Not everyone is a Jim Morrison fan

It's fair to say that Jim Morrison is (was) (is???????) one of the more divisive figures in music. For every person who orates on Morrison's artistic genius, there is another person whose views of Morrison are not as positive.

One of the latter writes for the Onion.

Citing the 17-year-old's awkward overuse of Native American imagery and general ability to make long lists of random adjectival phrases, the Jim Morrison Foundation announced Monday the awarding of a $50,000 grant to self-obsessed ... Jerome Caudry of Shullsburg, WI.

Read the whole thing here.

It's a wonder this band didn't play Korea

Entertainers who have a variety of talents have an advantage, because they have more of a chance of earning a paycheck. Take the members of The Relatives, a band from the late 1960s. Their most famous gig was a three-month stint at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Since the lead singer was under 21, she had to enter the casino via the kitchen.

Eventually The Relatives ran its course, and the lead singer moved on to another band that played a just-opened San Francisco hotel.

[T]heir first performance was in a brand new San Francisco hotel that had no sidewalk entrance built yet, so they played to mostly the janitors and whatever hotel guests parked their cars in the underground garage. But she performed so well under such intimidating circumstances that Howard "Speedy" Garfin nicknamed Lynda "Wonder Woman"!

Which was a good thing, because Lynda the lead singer happened to be Lynda Carter, who would become most famous for her television role as Wonder Woman.

But her friend from The Relatives, the drummer in the band, didn't do too badly either. Carter got him a guest shot on the Wonder Woman show, but by that time the drummer was already famous from movie and television appearances. That drummer was Gary Burghoff, most famous for playing the character Radar O'Reilly.

And they probably don't like Jane Fonda movies either

Perhaps you don't remember - I honestly don't remember parts of it - but when large segments of the U.S. population opposed the Vietnam War, some assumed that the opponents were members of the Communist Party. "Hanoi" Jane Fonda, Walter Cronkite, and so forth - you name them, they were all part of Communist Party cells.

So you would assume that after Vietnam fell, all of these so-called Communists would be greeted with warm welcomes by the Vietnamese government. Or, alternatively, the Vietnamese government would have laughed at the stupid Americans that supported them.

Would anyone have considered that the Vietnamese reaction would be - total indifference?

Take Bob Dylan, considered by many as the voice of a generation until Bruce Springsteen and Doug Fieger came along. You would think that he would be a hit in Vietnam. Not exactly:

Days after his historic and headline-generating concert debut in mainland China, Bob Dylan played his first performance in Vietnam on Sunday night, eliciting criticism but drawing only moderate crowds....

Appearing in a performance space that could hold about 8,000 people, Mr. Dylan played to a crowd only half that size...

The New York Times and its source articles identified two possible reasons for the tepid reaction. First, the ticket prices were higher than the average Vietnamese monthly salary. Second, most people in Vietnam don't know who the heck Bob Dylan is, since half of the Vietnamese population is, in the words of the popular phrase, "over 30."

And many people, including Human Rights Watch, Maureen Dowd, and others objected to the fact that the Vietnamese government had approval over Dylan's set list - something that hasn't happened since Ed Sullivan modified Rolling Stones lyrics many decades ago.

I guess Ed Sullivan was a commie too.

If only more band interviews were like this - Emily the Strange interviews Ladytron

[12:15 PDT - MADE A COUPLE OF CORRECTIONS. IF HELEN TRULY WERE A MARINE, HER HAIR WOULD BE REALLY SHORT.]

Interviews can be tedious, or they can be good, or they can be exceptional.

Since the band Ladytron has been around since 1999, I'm sure that the band members have experienced all three types of interviews, over and over again. So I'm sure that an interview that takes a different tack is welcomed.

I have no idea who Emily the Strange is, but she obviously knows a bit about Ladytron, based upon the questions that she asked Helen (Marnie) and Mira (Aroyo).

And oh, what questions.

The interview is undated, but a Ladytron blog shared it on April 10, so it may (or may not) be recent.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

(Emily) If you boost all the RGB and in your cover art, what do you get?

Mira: Owls kissing

Helen: Eagles and lizards.

And here's another one that Mira fans will appreciate:

(Emily) Have you invented any instruments? Tell me about them...

Mira: No but I have invented many many strains of bacteria and quite a few new genes and proteins.

Helen: Not as yet.

Let me share one more:

(Emily) Do you ever use the C-sides of records?

Mira: On the hexagonal records we use the C side for writing notes and the F sides for doodling when I'm bored.

Helen: For secret tracks.

Read the whole interview here or here.

Let me close out with some other like-minded observations about the band and its work. I like the site songmeanings.net, in which various people analyze songs. Several people analyzed the Ladytron song "Seventeen" but two of those analyses stood out.

shoez:

the song is obviously about fishing. if you are too big(21 inches) they can't legally keep you, so they take a picture and throw you back in. if you are the right size(17 inches) they want you. you guys read too much into these songs sometimes.

ephidaboost:

It's about rim sizes. She is saying that 17" rims are great because they are the most functional diameter for most sports cars. She is taking a stab at the homeys who roll around with 21" rims basically saying that they are just for show "taking polaroids" and the "say that they will let you know" part is a reference to how people who drive on oversized rims are less responsible than the general population and when they get interviewed they almost never get jobs. She makes it clear that 21" rims are "no fun" because they have high rotational weight and cause performance issues and low gas mileage. By saying "so come on" she is saying "Come on, guys. Big rims look rediculous and offer no performance advantage. Spend that money on something that will better your lives, like your education or your children."

Here is something that I wrote back in May 2005. Louis Marshall Jones is better known by his stage name "Grandpa Jones."

The only similarities between Louis Marshall Jones and Helen Marnie is that both of them wore makeup.

And I should close by thanking Martin Bryant, whose scrobble of the song "Seventeen" inspired me to dig deeper.



And after reading this Reuben/Mira interview in which they discussed the video, I am forced to conclude that shoez and ephidaboost were both on so something here.

Phil Collins revisited via @Joffi - and I do care

I previously discussed Phil Collins in this blog back on September 11, 2009, in a post that looked at his retirement from drumming due to spinal issues. It also looked at Collins' drumming work as a solo artist, in Genesis, and with Brian Eno.

It's time to revisit Collins again.

My lastfmfeeds room on FriendFeed tracks last.fm scrobbles by various music fans, and it caught this March 28 scrobble by Joffi222 (@Joffi on Twitter, Michael W. May in the real world). The song? "I Don't Care Anymore."

If you want to talk about interesting drum parts, here's a good place to start. When Collins shot the video for this song, he had a whole band behind him as the singer, but in reality Collins himself recorded all of the parts except for the guitar.



The song, incidentally, was written as the result of a breakup of a marriage. No, not the breakup with Orianne Cevey a couple of years ago that cost him millions, but from an earlier marriage to Andrea Bertorelli that ended in 1980. Collins is quoted as saying:

"I had a wife, two children, two dogs, and the next day I didn't have anything. So a lot of these songs were written because I was going through these emotional changes."

Despite this, the UK Biography Channel web site claims that Collins and Bertorelli "remain on friendly terms."

So presumably Berrtorelli doesn't think of Collins as a gorilla.

Bands encouraging covers - OneRepublic and Tamar Kaprelian

I spent one evening on YouTube listening to cover versions of the OneRepublic song "Apologize," including versions by SpongeBob SquarePants and a Chipmunks knockoff, and then I ran across this cover. One difference - this cover was selected by OneRepublic itself as the winner of a contest.



Not only did she win the cover contest, but OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder helped her get a recording contract with Interscope Records. Her first single, "New Day," ended up being used on the TV show The Hills.

More information can be found at Tamar Kaprelian's official website.

Wes Farrell and David Cassidy on...David Cassidy

For those who don't recall the name Wes Farrell, he was a producer and music businessman who, among many other accomplishments, produced the records of the Partridge Family.

Now I realize that some of you may not necessarily recall David Cassidy. He first achieved stratospheric fame as one of the actors, and the lead singer, in said Partridge Family. He has continued his involvement in music ever since, though not necessarily with screaming girls following his every move.

The Partridge Family, like the Monkees before it, was a band that was primarily created for a television show. Unlike their TV predecessors, who eventually exercised some control over their music, the Partridge Family remained firmly under the control of the music folks. Most of the actors in the Partridge Family didn't even appear on the records themselves. Cassidy of course was on the records, and his TV mother and real life stepmother Shirley Jones - a woman with an illustrious musical career of her own - was used as a backup singer.

When singer-to-be Cassidy met producer Farrell, two things were clear - Cassidy had never been in a recording studio before, and Cassidy's personal tastes in music did not necessarily coincide with what Farrell envisioned for the television show. Farrell, in a Tiger Beat interview before the release of the Partridge Family's second LP:

After talking with Paul Witt and Bob Claver, the show’s producers, the next step was deciding what is The Partridge Family? Who is it? Where is it? So we began with David, and it was funny because he was a bit unprepared. Not knowing who or what is a Wes Farrell, we arranged to meet at Paul Witt’s office. David came down with his guitar. He wasn’t really sure he could describe to me what he wanted to do vocally because he was a little hung up on certain kinds of music that weren’t necessarily the type I wanted to record.

Cassidy has subsequently described his musical interests at that time, and this Gary James interview (which occurred decades after the Partridge Family phenomenon) illustrates this:

You know, I had a lot of musical influences in my career, some of which were really juxtaposition to antithesis perhaps of what my public image was from the television show I did. Long before I was on television playing this character and doing music that was designed for that show. I'd seen Hendrix five times. I'd seen B.B. King, Clapton, Albert King, Muddy Waters and all kinds of Rock and heavy Blues influences. So, I was a guy that had a vastly different musical taste than just the stuff that I was performing.

But Cassidy was a professional, worked well with Farrell, mastered the recording process quickly...and became a bubblegum superstar. But Cassidy still felt stifled, and as a result was open to a 1972 Rolling Stone photo shoot which was anything but bubblegum.

Oh well...at least Yoko Ono wasn't in the picture.

Finale

Another post related to my father's death, and to music.

My father was a user of the Finale software package, which is published by MakeMusic, Inc. On February 26 he had a support question on the software, which he submitted via MakeMusic's automated customer support system. As it turns out, this is the ONLY way in which you can contact MakeMusic customer support. On the surface it seems like a reasonable way to do business, since 99.9% of all people who use the Finale software have Internet and e-mail access.

My father traded questions and answers with a MakeMusic representative, but his problem wasn't getting solved despite MakeMusic's attempts. One afternoon in early March my father sent an e-mail to the customer representative. The representative followed up with an e-mail message a few minutes later, and another the next day.

The representative, however, had no way of knowing that my father was unable to answer the messages.

Several days later, MakeMusic sent another e-mail to my father's e-mail address. This was the message that I saw when I accessed my late father's e-mail account. I forwarded this message to my own personal e-mail account and wrote a reply to MakeMusic (following MakeMusic's instructions to paste my reply between the two "Please enter your reply below this line" and "Please enter your reply above this line" messages). My reply basically stated that my father had died, that no one in my family would use the Finale software any longer, that this support ticket could be closed, and that all future correspondence should be directed to my e-mail address, not my father's.

My message was received by MakeMusic's automated customer support system, and I received this reply:

Your recent incident update was from an email address not associated with the incident. In an effort to maintain the security of information, we cannot update the incident using this email address. If you are the incident owner and your email address has changed, or you want to be able to update the incident using this email account, please update your contact information using the following link, then resubmit your update.

Again, there's probably a really good reason for MakeMusic to impose this level of security on customer support communications. You don't want someone sending spurious customer support reports in - for example, you don't want a person from Company X to falsely claim that a support ticket from Competitior Y can be closed.

But it's still disconcerting to find that MakeMusic's automated customer support system allows no exceptions whatsoever.

So I made one. I looked up the name of MakeMusic's COO/CFO and forwarded my original e-mail to her, along with an explanation.

Automated customer support systems are not equipped to handle extraordinary cases, so I am submitting this to you directly.

I'll grant that this case is a very rare case, but it only goes to prove that no single system can be designed that can handle every single possibility.

P.S. If you were a fan of the movies "Ratatouille" and "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," Finale software was used when working on those films' soundtracks.

You can't take it with you

No, I haven't been blogging for the last few weeks. This is due to personal issues - namely, the death of my father.

At one point, I found myself helping to make arrangement in a funeral home. Now funeral home directors are by nature caring, and this director certainly was caring. But in the course of our discussions, certain documents needed to be signed.

One of these documents involved our acknowledgment of our responsibilities to guard against copyright infringement. Basically, if we brought our own music into the funeral, the appropriate royalties would still have to be paid.

Afterward, the contractual clause reminded me of some words written by George Harrison, although Harrison's concerned the government rather than private entities. Perhaps you recall the words:

And my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eye

Two ways to use "The Sun's Gone Dim and the Sky's Turned Black"

If you have a song, with lyrics, you would think that a video presentation of the song would be pretty straightforward.

But compare these two interpretations of a Johann Johannsson song.

Magnus Helgason:



Battle:Los Angeles:

Update on attempts to preserve the Pussycat Dolls brand

Remember the Sugababes? They were the band that had significant membership turnover, so that by 2009 there were no original members in the band, prompting one last.fm biographer to refer to the band as the Sugafakes. That particular edit has long since been removed from the Sugababes' last.fm biography, and life goes on.

Well, another band's last.fm biography has been edited, though not that dramatically.

You'll recall that in June 2010, I blogged about the Pussycat Dolls.

For those who are not familar with this band, they're a bunch of half-naked women who sing and dance. Actually, the Pussycat Dolls band is an extension of the overall Pussycat Dolls brand, which initially started as a dance troupe before any music was released. Now this sounds like it could be a formula for disaster, but they've actually put out some pretty good music.

But, as I noted in my post, there appeared to be two schools of thought concerning the band. On the one hand, band members such as Ashley Roberts were making public statements saying that the band had broken up. Band manager Robin Antin, however, denied that those words were accurate, even after most of the band members had left.

Note the semantic difference. If the Pussycat Dolls had broken up, then they would no longer exist and the brand would be dead. If the Pussycat Dolls merely changed 80% of its membership, then it would still be a going concern, no different than before.

So at the time of my June post, a new set of Pussycat Dolls was performing - lead singer Nicole, and new members Kherington, Rino, Vanessa, and Jamie. I figured that band manager Robin Antin would take steps to get the band into the studio, get some recordings out, and do whatever possible to ensure that people thought of the Pussycat Dolls as a brand, and forgot all about Kimberly, Melody, Jessica, and Ashley, just like most Beatle fans have forgotten about Tommy Moore (who?), who preceded Norman Chapman (who?) as drummer. Chapman was followed by Pete Best as drummer, but Best is primarily remembered by IBM Watson and other trivia maniacs. So if Antin could get an album out with the new Pussycat Dolls, all would be fine.

One night I was scrobbling stuff on last.fm, and I happened to peek at last.fm's Pussycat Dolls page, which included the following title:

The Pussycat Dolls

(2003 – 2010)

The biography included a December 11 edit from last.fm user wadamz:

On December 5 2010, Nicole Scherzinger, the lead singer of The Pussycat Dolls, announced that she is leaving the band to concentrate on her solo career and acting projects. Scherzinger follows the four other members - Kimberly Wyatt, Melody Thornton, Jessica Sutta and Ashley Roberts in exiting the group.

last.fm is not really set up to include citations in biographies, so I had to search for the story. I found a post in The A Music Blog, which referenced a News of the World interview. The interview is now behind a paywall, but Scherzinger reportedly said:

We had our time. Some of the girls left the group. That was out of my hands. I wouldn't want to be in a group with other girls -- we were like a tight family.

So I figured I'd get Robin Antin's side of the story, starting at the Pussycat Dolls' website. The site's news page, however, hasn't been updated since September 2009, and doesn't even mention new members Kherington et al. I did find a mention of the new members on the blog Homorazzi, but somehow I suspect that this wasn't an authorized press release from Antin:

The new line-up consists of a SYTYCD alum, ABDC alum, Girlicious reject and a Laker Girl. Warning girls, you don’t want to piss of the HBIC (Head Bitch In Charge) Nicole or else you might be the new Melody, Kimberly, Jessica or Ashley.

Read more at: http://www.homorazzi.com/article/pussycat-dolls-new-lineup-new-members-kherington-rino-vanessa-curry-jamie-lee-ruiz/#ixzz1EPE7a9ue


Homorazzi lists the Twitter accounts for the new members:






Because we're in the home stretch of the NBA season, I figured that I'd see what former Laker Girl Vanessa Curry was saying about Robin Antin's fabulous band. And I found a tweet in which Curry retweeted Antin:

Oh sugz so precious!RT @robinantinpcd: My little Sugar baby, she's such a Lady! ♥ http://yfrog.com/gzqxuqjj

The tweet goes to a picture of...a dog. I went through several weeks of tweets, and Curry never explicitly mentioned the band at all.

But Antin is keeping up the publicity, with this January 22 tweet about a Dolls performance. It links to a Twitpic, but unfortunately for Antin, someone chose to leave the following comment:

What the F*ck???? OMG They Are NOT PCD

Apparently Antin needs to do a little more work to sell this thing.

Beatles as hacks

I was thinking about the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team one night, and its ability to produce merchandising product.

Now this flies in the face of most of us who think of the Beatles as pure artists supreme, but the fact remains that they got their start by being very talented practitioners of Tin Pan Alley techniques.

Think about it, based upon what we know about the Beatles today. By late 1963, the Beatles and Rory Storm's Hurricanes (and their drummer Richie) had torn both Liverpool and Hamburg apart, playing for hours on end, getting smashed on booze and pills, and having an unknown number of sexual conquests. Lennon had already done the proper thing by becoming a married man so his son would have a father. And what were he and his songwriting partner writing about? What was the subject matter of the song that was about to dominate America?

Holding hands.

Now Lennon and McCartney could have written about Hamburg gangsters or who knows what, but that wouldn't have moved product for Parlophone and Capitol. Songs about holding hands, however, would be bought in mass quantities, so that's what Lennon and McCartney produced.

In short, the two were hacks. Very good hacks, but hacks nonetheless. It would be several years before Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison realized that they could write songs about any dang thing that they pleased. If Harrison had told the Parlophone brass in 1962 that he wanted to write a song about the tax rates in Britain, they would have been laughed out of Abbey Road.

Speaking of Abbey Road, the famous picture inspired a comment thread in Free Republic. And not surprisingly, given the political orientation of Free Republic, the Beatles were not universally admired by all.

I don't hate the Beatles as a group, during their time they were great.

What ticks me off tho is the accolades that have been thrown on the individual artists John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr after the Beatles. Individually they were hacks with nothing noteworthy being produced by themselves but because they were "Beatles", they were still idolized......

I happen to disagree, and in fact think that the reverse is true. Anything that Harrison, or Lennon, or Starr, or McCartney released on their own is often denigrated because the other three are not present. (For this reason, "Ringo" stands out as the best album ever among certain fans.)

But because of my age, and the fact that I was too young to catch the Beatles in their heyday, I personally was able to enjoy the ex-Beatles on their own terms, without immediately comparing it to what had gone before. During the early 1970s, AM radio was defined by the guitar work of George Harrison, songs like "It Don't Come Easy" were enjoyed by all, and that band called Wings was releasing stuff like "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five." Only later did I discover that these guys had all been in a former band, kinda like the Monkees but even more zany.

Now I'll grant that the solo Beatles never set out to do concept albums - unless you consider "Double Fantasy" a concept album, and that of course is a collaboration. But all four of them were clearly able to create some great songs on their own.

In fact, I much prefer Ringo's solo work to his work within the Beatles - "What Goes On" is outstanding, but much of the rest is good at best. "You were in a car crash and you lost your hair" over organ and fiddle? Suitably bizarre, but not something that a hackmaster would use to dominate the charts.

In fact, if the Beatles HAD reunited, I suspect that the best part of the reunion concerts would have been the Beatles playing post-Beatles songs. McCartney playing piano on "Imagine." Lennon taking Eric Idle's lines on "This Song." Or better still, a medley of two songs - McCartney's "Too Many People" and Lennon's response, "How Do You Sleep." Now that would make for riveting stagework as Lennon and Harrison joined guitars for McCartney's attack, followed by wild McCartney bass lines on Lennon's attack.

Why the music industry hates itself, part two (try watching the Grammys TODAY)

Presumably NARAL - whoops, I mean NARAS - wants people to know about their awards and how wonderful all of their music performers are. But they don't make it easy.

As I noted in a post that I shared this morning, the Grammy awards are broadcast live - if you live in the eastern half of the United States. If you live in the western half, NARAS would prefer that you lock yourself away from the Internet for three hours, and THEN watch the Grammy awards on tape delay.

But, as Peter Kafka noted in a post this morning, it gets even more ridiculous.

The official Grammy site, run by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, has plenty of clips, but none from the CBS broadcast itself–it’s all backstage, or red carpet or other footage I don’t care about. CBS.com doesn’t have anything, and neither does TV.com, CBS’s mini-Hulu.

Meanwhile, Google’s YouTube, the place where I really expect to see clips, is doing a very good/frustrating job of keeping the site scrubbed free of amateur uploads. You can find some stuff, but it takes work, and the quality is poor, and I’m pretty sure it’s getting removed quickly after it goes up.

So not only were west coasters such as myself forced to wait three hours to see the Grammy awards - it turns out that was the only time that we could have seen the Grammy awards.

Way to go, NARAS.

So if I wanted to see how this danged egg thing actually played out, I need to rely upon the people who tweeted about it.

At least until NARAS and the RIAA try to shut Twitter down for distributing copyrighted material.

P.S. It's illustrative to compare the entertainment industry with the sports industry. Sure, the leagues put up some roadblocks so that I can't watch a Redskins game any time I want, but at least all (well, most) sporting events are shown live no matter where you live. Can you imagine the furor if the Super Bowl organizers decided to delay the west coast feed for three hours?

And, unlike awards shows, there are certain sporting events that you can see online, for free. As I noted in an Empoprise-BI business blog post last Friday, I could have watched the Lakers basketball game on ESPN3 had I chosen to do so. ESPN3 could have gotten my eyeballs and could have bombarded me with online commercials.

But apparently that's too edgy for NARAS. Maybe Grammy winners Jethro Tull could talk NARAS into it.

Why the music industry hates itself (Grammy tape delays tell you all you need to know)

On Sunday evening, Dave Winer (who is currently residing in New York) tweeted the following):

So much fun to watch west coast people tweeting the grammies three hours late. #not

You see, there are a number of Twitter users on the west coast of the United States, and all of these people (not including me) had to wait three hours to watch the Grammys, even though they took place on the west coast.

This reminded me of something that I wrote several years ago in another context. This mrontemp post, written under my Ontario Emperor pseudonym, has been cited as one of the semi-important documents in the development of hashtagging. No, it's not like I'm Stowe Boyd or Chris Messina or anything like that, but I did contribute an interesting observation to the discussion - what happens if two people are using hashtags to describe an event that occurs at different times? My example was the Rose Parade, and people observing the parade from two different vantage points on the parade route. In my example, I was tweeting about stuff happening at the beginning of the parade route, while Philip Hodgen was tweeting from the end of the parade route. Because hashtagged text is presented in a linear fashion, my tweets and Hodgen's tweets were juxtaposed against each other, giving a false impression of the parade.

In a similar fashion, Sunday night's Grammy tweets, when taken in toto, gave a false impression of the Grammy awards, since things appeared out of order.

And why did that happen? Because The Powers That Be determined that the Grammy awards should not be shown live on the west coast. Theoretically this ensures that they will get the maximum viewing audience on the west coast by having a prime time slot, but the whole thing rests on the assumption that people on the west coast are either (a) unable to figure out how to get on the Internet and find out who won three hours in advance, or (b) disciplined enough to stay away from all Internet feeds, just to make sure that they're surprised when the television shows the announcements of winners that were already announced three hours ago.

This model may have worked in 1971, but it's not going to work in 2011.

This is especially ironic because these are music awards, and much of the music industry is based in the Los Angeles, California area. Granted that the top names in the music industry were actually at the awards, but many of the worker bees who actually do the work in Los Angeles' music industry were unable to see the awards live.

But the music industry believes that it's perfectly fine to keep the awards presentation locked up and make people wait to see it.

Then again, the music industry likes to lock up a lot of stuff and make people wait to hear it, so why should the industry's awards show be any different?

Oh, and by the way, my early 2008 post discussed the tape-delaying of televised events:

This [discussion of two Rose Parade vantage points] is probably a strange example, since most disasters/events occur at the same time for all people (exceptions being parades, and certain televised events which are tape delayed on the West Coast). However, in the odd case in which people are using the same hashtag for events occurring at different times in different locations, how is one to make sense of the mess?

How, indeed?

Another version of "One"

I was working on a post about one Inland Empire and ended up searching for a YouTube video. I couldn't find the buffalo (or bison) (or buffalo), but I found this Bono/Edge/Eno/orchestra version.

Home and Dry

Earlier this week I found myself thinking about Gerry Rafferty songs for no apparent reason, and remembered the old song "Home and Dry." Here's a video of the song, created by hodgepig007.



Then on Wednesday morning, I read the news of his death.

Oh boy.

Before my mind meanderings earlier this week, I had only thought of Rafferty a couple of times in the last few years - when I heard Blacksteel & Badger's "Toxic Jerry,", and when I heard the odd stories about Rafferty's disappearance.

Obviously the song "Home and Dry" (lyrics here) was written decades before Rafferty's more recent troubles, or non-troubles, but at least now Rafferty is at peace.

The Gifford Children's Choir in Racine, Wisconsin presents "A Christmas Trololo"

A brief history - back in March, I wrote about a video performance that appealed to both the Tall Ships (Keith Andrew is a member of that band) and Josh Haley (who used to be one of the ukelele players in the Ffundercats). That performance, which could be found on YouTube and elsewhere, was sung by Soviet-era singer Edward Anatolevich Hill. Although the name of the song is something along the lines of "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home," it is commonly referred to today as the "Trololo" song. See my March post for more extensive details about the song and the singer.

It turns out Andrew and Haley weren't the only musicians who enjoyed the song. If you scroll down to the comments for my post, you'll see a comment from Jack Senzig, who was trying to find an orchestral score of the song. I wrote about Senzig's search in September. Senzig is with the Gifford Children's Choir at Gifford Elementary School in Racine, Wisconsin, and he wanted the orchestral score so that the children's choir could perform the song.

As it turns out, Jack Senzig received responses to his request:

A man named Alexander Kuznetsov from Russia was very helpful in finding a piano vocal score of the piece. Alexander surprised the choir earlier this year by donating a few dollars on our blog. I emailed him a thank-you and asked if he could help find the score. What an amazing world we live in where people who don't know one another are willing to help with out thought of reward! The choir has had many experiences like that in the past 6 months. We are still looking for the orchestral score and for the copyright holder.

Senzig forged ahead, and now you can see the result - "A Christmas Trololo" as performed by the Gifford Children's Choir. Arkady Ostrovsky's song has been married with costumes and children's dancing moves.



Also note the audience participation. As Senzig notes in the Gifford Children's Choir blog, he was very pleased with the result:

What an incredible event! The kids did an amazing job, the audience participation was great, the band played so well, props and solos went as planned. We had three hours to rehearse and record....

Live, this was nothing short of incredible. I think you are going to be treated to an unique entertainment!

However, Senzig's enthusiasm was topped by the comment from one of his readers:

Did everyone remember their lyrics?

So a hearty congratulations to Jack Senzig, Alexander Kutznetov, Donovan Senzig, Jeni Balch, Keri Bieri, The Gifford Children's Choir, members of the Gilmore Middle School Choir, members of the Racine Community Choir, members of the St. Louis Church Choir, students from other schools (Case H.S., Walden III, 21st Century Prepatory School, and Gifford Elementary), Katie McCormick, Angela Janota-Peavler, Ken Norman Kathy Gabbey, Eric Weiss, Russell Skewes, Mike Cobb, Hallie Senzig, Brad Karas, Jeff Eben (the principal!), Santa Claus, Brett Halladay, Lance Peavler, Gary Alvarado, the Gifford PTA, the parents, and Chris Janus.

Now I have to share this with both Keith Andrew and Josh Haley...

What difference does it make? The ease of making some sort of music

One of the wonderful things about music is that it's very easy to create it. Now it's hard to create professional-quality music, but it's very easy to create music in general.

Let me cite an example.

As my friends know, I'll often get in moods in which I listen to a single song over and over. Last weekend, the song in question was "What Difference Does It Make?" by the Smiths. I found a YouTube video of a performance of the song on Top of the Pops, and just listened to the video (embedding disabled by request) again and again.

Then I had to go gas up my car.

So, as I was driving alone to Costco to gas up, you can guess what I was doing in the car.

Yes, I was creating music.

And even though I was facing several handicaps, I was still able to create music.

The first handicap that I faced was that I don't know all of the lyrics to the song "What Difference Does It Make?" In fact, I only know five of the words in the lyrics. (No extra credit if you can guess those five words.) So my vocal performance sounded like this:

What difference does it make?
What difference does it make? Oh oh oh...
Da da da,
Da da da da-da da...

At this point, I encountered the second handicap - I did not have a guitar with me in the car. And even if I had a guitar with me in the car, I was driving and therefore unable to play it. And even if I were parked and had a guitar, my guitar skills are, to put it mildly, deficient. (I can play a C chord, and I could probably pick out the riff to "What Difference Does It Make?" but it would be at a VERY slow speed.

So you can guess what I did next:

Da da da da
Da da-da da da
Da da da da
Da da-da da da...

So, as you can see, it's very easy to create music. And it's even possible to expand on it. When Morrissey sang the chorus, he had a hint of a yodel in it. As a lover of Slim Whitman, I wondered what would happen if that were converted into a full yodel, with an octave jump.

What difference does it ma-AKE...

And obviously I'm not the only one. All sorts of people, with all sorts of musical skills, have a desire to perform a song that they like. In the car on your morning commute, in the shower before your morning commute, or in your cubicle or dorm room with the headphones on, many of us are creating music.

And some people create videos of themselves making music. For example, here's a video of laydjay (Jacqueline Sinclair of All About the Dots on MySpace and Facebook), possibly in someone's apartment, singing the song (unfortunately, without any Slim Whitman touches, although she does some interesting vocals toward the end). I'm not sure who is accompanying her.



Here's a video of a guy who started playing the Smiths' recording of the song, then played along on the lead guitar part.



Here's another video of another guy who did the same thing.



Here's yet another guy who not only videoed himself playing "What Difference Does it Make?" but also played a bunch of other riffs. ("Difference" is about four minutes into the video.) His name's Johnny.



Seriously, this guy Johnny shares some interesting observations about guitar sound and guitar culture. I guess he knows what he's talking about.

New Jersey

I was in one of my "Wanted Dead Or Alive" moods one evening and ended up finding this video in which Jon Bon Jovi sings "It's My Life." But Richie isn't playing the guitar on this performance; instead, some guy name Bruce is playing.



That video serves as a reminder that New Jersey produced both Bon Jovi AND Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Oh, and Frank Sinatra also.

But when you're talking about New Jersey music, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Here are 10 other musicians who have been associated with New Jersey.

Count Basie
David Cassidy
George Clinton
Lesley Gore (see my 2008 post)
Ice-T
Wyclef Jean
Les Paul
Eddie Rabbitt
Patti Smith (see my 2003 post)
Gary Wright

Again, there are many more New Jersey musicians listed here.

Opposing views - people who think that Eddie Van Halen is the best guitarist ever

There are plenty of very good guitarists out there. For example, I have a high regard for the guitar playing of Martin Gore. I believe that Gore's guitar playing (beginning in the late 1980s) is a perfect complement to Depeche Mode's music.

But I wouldn't call Martin Gore the greatest guitarist ever.

In my view, the three greatest guitarists ever, in alphabetical order, are Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Jimmy Page. In my view, these three made their guitars sing, and were the equivalent of an excellent vocalist in that regard.

I do not include Eddie Van Halen in that rarefied company of guitarists. In fact, I don't rate Van Halen as great, or as good. In my view, the ability to play guitar really really fast does not necessarily indicate good music.

However, there are those who disagree with me. Let's start with 330 guitarists surveyed by Roadie Crew Magazine, who ranked Eddie Van Halen as the second best guitarist of all time. Ahead of Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Brian May, Slash, and everyone except for Hendrix.

Of course, any such list is going to have its detractors. Let's look at someone who thinks that Hendrix should not have had the number one spot:

I think Ed should be in the #1 spot. Jimmy droped some jaws but Ed re-invented the guitar.

And another one:

In a century’s time, Edward may very well take over that #1 position. Think about it.

And then there was one person who, while agreeing that Van Halen was only number 2, made his case for Van Halen occupying that position:

There has not been a more exciting guitar player since van halen. Edward is still the king. He is the Michael Jordan of our time on Guitar. Good luck to all the rest who are really cool to listen to…but not nearly as fun and as original as Edward.

But among the thoughtful (and less than thoughtful) comments regarding the greatest guitarist, there were some real groaners. Or some really bad jokers. Take Mark Johnson:

Who the hell is Yngwie Malmsteen? And whys isn’t Elton John on this list?