive.”
It probably wouldn’t have gone quite so well if young Stanton had sucked. But from an early age, he committed to learning the distinctive, tricky and at times peculiar nuances of the New Orleans drumming style. (See his video demonstrations at the bottom of this post.)
“I had a great guy who taught me the basic rudiments,” Moore says. “But it was a real challenge to go from that to learning from [storied NOLA drummer Johnny Vidacovich] to loosen up. But I was determined. I really worked on how to loosen it up and apply it to my drum set.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 15, 2009, at 12:09 pm
Green Day 21st Century Breakdown
Reprise
It may be a quaint notion in the download era, but I still think of the Album as a distinct artistic statement. Green Day obviously agrees, because 2004’s American Idiot was a rock opera and their new one, 21st Century Breakdown, out today, is a 70-minute, three-part song cycle.
And therein lies the problem. 21st Century Breakdown, as an artistic statement, is ultimately too much of a good thing. Listening to all 18 songs becomes, at some point, burdensome — an exercise in pop-punk overload.
That the disc is essentially a big slab of agitprop set to catchy hooks and big guitars only compounds the problem. As if the title “Know Your Enemy” wasn’t evidence enough, here’s a sample lyric: “Bringing on the fury/ The choir infantry/ Revolt against the honor to obey.”
Angry, alienated sick-and-tired Green Day rail against religion, conformism, complacency, consumerism, media overload, all the usual tropes. Americans are little more than zombies. Did you know, for instance, that according to Green Day, “You’re the victim of the system/ You are your own worst enemy?”
Maybe I’m cranky, maybe I’ve heard it all, but I’m not of a mind to be preached to and berated by Billie Joe Armstrong and his wingmen. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 15, 2009, at 9:04 am
My sleeper concert of the weekend is War, the Southern California band, formed in the late 1960s that blends flowing funk, Latin, Afrobeat and rock into a sound that has held up extremely well over the years. Case in point: Who doesn’t get a little kick in their step when they hear “Low Rider.”
Cuban Club Bandshell on the Patio
This is the hallowed stage where so much Heatwave history has been made — including the mammoth Sun Ra orchestra’s landmark set in the late ’80s. I think of singer/songwriter Chuck Prophet (10:05), a WMNF and Heatwave (this is his fourth appearance) favorite, as making avant-roots music — he injects agreeable amounts of weirdness and wry humor into his grabby tunes.
Also rootsy, but more poppy, is Boston-based Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles(video below) (6:35). Her best stuff reminds me of Joan Jett with the slightest touch of twang. And if her photos are any indication, she’s easy on the eyes. Bluesman Michael Burks (8:10) hails from Little Rock and brings plenty of muscle and a wild hair. The bandshell is bookended by a couple of reggae/ska/Caribbean-style acts from Tampa Bay: Johukames Posse (5:10) and Magadog (11:55), which reconstituted not all that long ago and has greeted with open arms by the locals. —Eric Snider Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 11, 2009, at 10:24 am
As elusive as the concept of African unity may be, Kinobe Herbert is doing his part to realize it. The 25-year-old singer/multi-instrumentalist from Uganda rejects the fragmentation of the continent’s often tradition-bound musical landscape, and instead actively seeks to incorporate influences and instruments from throughout Africa and beyond. Kinobe his band, Soul Beat Africa, play the Cuban Club Cantina Stage at Tropical Heatwave, 9:05 p.m., Saturday.(Video clips below)
“Most people in Uganda know more about America than even countries next door to them in Africa,” Kinobe (pronounced Chi-no-BAY) says by phone from a tour stop in North Carolina. “It’s because that’s what they see on TV. Ugandan education does not teach about other African cultures. And not many of the musicians are into the pan-African thing.”
Uganda is a smallish, landlocked country in east central Africa probably best known to Westerners as the one time killing grounds for dictator Idi Amin, whose brutal regime lasted most of the 1970s. The country has been relatively stable since the mid ’80s, but has not established the musical identity of countries like Nigeria, Kenya and Mali. While Kinobe employs the traditional styles of his homeland, he is by no means a nationalist. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve struck gold. Well actually my friend and colleague Wayne Garcia struck gold and passed it along to me.
It’s a full concert by Stevie Wonder — easily downloadable online — from Jan. 31, 1974 at the Rainbow Theatre in London, recorded after Inner Visions came out, but before Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Allegedly, the show was taped for official release, but scrapped, which gives this bootleg remarkably good sound quality.
It’s easy to hear why the tapes were filed away. Stevie’s set is sloppy, random and unfocused — and that much more interesting for it.
The 23-year-old, in the early stages of a hot streak that made him probably the most important artist of the ’70s, is backed by the three-piece rhythm section of guitarist Michael Sembello, bassist Reggie McBride and drummer Ollie Brown, along with a couple of woman background singers.
Neil Young seems to toss off discs these days like a bad blogger: quick and topical, without much depth or time to think deeper thoughts. That’s a shame, because Young still sounds great, still has a fire in the belly to make hard-grungey music and now has the wisdom of the Old Man that he once wrote so famously about.
Fork in the Road is the latest near-throwaway from Young, a cross between his heavy-handed political genre efforts (Living With War) and the thematic/cinematic concept discs (Greendale). It is ostensibly about his beloved LincVolt, a Lincoln that Young converted to run on electricity. He uses the car as his metaphor for a lot of things that are wrong with the old U S of A, including our addiction to oil. “Fill ’er up/ She’s not the car that she used to be” he intones in “Fuel Line.” Har-har.
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 5, 2009, at 12:49 pm
Three boys travel around the South with their itinerant preacher father and a mother who home-schools them. They sneak in as much secular rock music as they can, learn to play instruments, occasionally back up Dad at the altar.
They write songs. Then they write better songs and, as if from nowhere, land a record deal with a major label, RCA. They call their cousin to join the band as a lead guitarist. They adjourn to Nashville and begin a career that follows a steadily upward trajectory.
It’s the kind of narrative that record companies love — and, near as anyone can tell, it’s pretty much true. Kings of Leon’s first album, 2003’s Youth and Young Manhood, was garage-y and rambunctious, and earned them the sobriquet “the Southern Strokes.”
In the three albums since, KoL has consistently expanded its palette; its current disc, last year’s Only by the Night, is far more stylistic far-reaching, sonically polished and slotted more toward the rock mainstream. The single “Sex on Fire” might be described as Southern U2. Read the rest of this entry »
Green Day will play the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa on Mon., August 3. Tickets go on sale Friday, May 8 at 10 a.m.
Green Day are touring in support of their long-awaited eighth studio album, 21st Century Breakdown, which will be released globally by Reprise Records on Friday, May 15.
Green Day recently performed 21st Century Breakdown in its entirety during a series of club shows for hometown fans in the San Francisco Bay Area. In its review of a show at Oakland’s Fox Theater, Rolling Stone commented that the band, augmented by guitarists Jason White and Jeff Matika and keyboardist Jason Freese, had the “Quadrophenia-like hang of 21st Century Breakdown’s classic rock melodies and lifetime-punk drive down solid” and that the album is “rock opera in which the rock always comes first.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 4, 2009, at 10:42 am
Talk about a homecoming.
Drummer Jonathan Priest visits Tampa bay this weekend, but it’s not just to drop in on Pop and catch up with pals at The Hub. He has three gigs on Friday night and one on Saturday — all of them, thankfully, under the same roof at Yeoman’s Road Pub on Davis Islands.
The big night is Friday (starting at 9 p.m.), when he mans the kit with three bands he helped found or establish in the Bay area: the ska/reggae ensemble Rocksteady@8; Infinite Groove Orchestra, a space-funk jazz outfit; and the marquee event, the reunion of Ghetto Love Sugar, a jam-jazz quartet that burned brightly for less than two years in the early 2000s. Bassist Philip Booth, keyboardist/EFX guy Raulton Reichel and guitarist Joel Lisi round out the unit.
It should be a freewheeling night with lots of movable parts, as the musicians in each of the bands are friends and collaborators. Expect robust jamming. For the capper on Saturday, Priest will join in on the CD Release Party for singer/songwriter Dan Kincaid’s The Walk Within.
Gomez: A New Tide (ATO)
Being a Gomez fan can be lonely. It can also be confounding. The British quintet has never broken through in the States, despite making hooky, dynamic rock music that splits the difference between Britpop and American roots, and boasts one of the best singers in the biz in Ben Ottewell.
His otherworldly voice is husky yet warm, coming at the listener in stacked textures. The perfect delivery system for emotion. To the band’s credit – or detriment, depending on how you see it – Ottewell splits lead vocal duties with Ian Ball, an appealing singer but one with a more conventional tenor.
A New Tide, the band’s sixth studio album since breaking onto the English scene in 1998, sort of carries on, offering neither revelation nor disappointment. But the sorry state of ProTools rock that rules the airwaves these days makes A New Tide sound pretty damn good.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 27, 2009, at 2:35 pm
Prince Lotusflow3r(NPG)
The good news is that Lotusflow3r is the best Prince album since 2004’s Musicology. It’s his most guitar- and rock-oriented in years — perhaps ever — and includes a few songs that deserve consideration for the upper echelon of the Prince canon.
The not-so-good news is that Lotusflow3r is inconsistent and acts as a general reminder that Prince’s genius appears to be a spasmodic proposition. Lotusflow3er, part of a three-CD set sold at retail through an exclusive agreement with Target, is further proof that we’re not likely to get anything like a masterpiece from the mercurial artist again.
Let’s quickly dispense with Lotusflow3r’s sidekicks: Prince’s MPLSound is a collection of mostly brainless dance-funk, only partially redeemed by a couple of seductive soul ballads. Elixer, a Prince-produced disc by the latest of his ingénues, Bria Valente, is destined for the dustbin of R&B divas.
It’s worth noting that the three-disc package costs just $12 at Target, so if Lotusflow3r is the only one worth spending time with, it’s not exactly a rip-off.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 26, 2009, at 10:29 pm
Let’s start with the obvious: James Brown was among the two or three most incendiary performers of the rock ‘n’ roll era. He presaged the likes of Michael Jackson, Prince and all the other brothers with soulful voices and slick dance moves who came after them.
In the 1960s, Brown didn’t cross over to a white audience; the white audience crossed over to him. He achieved widespread commercial success without ever sanitizing, without ever suppressing the essential African-Americanness, of his music.
Yet as much as white folk listened to Brown on the radio, bought his records and watched him on TV, attending his concerts remained a shaky proposition, one that brought out the pervasive fear and distrust of the black inner city — because most of the time that’s where you had to go to see James Brown in concert.
Many a white JB fan walks the earth today having never seen the man on stage in his prime (me included). That ship has sailed, of course, but the loss can be mitigated a little with the release of a three-DVD set titled I Got the Feelin’: James Brown in the ’60s (Shout! Factory).
Actually, the set’s title underplays its value. These DVDs do more than show an extraordinary entertainer on stage, they capture a fascinating slice of American micro-history. Spring of 1968. James Brown’s status as a figure in the black empowerment movement is on the rise. He is not a believer in Dr. Martin Luther King’s policy of passive resistance; neither has he aligned himself with strident black militancy. But he respects and supports both.
Then King gets shot down in Memphis. Riots beset many American cities.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 25, 2009, at 10:17 am
This just in:
New York Dolls Announce May US Tour Dates!
Play the State Theatre on Tues., June 9
Legendary NYC proto-punk glam rockers the NEW YORK DOLLS announce the first dates of the US tour starting in May. The band that kick-started the NYC rock scene with their self-titled debut back in 1973 reunited with producer Todd Rundgren for their May 5 release, Cause I Sez So, on the newly revived Atco imprint.
The album comes roaring out of the gate with a classic Dolls riff on the title track and ends 12 tracks later with “Exorcism of Despair,” an anarchic rocker that’s vintage Dolls. The quintessential NYC band performs a private show on Tuesday, May 5 at the John Varvatos store on Bowery, the site of landmark punk club CBGBs.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 23, 2009, at 9:23 am
A little more than halfway through their set at the St. Pete Times Forum last night, Fleetwood Mac played “Say You Love Me.” A Christine McVie song. She is the only member of the re-assembled (yet again) Fleetwood Mac who opted out — she departed, apparently for good, in 1998 — and to these ears her presence was sorely missed.
Photo: Jamie Ostrand
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham traded verses on “Say You Love Me,” and although it was nice they included the song, this version lacked the airiness of the original pop gem. Buckingham played the brief guitar solo note-for-note, which made the performance seem obligatory.
“Say You Love Me” was also a reminder of all the McVie songs Fleetwood Mac did not play last night. And seeing as Chrissie was always my favorite of the combative quintet, to me the concert was left lacking.
Fleetwood Mac — which also included drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, two sidemen and three female backup singers — ran through a compendium of their mostly impressive songbook, touching on some obscure stuff (“I Know I’m Not Wrong”) but mostly sticking to such recognizable tunes and monster hits as “Dreams,” “The Chain,” “Monday Morning,” “Gypsy,” “Sara,” et al.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 21, 2009, at 4:48 pm
Aerosmith and ZZ Top are scheduled for the Ford Amphitheatre, LiveNation announced today.
The show is on Sat., July 11. Tickets go on sale this Saturday, April 25 at 10 a.m. at LiveNation.com, Ford Amphitheatre Box Office or charge by phone 877-598-8698.
Tickets are Tickets are $175.00, $89.50 and $59.50 for Reserved Seats and $35.00 for the Festival Lawn.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 20, 2009, at 2:52 pm
Allen Toussaint:The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch)
I’ve long been aware of Allen Toussaint as a New Orleans treasure, a prolific songwriter, magic-touch producer and arranger, and solo artist with a rather middling voice. I knew he played piano, but did not know he was such a bad, bad man at the keyboard.
I do now.
The Bright Mississippi, produced by Toussaint’s friend and frequent collaborator Joe Henry, is nothing short of a revelation, an album of instrumentals (save one vocal) that both honors and reinvents a number of songs associated with early New Orleans blues and jazz: Sidney Bechets’ “Egyptian Fantasy,” Jellyroll Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues,” Joe Oliver’s West End Blues,” and traditionals “St. James Infirmary” and “Take a Closer Walk With Thee,” to name a handful.
Toussaint and his dream band — trumpeter Nicholas Payton, clarinetist Don Byron, acoustic guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist David Piltch and drummer Jay Bellerose — play the songs with an expansive ease, rather than employing tightly wound improvisational free-for-alls often referred to as Dixieland. One of the album’s charms, though, is the clattering, march-style drums heard on a number of the full-ensemble pieces (”Singin’ the Blues,” Monk’s “Bright Mississippi”), imbuing them with an antique quality.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 20, 2009, at 11:01 am
The house lights went down, synthesizers swelled and the stage oozed dry-ice smoke. This went on for so long that it seemed Seal and his band had experienced a Spinal Tap moment and taken a wrong turn backstage. But the extended buildup was just indicative of a show last night at Mahaffey Theater that was long on pomp and drama and crescendo — and pretty darn good because of it.
I’m pretty sure it was Seal’s first Tampa Bay show, and an adoring sell-out audience turned out to hang on his every note, every pose, every sly reference to his family (he mentioned his three kids but never wife Heidi Klum). An interesting crowd: Lots of MILFs all done up, fashionista fellas in vests, white trash, even an elderly lady wearing plastic wrap-around sunglasses who insisted on dancing directly in my sight line, if you want to call it dancing.
Seal flexed his star power, even though showmanship doesn’t come naturally to him. He’s not a graceful dancer, yet he moved around the best he could.
People came to hear him sing, and that he did very well, more convincingly and soulfully than on his recordings. Whether it was the early dance single “Killer” with Adamski, the big hits, or any of several songs from his current Soul album of R&B covers (“A Change is Gonna Come,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s World” among them), Seal commanded the material, hewing closely to the recorded versions but breaking out from time to time for Big Moments (like a serpentine a cappella line during “Love’s Divine”).
Backed by a three-piece band (guitar, bass, drums and mountains of computer-triggered synths), Seal paced the show beautifully; “Kiss from a Rose” and “Crazy” came back to back just before encore.
At home before the show, I was hit by a wave of Sunday night lethargy and thought it might be a better idea to stay home and watch the NBA playoffs. I’m glad I got my ass off the couch.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 20, 2009, at 8:35 am
He’s been called introverted, intensely private, interview-shy, even reclusive, yet here is singer/songwriter Ray LaMontagne talking to me by phone from a Cleveland hotel room. I’m asking questions, he’s answering. With pauses. He speaks just above a whisper, a sort of gentle murmur that belies the raspy bite in his singing voice.
LaMontagne, who plays Tampa Theatre on Wed., April 29, attributes much of his social awkwardness to a childhood that was transient and impoverished. His mother, he says, “had a really, really, really, really difficult childhood — horrific, really. She was completely unprepared for life.”
She regularly moved Ray and his sisters to new towns, to Tennessee, Utah, Minnesota, New York, Nebraska, New Hampshire and elsewhere. His father, a musician with a tendency toward violence, left the picture when Ray was very young.
As a result, he was the perpetual new kid, bashful and reluctant. “It was hard,” he says. “I think you just become an observer, always stay on the outside of things. It’s funny how that stuff sticks with you. I don’t like to go to shows ’cause I don’t like crowds. I don’t like festivals. They bring something up. I don’t know exactly what it is, maybe the fact that I’m not the one dancing in the sprinklers with my shirt off. Funny how that stuff stays with you.”
The solitary child did not seek solace and meaning in music. “I was more of a reader,” he says. “I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but we moved so much that we didn’t have a stereo. We didn’t have anything as far as those kinds of possessions go. I was sort of in my own world.”
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 16, 2009, at 8:38 am
If you’re reading this, a music blog, you probably go to quite a few concerts, and you’ve probably developed some strategies that work for you. Nevertheless, for those less experienced, and for those who might need a refresher course, let me pass along some knowledge that I’ve acquired over the decades. You can think of them as rules, or think of them as suggestions.
Certainly there are more than just these that that popped into my head. Please post yours in Comments. Maybe we can come up with a handbook and split millions of dollars in royalties.
Some of these tips are obvious, some not so much. We’ll start with what I consider to be the Concertgoers Platinum Rule:
+ Don’t get wasted and effectively miss the show. Nothing more needs be said, really, but I’m surprised at how often I see this, and not just from kids. I was at a Tom Petty concert in the old Bayfront Center arena in the early 1980s and I saw a young woman passed out with her head inside the front of a speaker. Miss the concert, brutal hangover. And deaf. She shoulda stayed home.
+ This is one of my biggies: Don’t go to a show desperate to hear one song, especially if that song is a a deep album track that was in the background when you first got laid or something. You’ll end up obsessing about the tune, waiting for it, pining for it, and there’s a really, really good chance you won’t hear it. And you’ll miss the show. You’ll blame it on the act. It’s not their fault, it’s yours.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 15, 2009, at 10:57 pm
I’m pretty sure I was a sophomore in college when this happened.
I was sitting in a friend’s room in the dorm on a weekday afternoon when I heard this music from another room. The stereos, dorm stereos at my college at least, were shit, so the sound was faint. But the song captivated me. I tuned out the conversation, stood up, walked out the door, made a left, went down two, maybe three, rooms and turned right.
A medium tempo sort of folk-rock tune was playing on the shitty stereo. “Who is this?” I asked the guy playing it on the shitty stereo. Daryl Hall and John Oates, he told me. “Never heard of ‘em,” I said, and he handed me the LP cover of Abandoned Lunchonette.
“Ahh-oooo, uh-oooo, woo-ooo, it’ll be all right, when the morning comes,” the male tenor sang. It was Daryl Hall.
So began my long love affair with the music of Daryl Hall & John Oates. I followed them through the glam period, through the quasi-psychedelic period, through the quasi-disco period, through the superstar period of the 1980s, which turned into the set-the-drum-machine-so-it-sounds-like-a-baseball-bat-hitting-a-garbage-can period. I followed them through the “you like Hall & Oates?” jibes from my hipper-than-thou acquaintances, insisting that Hall & Oates were merely a pleasure, not a guilty one.
I’ve seen Hall & Oates six, seven, eight times, but I never heard them play “When the Morning Comes,” the song that first seduced me from another room.
They played it last night at Ruth Eckerd Hall. A lump-in-the-throat moment.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 12, 2009, at 3:06 pm
Last night, the Murray Studio Theater at Ruth Eckerd Hall hosted Karla Bonoff, a Ming vase wrapped in 18th century parchment flown in on gossamer wings. And here I thought she was just a singer/songwriter who had some middling success in the 1970s.
Bonoff put on an embarrassing display of petulance in the first of two sets in the intimate black-box space. The sound setup was not to her liking, so the capacity crowd was subjected to her running complaints about the stage monitors and other glitches. Her on-stage partner, singer/multi-instrumentalist Kenny Edwards, got into the act as well — both performers spent the better part of their show looking perplexed and vexed about the technical problems. Bonoff even stopped one song a couple of verses in to chastise the sound man.
Memo to Bonoff and Edwards: It’s a fucking ACOUSTIC SHOW, a couple of acoustic guitars, a couple of mics, a piano and a bass. Stop whining and play!
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 11, 2009, at 12:45 pm
Ruth Eckerd Hall On The Road presents the entertainment for the Summer Concert Series for select Tampa Bay Rays home games. The schedule begins May 30 with the first concert of the series to be announced shortly. The remainder of the concert schedule continues Saturday, June 13 with Grammy Award-winner Ludacris and concludes Saturday, September 5 with the legendary group, The Beach Boys.
The B-52’s
All concerts are free with game ticket and will begin immediately following the baseball games. The following is the schedule:
Saturday, May 30: Tampa Bay Rays vs. Minnesota Twins, 4:10 pm with TBA.
Saturday, June 13: Tampa Bay Rays vs. Washington Nationals, 6:08 pm with Ludacris.
Saturday, June 27: Tampa Bay Rays vs. Florida Marlins, 7:08 pm with Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo.
Saturday, July 11: Tampa Bay Rays vs. Oakland Athletics, 6:08 pm with Smash Mouth.
Saturday, August 1: Tampa Bay Rays vs. Kansas City Royals, 6:08 pm with Daughtry.
Saturday, August 15: Tampa Bay Rays vs. Toronto Blue Jays, 7:08 pm with the B-52’s.
Saturday, August 22: Tampa Bay Rays vs. Texas Rangers, 7:08 pm with Big & Rich.
Saturday, September 5. Tampa Bay Rays vs. Detroit Tigers, 7:08 pm with The Beach Boys.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 10, 2009, at 10:53 am
My men’s league basketball game ran into overtime, so I arrived at the Palladium’s Side Door club just in time for boogie-woogie piano master Bob Seeley to go on break. I was surprised, and pleased, to see a sell-out audience of 150 lingering around the tables, the crowd made up mostly of retirees.
Seeley, based in Detroit, is 80, but doesn’t look it — and he certainly doesn’t play like you might expect an 80-year-old to play. He’s a firebrand with remarkable technique. After doing brisk CD sales at the merch table, and a set by locals Liz Pennock & Dr. Blues, Seeley took to the baby grand and wowed the joint.
Whereas most jazz piano features the player’s right hand, with the left hand laying out chordal accents, boogie-woogie highlights the left hand, which pounds out a steady stream of eighth notes.
Not to say that Seeley’s other paw was sub-bar; he used it to execute some marvelous runs.
Boogie-woogie, played on solo piano like last night, is one of the most exuberant, joyous sounds to emanate from the annals of American music. Seeley sure proved that.
His show-stopper piece was “Mama Don’t Allow,” an old-time number that Seeley used to strut his skills in boogie, ragtime, stride, Charleston, Ellingtonia (”Take the A Train”), Gershwin (”I Got Rhythm”) and more. He blasted through the piece with supreme confidence and good humor.
He’s one of the most gifted contemporary singers in any genre, and although he occasionally goes a little Andrea Bocelli on us, Raul Malo can really bring the swoon with his clear, heart-on-sleeve tenor. The ex-Mavericks frontman, solo since 2001, calls to mind his former band on Lucky One, although it’s less categorically country. He brings tinges of high-lonesome Western, Spanish, swing and classic pop balladry into play.
Malo, who has done a couple of cover records, co-wrote each of the 12 tracks on Lucky One, beginning with the title track, a jaunty charmer with a south-of-the-border air. He breaks out his inner Roy Orbison — not too much of a stretch, seeing as it’s right near the surface — on a few tunes, most notably “Something Tells Me.” He drops a little uptown blues on “Ready For My Lovin’,” finds just the right swagger on the breezily swinging “You Always Win” and hits the Tex-Mex with “Lonely Hearts.”
Malo is most apt to go over the top on ballads, none more so than “Rosalie,” which is bloated on passion and pain. Yeah, Malo’s a country singer, but he’s also Latino — so we’ll give him a pass on that one miscue.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 5, 2009, at 12:06 pm
Various Artists:Covered, A Revolution in Sound: Warner Bros. Records
(Warner Bros.)
To commemorate its golden anniversary, Warner Bros. Records commissioned a dozen artists on its current roster to each perform a favorite tune from the label’s first 50 years. The results, not surprisingly, range from insipid to almost brilliant.
We’ll start with the clunkers: Adam Sandler doing a rote, irony-free version of Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” whiny vocals and all. WTF? Taking Back Sunday’s “You Wreck Me,” another blatant copy that begs the question: Why would anyone ever listen to this version when you can cue up the Tom Petty original? On paper, Avenged Sevenfold’s covering Sabbath’s “Paranoid” would seem to have potential — but the original, while thinner sounding, is so much heavier and more menacing than this stiff, ProTooled remake.
James Otto’s “Into the Mystic,” while pretty faithful to Van Morrison’s, succeeds because of the sheer commitment in Otto’s blue-eye-soul vocal. Michelle Branch doing Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You?” A recipe for disaster? Nope. Branch proves herself a much more formidable singer than I ever gave her credit for.
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 3, 2009, at 12:20 pm
Neko Case: Middle Cyclone (Anti-)
Perhaps in 30 years we’ll look back at Neko Case with the same reverence that we do now with, say, Joni Mitchell — as a true original. Will Case ever carry the same legendary stature? Hard to say, but it seems to me that legends are not as easily made these days.
That’s OK. We have Case right now, 38 years old and at the peak of her powers. Middle Cyclone is a more than worthy follow-up to 2006’s brilliant Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. The new one builds on Case’s heady blend of country noir and airy folk-pop, with oblique song structures stitching together melodies that at first sound a bit unlikely, but quickly ingrain themselves. This is boldly inventive, new-sounding stuff that somehow evokes an antique feeling. Postmodern roots music, a contradiction in terms. All of which equates to something like wisdom.
Case is among the few artists in contemporary pop who is a legitimate poet. Her lyrics are like funhouse riddles left wide open to listener interpretation, yet not so obtuse as to be precious.
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 31, 2009, at 8:54 am
Our guy Woody at Live Nation sent us this fresh info:
Tickets are $253.50, $98.50, $58.50 & $33.50, and go on sale Monday April 6 at 10 a.m. through livenation.com, 877-598-8698 (the toll free Live Nation ticketing phone number), and all TicketMaster outlets.
Long-time U2 Show Director Willie Williams has worked again with architect Mark Fisher (ZooTV, PopMart, Elevation and Vertigo), to create an innovative 360? design which affords an unobstructed view for the audience. U2 360° also marks the first time a band has toured in stadiums with such a unique and original structure (which can be viewed at U2.com).
“U2 has always been at their best when surrounded by their audience, this staging takes a giant leap forward. With 85 percent of the tickets priced at less than $95.00, general admission floor tickets priced at $55.00 and at least 10,000 tickets at every venue priced at the $30.00 price range, we have worked very hard to ensure that U2 fans can purchase a great priced ticket with a guaranteed great view” says U2’s manager Paul McGuinness.
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 30, 2009, at 3:27 pm
Pearl Jam Ten [Deluxe Edition]
Over 18 years and eight studio albums, Pearl Jam has proven itself to be far and away the most durable band to come from the original grunge movement. (Also the best, I would argue.) Nirvana trumps them on mystique and cultural impact, mostly because Kurt Cobain blew his brains out, but Pearl Jam had the courage to experiment, to risk failure, to grow up and shed the voice-of-a-generation pressure, to persevere.
And now for the just desserts: A sprawling reissue program that leads up to their 20th anniversary in 2011, kicked off by an expanded re-release of the band’s mega-hit debut.
Ten [Deluxe Edition] includes the original album, plus another CD showcasing a remix by producer Brendan O’Brien that additionally includes previously unissued bonus tracks. Also part of the package is a DVD of PJ’s 1992 set on MTV Unplugged.
Pearl Jam has made plenty of terrific recorded music during its tenure, but no cluster is as perfect as the first six songs of their debut album, a visceral, revelatory sequence: “Once,” “Even Flow,” “Alive,” “Why Go,” “Black” and “Jeremy.” If Nirvana’s Nevermind told us that hair-band rock was on its last legs, the first half of Ten threw dirt on its grave. The album’s ensuing tracks are solid, but to these ears they represent a noticeable drop-off in songcraft.
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 30, 2009, at 11:07 am
That’s how Flee, music director at the station, headlined an e-mail he sent this morning. He continued:
Doubtful — but it looks like the amount of music is going to be reduced. During our current pledge drive, news and public affairs has been frequently out performing music. Especially vulnerable are the drive time shows (M-F 6-9a and 4-5p).
If you like to hear music in the afternoon, we need to hear from you today (Monday 3/30) between 4 and 6pm. Every pledge is a vote for MUSIC! A $5 pledge is a vote, a $1000 pledge is a vote.
Keep fresh un-boring music alive at 88.5.
Thanks,
Flee
If you can’t call or e-mail in between 4 and 6 today, you can pledge for this time slot on line.
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 30, 2009, at 8:22 am
This concert review was written by CL intern Michelle Stark; photos by Nicole Kibert.
Adding to a slew of sold-out shows across Europe and the United States, British duo the Ting Tings played to a packed Orpheum on Sunday night.
Lead singer Katie White, decked out in sparkly tights and red ankle boots, pounced energetically onto the stage and launched into the band’s first song, “We Walk.” She and her partner, drummer/singer/guitarist Jules De Martino — who was equally fashionable in neon green sunglasses that matched his T-shirt —filled the next hour with lovely vocals and some serious jamming. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 27, 2009, at 11:40 am
Tonight’s Todd Rundgren concert was supposed to be the grand unveiling of the new Capitol Theatre in downtown Clearwater, Ruth Eckerd Hall and the city of Clearwater joined forces to renovate the old Royalty Theatre and turn it into an intimate, 451-seat concert venue — but the overhaul is not sufficiently completed to host a show.
As a result, Rundgren and his four-piece backing band — guitarist Jesse Gress, drummer Prairie Prince, bassist Rachel Haden and keyboardist Kasim Sulton — will perform on a stage set up directly in front of the theater. The reserved-seating configuration will be adpated for outdoors, essentially set up right on Cleveland Street.
Rundgren is touring to support his latest album, Arena, his first patently rock record in many a year, and a pretty heavy one at that.
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 20, 2009, at 8:23 am
Black Lips play Orpheum in Ybor City next Thursday, March 26. Here’s my feature/interview with the band:
“I want other bands like us to become as successful as we are so they can stay as shitty as we are,” says Jared Swilley, bass player for Black Lips, talking on a cell phone as the band rolls out of Omaha in a van.
So why is Swilley standing up for shitty music? You have to understand his definition of such: music that comes from a raw, unfiltered place, that’s not recorded using the latest computer technology, that doesn’t concern itself with whether the vocals and guitars are exactly in tune or the rhythms are perfectly in time.
“I like the human side of music,” he says. “I love imperfections and mistakes. Otherwise the cyborgs win. Look at ‘Louie Louie.’ It was No. 1 hit [actually a No. 2 in 1963] and it was sloppy and had the biggest vocal flub.”
“Louie Louie” would be a fair reference point for the music of Black Lips, an Atlanta quartet that’s been together since the early part of this decade. It sounds like the stuff made in basements and garages by self-taught kids in the 1960s, recorded off-the-cuff with lots of reverb and little regard for squeaky-clean sonics. Black Lips have dubbed their music “flower punk.”
“When me and [guitarist] Cole [Alexander] were pretending to be in a band early on, we listened to The Germs and they couldn’t play their instruments at all,” Swilley says. “When we really started playing guitar, we emulated Link Wray. He had these guitar riffs that were cool and tough and easy to play. We were into the punk stuff, but we were always into the ’60s stuff.”
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 17, 2009, at 9:14 am
This just in from Ruth Eckerd Hall:
It was announced today that due to illness, Willie Nelson has unfortunately postponed his concert in Clearwater at Ruth Eckerd Hall scheduled for tonight at 8 pm. The concert will be rescheduled for October, 2009. The exact show date will be announced soon. Willie regrets any inconvenience to his fans.
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 17, 2009, at 9:04 am
Gonna be bendin’ an elbow, turnin’ a few up for St. Patty’s Day tonight? (Don’t drink the green beer, pleeeze.)
To get yourself in the proper mood, have a look at a couple of videos by THE BEST Irish rock band ever, the standard-bearer, a group not from Boston or Chicago, but Ahhr-land: The Pogues.
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 13, 2009, at 3:50 am
Irma Thomas headlines the Sunday (March 22) portion of the Tampa Bay Blues Fest. Here’s my feature/interview with the Soul Queen of New Orleans Look for it in Wednesday’s CL print edition.(By the way, Irma Thomas is awesome.)
Let’s see, Irma Thomas. Lots of stuff to ask her. The music biz kicked her around but good in her early days, but she forged on to become known as the Soul Queen of New Orleans. At 19, she’d already been married twice and had four children; now, at 68, she has nine great-grandchildren.
So where to start this interview? How about … her funeral.
The Crescent City is big on funerals. We’ve all seen images of raggedy brass bands parading next to the casket while people on the periphery dance, celebrate the fallen and just dig the music. Those folks are called the “second line” and such processions have come to be known as second line funerals.
So I wondered: Does the Soul Queen of New Orleans want a second line funeral?
“Not really,” Irma Thomas says. “If I tell my kids I don’t want it, they’ll make sure it doesn’t happen. I’m not a big second line person.”
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 10, 2009, at 10:12 am
The 15th annual Tampa Bay Blues Fest is around the corner — Fri., March 20 through Sun. March 22 at Vinoy Park on the downtown St. Pete waterfront. Needless to say, it’s a good time. Sunny days, cool evenings, free-blowing beer and hour after hour of hot, quintessentially American music.
Here’s a primer for the event, some quick blurbs about the acts to whet the appetite. Ticket prices range from $30 for a single-day ticket to $350 for a three-day backstage pass. This year also introduces organized after-party jams on Friday and Saturday nights, to be held at Nova 535 in St. Pete. Here are details.
Friday, March 20
12:30 p.m. Robin Rogers The blonde, blue-eyed songstress out of Charlotte, N.C. has quite a bit of that Koko Taylor roar in her.
2:30 p.m. Lurrie Bell The 49-year-old son of the late, legendary Chicago harp player Carey Bell wields a Stratocaster and has a lusty voice somewhat reminiscent of B.B. King.
4:30 p.m. Coco Montoya A one-time protégé of Albert “Iceman” Collins, L.A.-based singer/guitarist Montoya is a familiar figure on the blues festival circuit.
Coco Montoya
6:30 p.m. Curtis Salgado The 55-year-old veteran of the Northwest blues scene has played for a few years in Robert Cray’s band and in 1995 did a short stint as lead singer in Carlos Santana’s band. He sings and plays harmonica.
8:30 p.m. The Fabulous Thunderbirds Singer/harp man Kim Wilson has been the constant over the band’s 35-year history (which has included since-departed guitarists Jimmie Vaughan and Duke Robillard). Having scored a handful of hits in the mid 1980s (“Tuff Enuff,” “Wrap it Up”), the Austin-based quintet soldiers on as a more-than-dependable juke-joint R&B band.
Sat., March 21
11:30 a.m. Teresa James and the Rhythm Tramps Houston-bred, L.A.-based Teresa James brings a kind of Bonnie Raitt/Susan Tedeschi feel to her singing — gritty but feminine. Sexy.
This is full-immersion music — on the part of players and listener alike. Farmers by Nature captures a live performance by three of the most accomplished improvisers to be found anywhere — drummer Cleaver, bassist Parker and pianist Taborn — in a completely extemporaneous setting. The level of interactivity is at a ridiculously sophisticated ebb, each player leading and reacting equally, the trio moving organically from minimalist solo forays to manic, almost violent, crescendos.
There aren’t a lot of pretty notes here, but the music is not the non-stop, high-dudgeon cacophony that informs most free jazz. During a good portion of “The Night,” Taborn fixates on the middle range of his piano, wringing all he can from a limited palette of notes. On the ensuing two pieces, “Cranes” and “Not Unlike Number 10,” he murders his instrument, spewing out fusillades of sound like he’s a deranged octopus.
Very little of Farmers by Nature grooves, but most of it finds a shifting but discernible pulse. A section of “In Trees” features Taborn’s scattershots over something akin to a frenetic bop rhythm. Occasionally, Parker gets a bit enamored with plumbing the sonic possibilities of his acoustic bass and devolves into lone noodling, but soon enough the trio rediscovers its collective momentum and (dis)order is restored.
The trio has no particular destination during the set — and is in no particular hurry to get there. But the immersed listener, with sensibilities geared to this sort of music, will find it a most invigorating ride.
PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES FRIDAY’S LINE-UP PLUS SELECT ACTS PERFORMING SATURDAY & SUNDAY
The 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival — to be held in Chicago’s Union Park Friday, July 17 – Sunday, July 19 — is announcing the first round of band’s to perform at this years festival, as well as a new series that will include Friday’s performances. On Friday, the festival welcomes Yo La Tengo, The Jesus Lizard (first show in Chicago in 11 years!), Tortoise and Built to Spill; Saturday will see performances by The National, Pharoahe Monch, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, while Sunday’s event includes Grizzly Bear, The Walkmen and Vivian Girls!
Yo La Tengo
This year, the Pitchfork Music Festival is mixing things up a bit and putting the set lists in the hands of the fans, under a new series titled “Write the Night: Set Lists By Request.” When someone buys a ticket they will receive a confirmation e-mail that will include a link to a web page where they can vote on which of each band’s songs they’d like to hear during their set — and truly be the ones to “Write the Night.” Voting will begin on March 13 (when tickets go on sale) and will end on June 12.
To recap the 2009 line-up so far:
Friday – “Write the Night: Set Lists by Request”
Built to Spill
The Jesus Lizard
Yo La Tengo
Tortoise
Saturday
The National
Pharoahe Monch
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Rare is the musician who can record an album of avant-garde solo piano, then turn around and write, sing and perform a simple, confectionary pop song called “My Girl My Girl,” which begins with the lines, “Just can’t find one better lookin’/ There ain’t no one that’s got more cookin’.”
Perhaps that’s why more people haven’t heard of Terry Adams. His brand of bold, unrepentant eclecticism does not usually make for a star career. More folks know Adams as the wild man behind the keyboards in the long-beloved and now-defunct cult band NRBQ. That outfit was about as stylistically free-spirited and far-reaching as any that’s fallen under the general rubric of rock ’n’ roll. Adams, who formed the band, and the various musicians who came through it, had an exquisite case of musical ADD.
Terry Adams plays Skipper's March 15
NRBQ used to bounce from honey-coated, post-Beatles pop to jagged jazz a la Thelonious Monk to silly country tunes to jaunty blues. And more, lots more. They weren’t genre slumming, either; the group played everything convincingly, albeit with a healthy dollop of quirkiness. At the height of their powers, the quartet would even take random requests from the audience and perform (sometimes attempt to perform) songs that they had never played together before.
In the five years since NRBQ’s breakup, Adams’ has forged on with a similarly fearless aesthetic. The central characteristic of his music, from its beginnings in the mid 1960s until now, is a sense of wonder, an almost childlike yen for constant discovery. And when he gets there, he shares his delight with the audience. Along the way, he’s shown a knack for making the complex seem carefree and the simple seem somehow profound.
After a half-hour phone conversation with Adams — not to mention several quickie calls to set up an interview — I feel qualified to say that he’s a one-of-a-kind cat, an eccentric (but not strange) fellow not given to linear thinking.
I ask him why he doesn’t use the NRBQ moniker as a branding device — to, at the very least, pull more folks out to his shows. Adams pauses, seeming to genuinely ponder the option. “I didn’t wanna keep draggin’ the name on,” he replies in a slight drawl reminiscent of his native Louisville. “I dunno, maybe I should.”
Tom Staley, an early NRBQ drummer who’s joining the keyboardist for a few Florida dates as a member of the Terry Adams Crazy Trio, has a more pithy take: “He has more integrity than to call something he’s doing NRBQ,” says the St. Pete resident, who also drums for The Vodkanauts. “He knows people would take offense at that.”
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 3, 2009, at 12:13 pm
Prince may not be willing to be a “slave” to record labels, but he is OK to work with Target to exclusively retail his next three CDs. In an innovative marketing move, he’ll offer a three-album bundle for $11.99. Available March 29, the three-fer will include Prince’s guitar-oriented Lotusflow3r and funky-leaning MPLSound, along with Elixir, the debut by his latest protege, Bria Valente.
U2 No Line on the Horizon
Interscope
Four years after “Vertigo” blasted from speakers and iPod commercials — can it really have been that long? — U2 continues to defy the odds. While the ranks of legendary rockers limp along with lame new offerings that suggest they’re all but tapped out (it wouldn’t be polite to name names … but Springsteen comes to mind), U2 unveils its 12th studio album, No Line on the Horizon, which is marked by nothing less than consistent excellence.
While No Line does not include a song quite as incendiary as “Vertigo,” nor quite as soaring as “City of Blinding Lights,” it is, track for track, a superior effort to 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
The tunes take a bit longer to insinuate themselves, in part because U2 is even more infatuated this go-round with long and winding intros. And while sometimes I find myself just wanting them to get on with, there’s always a payoff at the end of the slow build, usually delivered by the Edge, be it with a wave of orchestral guitar textures, a punchy riff or a chord sequence in full chime.
Bono, 48, continues to progress as a vocalist, without showing any degradation of pitch or range. Sometimes it’s a surprising spike into falsetto, or a wordless cry (you can see his head thrown back), or a dialed-down foray into speak-sing, which sets apart the quiet, minimalist closer “Cedars of Lebanon.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 2, 2009, at 12:42 pm
This just in from WMNF:
Loudon Wainwright III is ill with the flu and cannot make the show in St. Petersburg tonight. A make-up show later this month or next month will be set up where we will honor the original tickets.
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 1, 2009, at 11:53 am
Rolling Stone recently did an analysis of the likelihood of certain legendary bands re-forming. Here’s an excerpt:
Band:Led Zeppelin Date last seen: December 10, 2007 in London Why you shouldn’t hold your breath: Frontman Robert Plant said that the band’s surviving members explored a reunion after their one-off tribute to Ahmet Ertegun, but ultimately decided they couldn’t do it without late drummer John Bonham. “We were incomplete, and we’ve been incomplete now for 29 years,” Plant told Absolute Radio.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 27, 2009, at 11:30 am
I guess this is what you do when your highly anticipated album stiffs. In a recently published new interview, Axl Rose said of his former guitar mate Slash, “In a nutshell, personally I consider him a cancer and better removed, avoided — and the less anyone heard of him or his supporters the better.”
Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy, released late last year, underperformed commercially, especially considering the years of hype it generated while in development, and the barrage of pub it enjoyed directly after its release.
Pretty transparent: Axl’s trying to get himself in the new again. Congrats, dude, you succeeded. But it’s doubtul that anyone’s gonna run out and buy Chinese Democracy as a a result.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 23, 2009, at 4:42 pm
Giddy-Up, Helicopter!: Something that Needs Nothing
A surprising warmth pervades Giddy-Up, Helicopter!’s new CD — surprising in light of the quintet’s propensity for shoegaze and general outward aloofness, in light of a vocal approach that favors a matter-of-fact delivery over emoting. “Tiny Moon,” five tracks in, brushes closest to warm ‘n’ fuzzy with its loping rhythm, luxuriant melody and the cozy vocal interplay of male singer Conner and female counterpart Nikki. Then a crescendo — built around a soaring vocal chant and swell of instruments — that’ll raise the hairs on your neck.
Something that Needs Nothing becomes even more gregarious with the ensuing “Cub Jr.,” an uptempo track that rises and falls in intensity, but never stops climbing toward a climax. “Bones” veers into Brit-style dream-pop, with drummer Ryann lending propulsion and bassist M To The D letting her fingers loose during an instrumental break.
Longtime fans of the Tampa Bay band shouldn’t fret, though. While GUH! has embraced some pop and art-rock elements, they haven’t abandoned their stock-in-trade of droning, hypnotic sequences.
The music’s most beguiling aspect is the layered guitar arrangements imagined and executed by Conner and Nikki: intertwined parts that meld ringing long tones with cascading arpeggios, echo-drenched chords, blasts of fuzz and Edge-esque flourishes. One of the band’s signature conceits is to pull back on the reins, delve into a thoughtful, even pensive, guitar interlude, and then re-marshal the energy, gradually revving back into the song structure. These sequences can be considerably more interesting than standard-issue guitar solos.
Something that Needs Nothing does occasionally lapse into numbing repetitiveness, and sometimes the band’s overall remove can come off as just a tad precious, but in the end this 11-song set shows maturity, growth and, probably best of all, artistic ambition.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 20, 2009, at 4:16 pm
U2’s No Line on the Horizon, slated for release March 3, is now streaming in its entirety on the band’s MySpace page. Click on the album cover icon next to the playlist.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 19, 2009, at 10:08 pm
See Stevie Wonder on the Grammys? They had him slumming with the Jonas Brothers, and the dude is enormous, whale-esque — but, y’know, he can still sing.
Coming up is a better opportunity to see the pop/R&B legend on the tube — in a program called “Stevie Wonder In Performance at the White House: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize.”
A press release adds that the program will “showcase an evening of celebration with President and Mrs. Obama at the White House in honor of musician Stevie Wonder’s receipt of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The 60-minute program, to be taped by WETA Washington, D.C., airs Thursday, February 26, 2009, at 8 p.m. ET on PBS stations nationwide.
The concert takes place February 25 and will include performances by Wonder himself and Tony Bennett, Diana Krall, Martina McBride, Esperanza Spalding, Will.i.am, and the gospel duo Mary Mary, among others. President Obama will confer the Gershwin Prize upon Wonder during the event.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 19, 2009, at 11:20 am
To promote the March 3 release of their new CD, No Line on the Horizon, U2 will perform five nights straight on The Late Showwith David Letterman starting Monday, March 2. No band has ever had a week-long residency on the program. U2 has yet to provide details about what they plan to perform, but it’s a safe assumption that they’ll mix in Horizon material with their old standards.
From here it looks like a win-win, a coup for both sides.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 18, 2009, at 1:41 pm
You may have heard that Pearl Jam is set to reissue its landmark Ten album on March 24 in four versions. Originally released in 1991, the album was a watershed of the grunge movement that pushed alternative rock into mainstream consciousness.
The band’s MySpace page is featuring an unreleased track, “Brother,” from the sessions.
Pearl Jam’s official website allows you to stream six songs from the reissue. Hear stuff from MTV Unplugged, a live concert and some remixed versions of songs from Ten.
Here’s some scoop on the components of the reissue packages:
Remaster of original Ten album + remix by producer Brendan O’Brien
DVD of previously unreleased 1992 Pearl Jam MTV Unplugged performance with 5.1 surround sound audio remix
LP of the band’s 1992 “Drop in the Park” concert
Replica of Pearl Jam three-song demo cassette with Eddie Vedder’s original vocal dubs
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 13, 2009, at 1:24 pm
At straight-up 3 p.m., the appointed hour, a man on the other end of the line announces himself: “Heyyyyy, it’s Southside!”
And so begins a spirited 40-minute conversation with one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most undervalued artists, Southside Johnny Lyon, who has fronted a horn-heavy R&B band called the Asbury Jukes for more than three decades. After his first troika of LPs, released in the latter ‘70s on Columbia, fell short of commercial expectations — especially in light of the concurrent rise of his Jersey shore compadre Bruce Springsteen — Southside and company focused mostly on touring.
They don’t do the road-dog slog of the old days, when 250 dates a year was the norm, but the Jukes still cover plenty of turf. And they try their level best not to let performing get stale. “I’ve never wanted to just go out and play the songs,” Southside says. “I need to find that nugget in the middle of the night, where the audience clicks and is really there, and we’re all in that night, in that moment.”
With an eight-piece backing band (including four horns), Southside, 60, shouts and wails and dances and sweats and jokes his way through sets that put a premium on spontaneity — sometimes taken to extremes. “I was drivin’ to a gig one time and I heard ‘Walk Away Renee’ on the radio, the Four Tops version,” Southside recalls. “So on stage that night I just started singing it. [Guitarist] Bobby [Bandiera] started playing it and we did it as a duet. A couple nights later, the drums and bass came in — they’d gone over it a little bit — and we added it to the set; ended up putting it on a record. When it works, it really works — but it doesn’t always work.”
Southside Johnny is a gifted singer, with a natural soul moan, an extra gear that brings out the grit, and a knack for calibrating his voice to fit the song, be it a jazzy ballad, a Stax-styled stomper like “Talk to Me” or Sam Cooke’s good-times anthem “Having a Party.”
For those other than his devoted cult of fans, Southside is perhaps best known as the guy who got left in Springsteen’s dust.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 13, 2009, at 9:12 am
Just yesterday it came out that Madonna was the music artist who made the most money in 2008, nearly a quarter-billion bucks, and now a nude photo of her has prompted an unnamed European to plunk down $37,500 for a photo of her nekkid. The photo session was in 1979 when she was 20. The full-frontal shot previously appeared in Playboy in ‘85.
I looked around online in hopes of presenting you the photograph in question, but no luck. I can just see hundreds of middle-age men rifling through the box of old Playboys in the attic.
Could this shot be from the same photo session? C’mon, Playboy hoarders, help us out.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 11, 2009, at 5:40 pm
Tampa’s (actually Brandon’s) own Damon Fowler’s national debut CD, Sugar Shack, makes its first appearance on the Billboard Blues Chart this week at #12.
This from a release by his record label, San Francisco-based Blind Pig:
Audiences and critics alike are responding to the young guitar phenom’s exciting, soulful blend of Southern rock and swamp blues. In an early review, Billboard called the CD a “notable project” and Fowler a “formidable slide guitar player … his playing throughout the album is deft … and his original material is solid,” while The Virginian-Pilot said “Sugar Shack effectively introduces a major talent” and praised Fowler’s “formidable guitar chops and slide work, versatile tenor voice, and expert command of rustic American music styles.”
If you haven’t seen CL’s multi-media feature on Fowler, click here.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 11, 2009, at 8:38 am
Axl Rose rarely gives interviews, as you may have heard, but when he does, he has a lot to say. Billboard scored a Q&A with the mercurial Guns N’ Roses frontman, and he gives plenty of insight into the making and marketing of Chinese Democracy (including a detailed slam on record companies), and talks freely about other topics.
Here’s a tidbit regarding Slash:
In regards to Slash, I read a desperate fan’s message about, what if one of us were to die and looking back I had the possibility of a reunion now, blah blah blah. And my thoughts are, “Yeah, and while you’re at the show your baby accidentally kicks a candle and burns your house down, killing himself and the rest of your family.”
Give me a fucking break. What’s clear is that one of the two of us will die before a reunion and however sad, ugly or unfortunate anyone views it, it is how it is. Those decisions were made a long time ago and reiterated year after year by one man.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 9, 2009, at 12:27 pm
This might make for a nice road trip in early March. Harvest of Hope, a non-profit organization that provides financial, educational, and service oriented aid to migrant farm workers all over the country, has organized a three-day alternative music festival on the St. John’s County Fairgrounds, a short distance from St. Augustine, Fri.-Sun., March 6-8. The lineup is surprisingly strong and the price is right. ($19.50 for a day pass/$39.50 for a three-day pass).
Here’s a partial list of confirmed acts:
Against Me!, Propagandhi, Girl Talk, The Bouncing Souls, Strike Anywhere, Smoke or Fire, Lucero, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, Mute Math, Bomb the Music Industry, Tim Barry (AVAIL), Fake Problems, Grabass Charlestons, Ninja Gun, O Pioneers!, Whiskey & Co., Underground Railroad to Candyland, Bridge & Tunnel, Tim Version, Paul Baribeau, Young Livers, Brainworms, E.Y.C., Eric Ayotte, Ghost Mice, Virgins (FL), How Dare You, Landmines, Anchor Arms, Monikers, The Takers, Dirty Money, New Bruises, Austin Lucas, Josh Small, Cheap Girls, Failures Union, Hometeam, Tubers, Alligator, Ones to Blame, Averkiou, Hawks and Doves.
It doesn’t appear as if a schedule of performers has been set as yet.
A thousand “primitive” campsites are available, and cost $29.50 for all three days.
Besting the likes of Lil Wayne and Coldplay, the tandem of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss surprisingly won five statuettes at the 51st annual Grammy Awards last night. Their country-esque Raising Sand took Album of the Year and “Please Read the Letter” bagged Record of the Year. Lil Wayne took home three awards. Here’s a more detailed account.
