Since it’s Halloween, just thought I’d remind everyone of 70’s rock band Bloodrock, whose sole contribution to rock history is this nightmarish ditty, D.O.A.:
Edgar Allan Poe is – despite or perhaps because of his proclivity for writing scary stories – one of our most beloved writers. Chief among Poe’s charms for the reader is his ability to grab us with a riveting opening line. As proof of Poe’s rare talent for the stunning opener, here for your Halloween Arts Week pleasure is a sample of great opening lines from the master of terror….From “The Tell Tale Heart”:
“TRUE! – nervous – very, very nervous I am and had been and am; but why will you say I am mad?”
From “The Fall of the House of Usher”:
“DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country ; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.” Full Story »
“… every Beatles song ever recorded is going to be advertising women’s underwear and sausages… It’s one thing you’re dead, but we’re still around! They don’t have any respect for the fact that we wrote and recorded those songs, and it was our lives.” – George Harrison, 1987.
“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.” – Walt Whitman
Saturday it’ll be forty years since the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair began.
To my fellow Boomers, for so many of whom (like me) Woodstock was such an existential moment, Bob Dylan’s question seems relevant: How does it feel?
To younger generations who see Woodstock only through the prism of history and who find the Boomers ‘ fascination with and smugness about this event alternately inscrutable and unbearable, John Sebastian’s explanation seems fitting: It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll.
Here are my stories. Make your own narratives….
August 15, 1969: A couple of friends and I have seen news reports and heard from friends about this fantastic thing happening up in a place called Woodstock, New York. We recruit an older friend (19 – we’re 17) to drive and tell our parents some bullshit about a camping trip. We start to NY about 5 PM with high hopes. Full Story »
Michael Jackson’s death is having a strange resonance for me. The feeling I have is like the sound a spring reverb used to make when you bumped into somebody’s guitar amp.
I haven’t been able to work out for myself what it means yet. Of course it’s still early.
I keep hearing Patrick Star’s voice: there’s this Sponge Bob episode where Patrick cries in despair, “Why does this keep happening!?” And Sponge Bob says in a resigned, measured tone, “I – don’t – know.”
It’s like that, if you know what I mean, which I doubt.
Here’s some random information I’m sorting through:
Today is the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that famously became known as “the day the music died.”
For those not consigned to the generational hell that is Baby Boomerdom, on this day 50 years ago a small plane carrying three important rock stars of their time – Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson – crashed in a snow storm.
All three men died, as did the pilot, a 21 year old with, evidently, about 30 minutes of flying experience.
There has been much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over the years due to this event. Full Story »
The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.
In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess. Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times? Full Story »
Like Lefsetz, I was not into the Motown thing at first. I tolerated The Supremes, but I wasn’t into The Temptations. I wanted boys with guitars and dreams I felt connected to, not guys in tuxes doing silly/funky dance moves. Full Story »
“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”
The response of American literary experts has been to say things like the following (this comes from Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the foundation that offers American literature’s most prestigious prize, the National Book Award):
“Such a comment makes me think that Mr. Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age,” he said.
So – who’s right? Engdahl? Augenbraum? And what constitutes American literature, anyway? Full Story »
Most music historians explain the origins of rock music as the gradual blending of Southern blues (both Mississippi Delta based acoustic style and Chicago electrified) with country/western music as codified by Nashville. This over facile explanation has always seemed insufficient – hence the plethora of “(name your)-rock” divisions within rock music – like “rockabilly” (pictured at left being performed by its foremost practitioner).
This week we talk about blues. And about two giants to whom rock, that most “rebellious” of music, owes just about everything….
Huddie Ledbetter’s catalog reads like the history of both folk and rock (Hey, that would be be “folk-rock,” wouldn’t it?). But no one thinks of Leadbelly, as he’s more commonly known, as anything but a blues man. Full Story »
If you’re about to explore any aspect of American culture, you rarely go wrong by beginning with a Walt Whitman quote. Here he is on the subject of music:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear;
Those of mechanics–each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work;
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat–the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck;
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench–the hatter singing as he stands;
The wood-cutter’s song–the ploughboy’s, on his way in the morning,
or at the noon intermission, or at sundown;
The delicious singing of the mother–or of the young wife at work–or of the girl sewing or washing–Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else;
The day what belongs to the day–At night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs.
In our time (gratuitous Hemingway allusion) you’ve probably heard one pundit or another bemoaning the conspicuous absence of music as commentary on social/political issues. So why isn’t America singing these days? Answering that question is the aim of this rambling, unscientific stroll thorough the history of American song. Full Story »
The way that the vast majority of people experience pop music (unfortunately – and btw, you should get your lazy asses out to see live music 3-4 times a month at the minimum – that way you can find good local artists and support them and quit complaining about the crappy stuff the major music industry outlets shove at you – which reminds me, still digging that American Idol compilation CD you impulse bought?) is via recordings. Full Story »
Jesse Helms is dead. He is, as somewhere in the ether a greater mind than his may be noting with some glee , consigned to “the dust bin of history.” And I, a native North Carolinian, say with the same sense of satisfaction Montressor had after walling his enemy Fortunato inside the catacombs, “in pace requiescat.”
But I owe Jesse Helms a debt of the literary variety – and today I repay it.
In the autumn of 1966 I was a 14 year old 9th grader. I was besotted with The Beatles and played my guitar at least 3 hours a night. I had been a straight “A” student throughout my academic career, but that was slipping away as I focused on the gospel of John and Paul with the zeal of the true believer. Full Story »
Posted on June 10, 2008 by Jim Booth under music [ Comments: 5 ]
For those of you who’ve fallen behind on your reading about the peccadilloes and peculiarities of musicians, here are a couple of articles (don’t worry – they consist mostly of pictures) to get you up to speed on the all important areas in which our musical heroes excel – having lots of casual sex and making weird faces on stage.
First, from Blender Magazine comes a list of the most oversexed musicians (don’t worry – both Mick Jagger and R Kelly made the cut) And of course we all have some idea who might be #1 in the “having more sex than anyone should” category: Full Story »
Periodically, it seems, to those who now have bought back into the concept of history, humans begin to think that their great works of literature are insufficient. This is not necessarily a bad thing. New literary movements grow out of this perceived insufficiency, and new masterpieces appear that eventually become, for some insufficient – and so new literary movements….
Unfortunately, we humans also seem to have a propensity to look on the great works of art we have and see their “flaws.” This has caused us to make some interesting and even laughable “improvements” to our masterpieces – Moby Dick has had the entire whaling section expurgated for “easier” reading for American students; 18th century stagings of Macbeth had the Thane of Glamis survive and repent his evil ways.
Now it seems that Jane Austen, our most brilliant analyst and most insightful critic of women’s roles in society and the institution of marriage, has been deemed too unromantic.
My son Trevor and I were driving to dinner one night a few weeks ago and he was complaining bitterly about how his band, Doco (pictured at right), is still struggling to get decent shows outside their local area (NC/SC/VA/WV):
“We’re not metal, we’re not emo, we’re not punk, we’re not hip hop, we’re not roots rock, we’re not power pop, we’re not jam band, we’re not any single genre. We’ve been trying to make something new, and that’s costing us money. Since club owners can’t ’silo’ us into a genre so they can package us with lower level acts, they only give us the odd bookings when they have open nights. We play lots of the ‘rep making’ clubs on Tuesday nights. It fucking sucks. Why do we have to fit a silo to get work? I love playing music. Is it asking too much to want to make my living at it?”
As we watch gas prices surge past $4 per gallon many places in the country and we receive ever more alarming reports of the self-destructive effects of our war on nature, it behooves us to indulge in what John Stuart Mill might have called the consolation of poetry. First, we look at Wordsworth’s warning to us in “The World is too much with Us”:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not…. Full Story »
While Rep. Bruce Douglas of the state legislature makes comments that make all thinking Coloradans squirm, back here in the Old Dominion, we’re hard at work trying to create our own crowds of illiterate peasants, thanks so much for caring.
This in and of itself might not raise your eyebrows, hard hearted/hard headed pragmatists that all you readers are – we’re in tough economic times after all. But, as those classic commercials say, wait – there’s more…. Full Story »
Edgar Allan Poe is – despite or perhaps because of his proclivity for writing scary stories – one of our most beloved writers. Chief among Poe’s charms for the reader is his ability to grab us with a riveting opening line. As proof of Poe’s rare talent for the stunning opener, here for your Halloween Arts Week pleasure is a sample of great opening lines from the master of terror….From “The Tell Tale Heart”:
Art as the Servant of Commerce
Saturday it’ll be forty years since the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair began.
