Opening Arguments: Music
Pretty clearly by the Dixie Chicks was not to reward their musicianship. It was meant as a poke in the eye to President Bush. And the of them by country music radio is about making a statement of values by those people.
Pick your politics, and make your choice.
But it's not about the music anymore, which is too bad. It might be impossible to even think of the Dixie Chicks -- buying their albums or not -- strictly in a musical context.
If they fade away, that will be why, not because of their specific politics.
Posted by Leo Morris on February 14, 2007 at 05:37 AM | In rock singer John Mellencamp's latest musical epistle from the heartland, Americans are vengeful, unforgiving, ignorant of other cultures and led by a president he describes as a rodeo clown.
Maybe he's in training to replace Hoosierland's most famous misanthrope, Kurt Vonnegut, who is talking about himself in the title of his most recent book, 2005's A Man Without a Country.
Most of it is :
In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.
And with good reason.
In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.
Posted by Leo Morris on January 24, 2007 at 05:32 AM | Old fogey alert!
This is the state of today:
Don't expect to see Bob Dylan joining the celebrities on American Idol anytime soon.
One of the show's judges, Simon Cowell, says he has never bought a Dylan record because he bores me to tears.
He also thinks Kelly Clarkson is a young Aretha Franklin, which pretty much confirms the musical intelligence that his Dylan remark hints at.
Posted by Leo Morris on January 15, 2007 at 05:33 AM |
December 20, 2006
The intended sale of the Verizon (aka Deer Creek) Music Center is a much bigger story than the possible loss of one concert venue. It's part of a much bigger shift in music, which in turn is part of the digital revolution we're all going through. The :
Live Nation is caught between a nationwide trend toward shrinking concert promotion profits and the Noblesville area's increasing appeal for new commercial development.
According to an Associated Press report in July 2005, North American concert attendance declined nearly 12 percent in the first half of 2005 despite the first drop in average ticket prices in a decade.
And thanks to low ticket fees from smaller venues and bands' do-it-yourself attitudes, ticket sales at larger venues are continuing to plummet. Mark LaFay, owner of local concert promoter Kulture Entertainment, said large concert promoters are facing more competition than in the past.
Musical acts once needed the clout of major labels to pull off anything larger than regional club tours. Now, because of Web sites such as Purevolume.com and MySpace.
com, bands can book and promote their own national tours with little more than a broadband Internet connection and the will to send thousands of e-mails.
The democratizing effect of the digital revolution is changing music just as it is changing commerce, publishing and a lot of other things, in a phenomenon described by in naming you (i.e.
, us ) person of the year:
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.
It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
This will mean, among other things, that communities looking to infrastructure to spur economic development ought to rethink their assumptions. Places that seem to suit today's needs, such as a concert arena or baseball stadium, might be obsoleted by the changing world.
I look at all the construction that's gone on recently -- the library, the convention center, our own new press building -- and all that's under consideration (school renovations, a downtown stadium and new hotel) and wonder if we'll all look back on it as ill-conceived, millions and millions wasted on buildings just when physical structures are becoming less important.
Posted by Leo Morris on December 20, 2006 at 05:28 AM | I'm taking my birthday day off today, so this will be my only post. Y'all keep the wheels of commerce running till I get back tomorrow.
Had a nice time last night at a trade show run by a little old Jewish man. That is to say, I sat through five hours of drizzling rain in order to hear an hour-and-a-half of music from the master at the Bob Dylan concert at Memorial Stadium. We found seats in a row right behind home plate, ordinarily a good spot at a baseball stadium, but a tent was erected there, so we had to lean slightly to the right all night to get a decent view of the stage.
Right in front of us were three 20-something chickie babes who, first thing, lit up cigarettes in defiance of ALL THE RULES, which clearly state that smoking is allowed ONLY downstairs by the restrooms. They also TALKED on their CELL PHONES and chatted to each other INCESSANTLY. The show started at 6, but it was dark by the time Dylan took the stage, so, encouraged by the three bad examples, EVERYBODY AROUND us was smoking before long, I mean BRAZENLY, not even cupping the glowing ends in their hands to avoid detection.
Who says we don't know how to engage in meaningful protest against the establishment in Fort Wayne?
But I digress.
In reading the in the morning paper, I was amused to read the comments by the hard-core Dylan fans, you know the ones, who say he spoke for a generation and all that nonsense:
They endured because, in the words of local folk booker Brad Etter, Dylan is an “American spokesperson.”
“He’s Robert Frost,” he said. “He’s Carl Sandburg. He’s everybody.
”
“His position in American culture: there’s no one better,” Kent Strock, sociology professor at the University of Saint Francis, said. “Baudelaire in the 19th century played a similar role. But (Paul) McCartney?
A pile of (expletive). (John) Lennon had the spirit. But Dylan and Lou Reed are the only ones who can assess the situation and come up with something that says something.
”
Just knew there had to be a sociology professor in there somewhere. Come on, guys, he's neither Robert Frost nor Baudelaire. These days, he's more like Ron Popeil hustling his gadgets on cable TV.
But Dylan hauls his merchandise around in trailers, from one minor league ballpark to another. Bob Dylan is an icon, which means he is a business and doesn't have to do anything but be Bob Dylan to make money. He hasn't quite reached the status of Pablo Picasso, who reportedly paid for restaurant meals by making squiggles on napkins, but he is still a very marketable commodity.
Did you see all that merchandise on the tables (right down from the restrooms, in front of which only a handful of LAW-ABIDING citizens were standing around smoking)? There were an astounding variety of Dylan T-shirts at $30 a pop (you can get a much better deal at , by the way), and there were Cd's and posters and all kinds of memorabilia to stick on your shelves so you can prove to Aunt Rhoda 20 years from now that you were actually there in the presence of the master on that drizzly night in Fort Wayne. And they were so helpful in encouraging those of us determined to leave the concert with no tangible proof but our tickets.
Umbrellas were on the list of items forbidden to be taken into the concert, which seemed a strange exclusion for an outdoor venue on a rainy night. Ah, but if we had umbrellas, we wouldn't have needed to buy those Bob Dylan ponchos for . .
. well, you don't really want to know what THOSE cost.
To move the merchandise, you do need the presence of the icon, so after the appetizers -- three hours of music by three good warm-up acts -- Dylan came out and played, I think, 14 songs from the hundreds he has written.
A few were extended jams, so the whole thing would have filled one double album; wouldn't want to overexpose the product. (You will have seen no footage of Dylan on TV or even still photos of him in the newspapers from the concert; that was not allowed). Of course, even if you play only a tiny fraction of your repertoire each night, that still ends up being having to play the same stuff hundreds or even thousands of times over a lifetime.
That gets old -- can you imagine going to work, day after day, year after year, and doing the same old things in the same old way?
Oops. Sorry.
You probably CAN imagine that. Anyway, a fascinating part of the concert experience was waiting to hear what new treatment he would give songs we had heard many times before. Some, like the straightforward Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, were immediately recognizable.
Others, like Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, sounded like completely new songs. Girl From the North Country was ethereal and delicate, unlike anything I've heard from Dylan before. All Along the Watchtower was much more like Jimi Hendrix's version than Dylan's original -- hey, part of merchandising is recognizability.
(And, in a smart move, that was the song for the obligatory Hey, Bob, please, please, please, come out and do one more encore, rather than the expected Like a Rolling Stone, which occupied the penultimate position.)
Overall? Got my money's worth.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I had to be there, wouldn't have missed it for the world. They were selling postcards of the hanging and, though I didn't go for one of those, I have the tickets to prove I was in the presence of the master on a drizzly Tuesday night in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Dylan never had a good voice, and these days he sounds like Kermit the frog with laryngitis.
But his band really rocks -- most people forget what a good musician he actually is. And his play book, however few titles he plucks from it on a given night, is one of the most insightful journeys available through the last 40 years. I don't think I could count the pivotal moments in my life when there was a Bob Dylan song in the background somewhere.
He never spoke for me, but he spoke to me.
I suspect that Bob Dylan the songwriter and musician and social commentator considers the traveling carnival of Bob Dylan the merchandiser with wry amusement, if not cynical disdain. And, as a fan, I don't mind being one of the exploited masses that get caught up in it.
Music is a business, too, especially for someone at Dylan's level. We should judge it like any other business, not by how much money it makes the business owner, but what it creates of value for those who consume the product. Dylan will leave behind much more than he has taken.
And, hey, Bob, I bet you can find enough words to rhyme with entrepreneur to make a heck of a song.
Posted by Leo Morris on September 6, 2006 at 08:00 AM | I don't care for the politics of either Bruce Springsteen or Pete Seeger, but I've always liked their music, so I was looking forward to Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. But I had to give up at about track 5, and I haven't listened again.
I like my folk songs rough and raw, and this sounded like elevator music. The songs were allegedly done in one take to capture a spontaneous feel, but they surely sounded rehearsed to death. And the 12 musicians sounded like an orchestra -- violins, horns and a grand piano on folk music?
Come on.
Apparently, I'm one of the few people who think it's awful. The 319 customers who reviewed in on amazon.
com gave it out of five. The reviewer who wondered why the best country music of the past ten years is on a Bruce Springsteen record has not been listening to much country music.
Posted by Leo Morris on August 29, 2006 at 07:24 AM | Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, Well, why not?
It ain't worth nothing anyway.
You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them, he added. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like .
.. static.
I think I know what he's getting at. Digital recording is phenomenal -- you can get every tiny little sound. And that's the problem -- there ends up being too much.
Many of the early rock recordings remastered digitally sound just awful, partly because the deficiencies of analog recording hid how awful some of the musicians were. It's like hi-def in video -- is it a better experience now that we can see every little wrinkle in the newscaster's faces?
Creating good art is a selection process -- what to keep in or leave out, what to just hint at.
Posted by Leo Morris on August 23, 2006 at 05:44 AM | Today's reality check. What Paul McCartney thought his life at 64:
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four.
Every summer we can rent a cottage,
In the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera ,Chuck Dave
Yesterday, as the former Beatle celebrated reaching the age he immortalised on the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, he could reflect with satisfaction on a year in which he made an estimated £48.5m from record sales and a tour of the United States - a welcome addition to an accumulated estimated fortune of £825m. He also, of course, retains a decent head of hair.
Posted by Leo Morris on June 19, 2006 at 06:49 AM | The last time I said about Barry Manilow, I was roundly thrashed by members of his international fan club, who will apparently let no slight stand. A woman in England wrote, Children, calm down there is no need to throw your toys out of the pram just because people love the Manilow.
Well, I'm not going to make that mistake again.
I actually think it's a good thing that a suburb in Australia is going to use as a crime-fighter:
Australians sick of the late-night music and revving engines of gangs of boy racers have unveiled a secret weapon - Barry Manilow.
Councillors in Rockdale, a suburb of Sydney, hope that the crooners' ballads will drive away the dozens of young hoons , as boy racers are known, who are making residents' lives a misery.
Loudspeakers will belt out hits such as Mandy, I Write the Songs and Copacabana over the car park where the youths gather nightly to drink, smoke and compare souped-up cars.
Councillors believe Manilow's music is so deeply unfashionable - daggy in Australian slang - that teenagers will flee the area.
We have plenty of hoons in this country, and some of them drive up my street. I can hear the bass lines booming from their cars from 10 blocks away.
Say what you will about all the daggy stuff many of us listen to, it is not used to force one person's taste on another at eardrum-shattering decibel levels.
I can personally attest to the power of Bing Crosby to drive hoons out of a tavern. When I was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, a bunch of us were in a place one night, near the holidays, consuming adult beverages, and one of us discovered White Christmas on the juke box.
We kept feeding quarters into the thing, playing Bing over and over again, collapsing into fits of laughter everytime the song started, until everybody else got sick of it and kicked us out.
The lowest level, by the way, is 30 dB, which is the sound of a whisper or what you might hear in a quiet library. The loudest: a jackhammer, 130 dB; firearms, air raid siren, jet engine, 140 dB; and, of course, rock music played at full blast, 150 dB.
Sounds louder than 80 decibels are considered potentially dangerous.
Posted by Leo Morris on June 6, 2006 at 07:22 AM | Yesterday, we talked about good music -- picking one song from every year you've been alive to come up with a playlist for your life. Today, let's talk about ever.
CNN.com got 5,800 responses to its request to name the worst song of all time and compiled a top-five list (actually, it would be the bottom five, wouldn't it?).
I don't quibble with the awfulness of the songs on the list they came up with:
5. Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks
4. I've Never Been to Me by Charlene
3. You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone
2. Muskrat Love by The Captain and Tenille
and, drumroll, please, voted the absolute worst of all time:
1. You're having My Baby by Paul Anka
As correspondents raved, of Anka's song, How can a person not be annoyed by lyrices like, 'You're a woman in love and I love what it's doing to ya'?
and 'What a lovely way of saying how much you love me' -- if that isn't the most egocenter, solipsistic, revolting line of all time.
They missed what I would pick as the absolute worst of all time, however -- MacArthur Park, written by Jimmy Webb (who actually penned some pretty good songs and should have known better) and sung by Richard Harris. Can there be lyrics any more pretentiously deep and sophomorically symbolic and just outrageously stinko than Someone left the cake out in the rain, and I don't know if I can take it, because it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again ?
You'll have to look hard to find anything more pathetic than people who actually like the song what it means.
Posted by Leo Morris on April 28, 2006 at 06:09 AM | For her 36th birthday, : Name one great pop song for each year of her life. I added a rule of my own, not to choose more than one song by any one artist.
If you’re gong to make a mix tape, you’ve really got to mix it up. For my birthday, here are 37 of’em. We’ll start in 1969 and work up to 2005.
What's interesting to me is not all the choices I'd argue with -- that's part of the fun of a list like this. I know more of songs from the later years than I would have imagined. Just shows how popular culture can seep into you even if you make a decision to turn your back on it.
It probably doesn't hurt that there's such a lack of really new stuff these days, when you've got Johnny Cash covering Depeche Mode and Feist doing an old Bee-Gees song.
Posted by Leo Morris on April 27, 2006 at 06:27 AM |
Only one No. 1
I haven't heard all these guitarists, so I can't comment on the overall quality of this guy's choice for the , but it has some credibility with me because he got No.
1 right (and I wouldn't argue too much about the top 3). No one before or since Jimi Hendrix has gotten closer to pushing the guitar to its full potential; of all the rock stars who died too young, his, before he reached the limits of his talent, if he had any, was the greatest loss. And, luckily for him and all of his fans, studio technology advanced just enough just in time to be able to produce the sounds he heard in his head.
After my first read through the list, I'd probably move Eddie Van Halen down a bit and Carlos Santana up a bit.
Posted by Leo Morris on March 6, 2006 at 05:41 AM |
Ya'll come back now, ya hear?
Happy 80th birthday to the , an American institution with a bigger Indiana connection than you might realize.
Still a lot of good country music out there, even if it has drifted too far from its hillbilly roots and become another part of the corporate music culture. The good news -- a lot of country stars are starting ; maybe that will re-energize the music.
Posted by Leo Morris on November 28, 2005 at 05:20 PM | I thoroughly enjoyed the two-part Bob Dylan documentary on PBS Monday and Tuesday nights, although it seems odd that all the recent Dylanmania focuses on his first few years when he's had a career lasting more than 40 years.
for such '60s wallowing, as post-boomer critic David Greenberg points out in a Slate article:
One part of the answer is that Dylan shares a problem with the 1960s as a whole: Scholarship and popular commentary alike are shaped by the baby boomers who lived through the period and have never quite transcended their own youthful enthusiasms.
(Lots of interesting links in the article, too)
Posted by Leo Morris on September 29, 2005 at 07:42 AM |
Round, round, get around
A piece on THE . Like most pop criticism, it's overthought and overwrought, but it's right that the Beach Boys' importance and Brian Wislon's talent often get overlooked.
And I defy anydody to find better driving-around music.
Posted by Leo Morris on September 6, 2005 at 08:04 AM |
I met the man. Shook his hand
has died.
If you're not a big bluegrass fan, that won't mean much to you. If you are, this is a time for mourning. Clements played all kinds of music on all kinds of albums with many of the best musicians of the last 50 years.
But it was bluegrass that he infused with his genius. He was just the best damn fiddle player around.
He was one of the true giants of the first generation of bluegrass.
Along with Bill Monroe and Jim Jesse (both of whom he played for) and Flatt Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers and a few others, he helped shape an art form that was only created in the middle of the 20th century. And like Earl Scruggs did with the banjo, Clements defined an instrument and how it could sound in a bluegrass ensemble.
The first time I saw Clements at a bluegrass festival, I was in my early 30s, but I acted like a high school kid meeting a rock star.
I had spend uncountable hours listening to several of his albums (especially this one, among his , if you want to give him a try). I wasn't very interested in the band on stage, so I wandered back to the food booths. And there he was, standing at the edge of a picnic table just noodling on the fiddle.
I went up to him and mumbled something about what an honor it was to meet him, and he said something back that I was too hyped up to even hear. I went back to my friends and babbled for the rest of the day about having shook the hand of Vassar Clements, a man who never studied music but just played what he heard, but, Good Lord, how could someone possibly be born with that much music inside him?
They were very embarrassed for me.
That's not the way you act at a bluegrass festival. It's very casual and matter of fact -- tape recorders and video cameras welcome -- with everybody hanging out with everybody else like it was a gigantic family picnic. The famous artist playing on stage during the day is likely to be around a campfire that night, playing songs with all the no-talent boobs who've brought their campers loaded with beat-up guitars and banjos.
You don't go treating people like they were stars or something. They're just folks.
Yeah, I know.
I've stood around with a group and talked to Bill Monroe just like he was an uncle I hadn't seen in a while. I told a joke once that one of the White family (which Ricky Skaggs married into) actually laughed at. One Sunday morning as the assembled multitudes closed a festival with Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
I was one of the 150 or so guitar players banging out three chords.
But still. Vassar.
Clements. Shook his hand. Awesome.
(If you go the page on his Web site, you can find short samples of his music both for Real amd mp3 players. But just go out and buy all the albums you can find with his name somewhere in the credits. There's only 2,000 of them.
)
Posted by Leo Morris on August 17, 2005 at 07:38 PM |
We had joy, we had fun ...
Need a new category for your iPod? How about music that makes you want to go out and kill yourself, which would have to include these songs of all time? The list includes such timeless hits as Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town, Kenny Roger's ode to the paralyzed Vietnam vet so pathetic he can't even work up the nerve to shoot his cheatin' wife; Hurt, the Nine Inch Nails song so eloquently covered by Johnny Cash; DOA by Bloodrock, possibly the creepiest song I've ever heard: and surely the sappiest sad song ever.
Enjoy!
Keywords: Bob Dylan, Country Music, Fort Wayne, Paul Mccartney, My Life, Bill Monroe, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Frost, Jimi Hendrix, Dixie Chicks
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