Even though the music review is a dying art-form, the magic words, “Brian Eno” are usually enough for me to purchase an album…
Turn It To Ten…
Greg Kot writes:
Brian Eno is perhaps best known as producer to the stars (U2, Coldplay, David Bowie, Talking Heads). But as estimable as some of that work has been, quintessential Eno can be found on a long string of less widely celebrated solo and collaborative records dating to the ’70s.
Since playing mad scientist to Bryan Ferry’s brooding night-crawler on the first two Roxy Music albums (still the peak moments in that band’s career), he has gone on to create small masterworks of skewed pop, ambient music and experimental electronica. He’s been especially prolific lately, and “The Ship” (Warp) continues his recent run of creativity, an album that has few direct antecedents in his vast discography and arrives as a late-career landmark.
In his typically thought-provoking liner notes, Eno presents the album as something of a soundtrack to two catastrophic events a century ago: the sinking of the Titanic and World War I. “Humankind seems to teeter between hubris and paranoia,” Eno writes, and “The Ship” captures that anxiety in two extended pieces.
The 21-minute title track is a theater of the mind: sonar blips, harbor bells and human voices weave in and out of a luminous soundscape that evokes an orchestra. Though comparisons might be made to Eno’s placid ambient works, the gently lulling layers of synthesizers give way to something more unstable. Eno uses his voice like another instrument. An excellent if underrated singer, he evokes the rumbling low end of Tuvan throat singers and the droning harmonies of medieval monks. As the mighty “unsinkable” ship goes under, words emerge with greater difficulty, as if the shivering, awe-struck narrator were slipping beneath “wave after wave after wave after wave …”
How is Brian Eno still finding uncharted waters after half a century spent making music? On The Ship, his first solo album in four years, Eno fuses his signature yawning soundscapes and substantive vocal work for the first time. The result is an album that occupies a space somewhere in between the ambient realm Eno helped to define and traditional songcraft. Its two major pieces meander, unmoored from rhythm and narrative, but they also demand your attention.
Of course, it’s not like Eno just holed up in his breakfast nook and jotted down the lyrics making up The Ship in a spare notepad — that’d be a little too simple. Instead, he fed dozens and dozens of texts into a Markov chain generator written by his frequent collaborator Peter Chilvers, many of them orbiting around a few key topics: soldiers’ songs from the First World War, accounts from the sinking of the Titanic, disclaimers inserted at the bottom of emails. The interesting phrases he salvaged from the resulting mess ended up on The Ship, brought to life by Eno’s sonorous voice.
plus a cover of one of my favorite Lou Reed / Velvet Underground songs – the one with a great, echoey unusual guitar solo1
For the sound installation, Mr. Eno assembled the speakers into “columns which look like gravestones from some culture that you haven’t quite heard of yet,” he said. “A mausoleum of some kind or a cemetery, because the music is very morbid.”
The music of “The Ship” is tolling and elegiac, while “Fickle Sun,” with lyrics about the “dismal work” of a soldier’s life, is in constant metamorphosis. Electronic sounds melt into orchestral upheavals and guitar distortion; voices, natural and synthetic, loom from all directions. It’s a rare Eno piece that revolves around contrast rather than homogeneity: “I liked the fact that things happened which you weren’t expecting, and they jutted out at you,” he said.
The piece ends unresolved, followed by an actor’s reciting a poem generated by a computer program over sparse piano notes and, as a soft landing, Mr. Eno’s tranquil, richly harmonized remake of “I’m Set Free,” the Velvet Underground song with a sweetly barbed chorus: “I’m set free to find another illusion.”
Time and mortality haunt “The Ship.” In recent years Mr. Eno has lost friends like Mr. Bowie as well as colleagues and family members. His father-in-law — “a very happy man, a very good man” — who worked as a doctor for the World Health Organization, once said something that stuck with him: “All men die in disappointment.”
The first time I ever heard [The Velvet Underground] was on a John Peel radio show… it was when their first album came out and I thought “This I like! This I want to know about!”. I was having a huge crisis at the time. Am I going to be a painter or am I somehow going to get into music. And I couldn’t play anything so music was the less obvious choice. Then, when I heard The Velvet Underground I thought, “you can do both actually”. It was a big moment for me.
That particular song always resonated with me but it took about 25 years before I thought about the lyrics. “I’m set free, to find a new illusion”. Wow. That’s saying we don’t go from an illusion to reality (the western idea of “Finding The Truth”) but rather we go from one workable solution to another more workable solution.
Subsequently I think we aren’t able and actually don’t particularly care about the truth, whatever that might be. What we care about is having intellectual tools and inventions that work. [Yuval Noah Harari in his book “Sapiens”] discusses that what makes large-scale human societies capable of cohering and co-operating is the stories they share together. Democracy is a story, religion is a story, money is a story. This chimed well with “I’m set free to find a new illusion”. It seems to me what we don’t need now is people that come out waving their hands and claiming they know the Right Way.
You’ve always pushed the boundaries of technology and recording techniques. Did you use any new methods on this album? I’ve been working with Markov chain generators (( from Wikipedia; A Markov chain (discrete-time Markov chain or DTMC[1]), named after Andrey Markov, is a random process that undergoes transitions from one state to another on a state space. It must possess a property that is usually characterized as “memorylessness”: the probability distribution of the next state depends only on the current state and not on the sequence of events that preceded it. This specific kind of “memorylessness” is called the Markov property. Markov chains have many applications as statistical models of real-world processes)) which are statistical randomizers. I was using them to generate text and, in some cases, music as well. Like all varieties of randomizers, what matters crucially is A) what you put in the front end and B) how much you select what comes out of the backend. It’s not magic — they’re tools.
The story that is read by Peter Serafinowicz on “Fickle Sun (ii) The Hour Is Thin” is generated by a Markov chain generator. What I put into the system in the beginning was some dirty songs by First World War soldiers — they used to take old songs and would put their own words to them which were often totally pornographic. I had some of the warnings and terms of conditions that appear at the bottom of emails, where they say “If you have received this email in error…” I like that kind of technical language. Then I had accounts written from the lifeboats by people watching the Titanic sinking. And also part of a book about the blitz over London.
All of that stuff went in and then the statistical generator reconfigures it. It might be mixing a bit from a bawdy song with a very serious account of weather conditions over London in 1941. It churns out tons of stuff. The trick is to go through it and find the bits that surprise you.
Markov chains are employed in algorithmic music composition, particularly in software such as CSound, Max and SuperCollider. In a first-order chain, the states of the system become note or pitch values, and a probability vector for each note is constructed, completing a transition probability matrix (see below). An algorithm is constructed to produce output note values based on the transition matrix weightings, which could be MIDI note values, frequency (Hz), or any other desirable metric.[33]
1st-order matrix Note A C♯ E♭ A 0.1 0.6 0.3 C♯ 0.25 0.05 0.7 E♭ 0.7 0.3 0 2nd-order matrix Notes A D G AA 0.18 0.6 0.22 AD 0.5 0.5 0 AG 0.15 0.75 0.1 DD 0 0 1 DA 0.25 0 0.75 DG 0.9 0.1 0 GG 0.4 0.4 0.2 GA 0.5 0.25 0.25 GD 1 0 0 A second-order Markov chain can be introduced by considering the current state and also the previous state, as indicated in the second table. Higher, nth-order chains tend to “group” particular notes together, while ‘breaking off’ into other patterns and sequences occasionally. These higher-order chains tend to generate results with a sense of phrasal structure, rather than the ‘aimless wandering’ produced by a first-order system.[34]
Markov chains can be used structurally, as in Xenakis’s Analogique A and B.[35] Markov chains are also used in systems which use a Markov model to react interactively to music input.[36]
Usually musical systems need to enforce specific control constraints on the finite-length sequences they generate, but control constraints are not compatible with Markov models, since they induce long-range dependencies that violate the Markov hypothesis of limited memory. In order to overcome this limitation, a new approach has been proposed.[37]
at least on the originally released version – there are alternates, “closet mix”, “mono mix”, live, etc. – though my favorite is the originally released version [↩]
This sucky blog has been a bit moribund recently due to my lack of engagement with the outside world. No strike that, just a long, long winter and my body has made the leap1 from young to not-so-young, and with it, nagging health issues of various kinds that I won’t bore you with. Anyway, to jump start me writing here again, I’ve assigned myself topics based on the day, starting with Music Monday.
An Overstuffed CD Shelf.
I may be one of the last citizens of America who still purchases music CDs on a regular basis. Streaming music is well and good, I don’t participate. I’d rather indulge my nascent horder tendencies, and have my own copies of things, especially since “used” CDs sound identical to “new” CDs 99% of the time. I also have wider, more varied tastes than the streaming algorithms encourage. I’ve only dabbled with Spotify and the Apple Music channels, but an hour of music via Spotify seems artificially constricted to my ear. You can change your musical directions by seeding new stations, but every “next track” is via a linear progression from the preceding song.
When I am the DJ of my own radio station, which truth be told, runs 20 hours a day2 whether or not I’m in the room(s), I queue up 500 or 1,000 songs at a time. If you are listening to Radio Seth3, you should expect to hear deep cuts from Funkadelic followed by Alt-Country maesters The Jayhawks followed by Brahms concertos followed by outtakes from Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti followed by whatever. Or 50 songs about rain, or 24 hours worth of David Bowie or Prince or Merle Haggard. Or albums released in 1985. Or albums released last year. I liberally use randomizing AppleScripts from AppleScript guru Doug Adams to top up my playlists, I change direction on a whim, and of course alter playlists when I have an audience4
CD shelf in need of an alphabetization project…
There was a mythical era in commercial radio when DJs had the freedom to play what they wanted. By the time I was interested in music, this FM free-form radio era seemed to be on its last legs, so I don’t actually know if there were radio stations that played all sorts of music with only the taste of the DJ linking them together, or if that is another bullshit myth perpetuated by aging Baby Boomers. I don’t even care, in my mind, there was such a time, and I want to have my own radio station that plays all the hits as defined by my own idiosyncratic charts.
CDs in need of a re-org…
One last thing, the age of the CD box set has encouraged record labels and musicians to open their vaults, reissues and repackaging are attempts to cash-in, but also mean that much music is available that I’ve never heard before. I’m not one of those who claim “music today doesn’t have the same soul”, I seek out new music from current artists just as much as I seek out classic albums from garage rockers of the mid-1960s or obscure Nigerian funk musicians from the 1970s. I try not to have preconceptions over what I’ll explore, but of course, there is plenty of new and old music I am not interested in. As someone on Reddit said:
People think old music is better than new music because people have already stopped listening to the old music that sucks
I wanted to like this, because, come on, it’s new music by Johnny Marr! Instead, screechy guitars, mixed too loudly. Maybe if there were better vocals, or interesting lyrics, or less bombastic production? But there isn’t, and this is fairly generic Brit-Pop, disposable, forgettable.
Steve Hyden on the legend aspect…
Declaring a man to be a “god-like genius” several months shy of his 5oth birthday implies he has no more worlds left to conquer. It’s been like this for Johnny Marr since before his 25th birthday, when he co-wrote a couple dozen perfect pop songs with Morrissey and then departed for a series of celebrity rocker odd jobs in other people’s bands (including Modest Mouse, the Pretenders, Talking Heads, and Pet Shop Boys). To say Marr ran up the score on his legacy with the Smiths, and has been treading water ever since, would be reductive. But Marr has been playing with house money for as long as many of today’s indie-poppers chasing “Hand in Glove” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” have been alive. Johnny Marr is an institution now.
Andy Hinds review of Foreigner’s oeuvre made me chuckle.
Although punk rock’s furious revolution threatened to overthrow rock’s old guard in 1977, bands like Foreigner came along and proved that there was plenty of room in the marketplace for both the violent, upstart minimalism of punk and the airbrushed slickness of what would be called “arena rock.” Along with Boston, Journey, Heart, and others, Foreigner celebrated professionalism over raw emotion. And, looking back, it’s easy to see why they sold millions; not everyone in the world was pissed off, dissatisfied with the economy, or even necessarily looking for a change. In fact, for most suburban American teens, Foreigner’s immaculate rock sound was the perfect soundtrack for cruising through well-manicured neighborhoods in their Chevy Novas.
I wouldn’t say that Battle Bend off of S. Congress in Austin was exactly well-manicured, it wasn’t really urban grit either. When I was a teenager living at 306 Sheraton Avenue, I had a copy of Foreigner’s Greatest Hits, on cassette tape. Amusingly enough, my friend and next door neighbor did have a car which might have been a Chevy Nova, or similar.
David Bowie adored Kraftwerk, writing the track V-2 Schneider for his 1977 album Heroes (the band would namecheck him back on Trans-Europe Express). African American DJs also found an odd kinship with the Germans. Keen to find a new musical language, they were familiar with the urban sounds Kraftwerk were using; 1978’s The Robots became particularly influential on the dancefloor, and in the burgeoning B-Boy and breakdancing scenes. Afrika Bambaataa fused the melody of Trans-Europe Express and the rhythm of 1981’s Numbers to create Planet Rock, one of hip-hop’s pioneering tracks. Trailblazing electro group Cybotron used a loop from 1977’s Hall of Mirrors; its founder, Juan Atkins, would create techno, and from there came modern dance culture.
Nuggets Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968
I’ve written1 about my love for garage band music, and this compilation previously, but 40 years later, the Nuggets set2 still rocks.
Before he would achieve recognition as the guitarist for Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye wrote reviews and articles for Rolling Stone in its early years and was hired as a freelance talent scout by Elektra Records in 1970. During that period, Elektra president Jac Holzman told Kaye about a record he wanted put out consisting of songs that were either hidden on records or minor hit singles. The result? Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968.
“In a way, it seemed to me that these songs were in a twilight zone,” Kaye tells Spinner, “between what was then the AM format — catchy three-minute singles with a good chorus and a hook — and the more expansive album-oriented music that developed in the ’60s when all these artistic parameters were kind of pushed aside, and a certain sense of possibility came into the music where you could think expansively and imaginatively beyond certain time lengths and song lengths and song constructs. Having lived through it as a teenager, I felt very much connected with it in terms of my own artistic growth and what I could see as the possibilities within music.”
With songs selected by Kaye and released in 1972, Nuggets became a classic garage rock album featuring bands that never achieved long-lasting fame. In marking the record’s 40th anniversary this year, Rhino Records reissued the original set as a single CD (it was previously released as an expanded 4-CD boxed set in 1998).
Two words on the shrink-wrap sticker on “Nuggets II,” a Rhino Records box set, say it all: The collection, four CDs each running more than an hour, contains “no hits.”
In the record industry — heck, even in the world of box sets, which are often filled with filler — this would seem to be apostasy. No hits? Why would anybody want to buy a box set with no hits? You may as well manufacture CD-sized Frisbees.
But there is a method to Rhino’s madness. After all, this box set follows in the tradition of “Nuggets,” four CDs of 1960s American garage band music from the same era, based on the famous 1972 double-LP compiled by Lenny Kaye.
That box set ran the gamut from national hits — the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction,” the Beau Brummels’ “Laugh Laugh” — to regional obscurities such as the Merry-Go-Round’s “Live” and the Sonics’ “Strychnine,” all celebrating the DIY ethic of countless Beatles/Stones wannabes.
It also surprised the heck out of Rhino (a division of AOL Time Warner, as is CNN.com).
“It sold four or five times what I expected,” says the label’s vice president of A&R, Gary Stewart, noting that sales tallied about 45,000 copies. (Sales of 20,000 copies of a box set is considered good.) The popularity of “Nuggets” cemented a decision, made even before “Nuggets” hit the stores, to do a sequel.
But what to focus on? Stewart and his colleagues decided to do anything but more American indie rock.
“We realized, rather than go to the next level of garage rock, there was a whole other world out there,” he says — a world of 1960s rock songs from locales ranging from Great Britain to Iceland, Peru and Czechoslovakia.
And so “Nuggets II” began, a box set that would feature more than 100 songs most Americans had never heard of.
…
What is on “Nuggets II” is still a record collector’s dream. There are bands that were big in their native countries, such as the Move, that never had a U.S. hit. There are bands that featured future stars (the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood in the Birds, Yes’ Steve Howe in Tomorrow) and bands that were obscure even in their native lands.
Best of all are the songs themselves. Sure, there are a couple recognizable tunes — “Friday on My Mind” and “Pictures of Matchstick Men” — but many are classics from Uruguay, the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain that likely would have been lost if not for Stewart and his merry band.
I am just unwrapping my copy of this; I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m already in a better mood…
Fifteen, twenty years ago, it would have been natural to respond to The Lost Tapes not just with astounded applause but with a rather lofty prescription: any group could learn a lot from close, repeated listening. It’s still true, of course, but in 2012 it seems a bit out of touch. In many ways Can – whose name so clearly dates them to a time before the internet search – were not like us, sat here with conflicting histories of everything, isolated by choice and by the new demands of our miserable lives. Living and working together was the point; the strengths of five individuals merged to create something greater, something uncontainable.
…
Can’s spontaneous, co-operative creativity hasn’t been weakened by time or by anything else; the music here sounds somehow even more potent, having outlasted all the cultural currents which carried it in. It sounds almost revolutionary again. Something unburdened by the self, or by self-consciousness; free of the past and the present.
Holger Czukay, somewhat professorial at the age of 30, joined Inner Space (the original name of the group formed by keyboard player Irmin Schmidt) on the understanding it would be a kind of art collective, a rather academic fusion of rock with the teachings of Karlheinz Stockhausen, he and Schmidt’s old teacher and mentor. In fact, from the sound of ‘Millionenspiel’, the opening track on this collection, Inner Space progressed very quickly to what would become the early Can sound (‘Millionenspiel’ is a psychedelicised Chantays on a surfin’ safari through medieval Europe and Jamaica in the 50s, far beyond the fumblings of the Prehistoric Future tape). Still, it was only when grainy-voiced Malcolm Mooney joined on vocals that Czukay grasped what could really be achieved. As he describes it in the sleeve notes to The Lost Tapes, “Stockhausen with a hell of a drive!”
That drive was Can’s trademark, powered not just by Mooney’s aggression but by Michael Karoli’s tattoo-needle guitar style and (especially) the drumming of Jaki Liebezeit, in which the delicacy and invention of jazz was applied to a series of rigidly mechanised beats, a kind of percussive hypnosis driving the others forward without fear. In time, as Mooney was replaced by the ethereal Damo Suzuki, the drive became more of a glide, the sound spun out until it was almost translucent, but the band retained its eerie power: heavy when featherlight, direct when delirious. In the glow of Schloss Norvenich, their hidey-hole near Cologne (then later at Inner Space Studios, a refurbished cinema in nearby Weilerswist), Can spent hours and days and nights and sunrises and sunsets playing. Everything was recorded, although not everything survived, because of the cost of tape, and – according to Schmidt in the sleeve notes – because of Liebezeit’s insistence on constant forward movement: “Erase!” These three discs have been assembled from a pile of rediscovered masters, pulled from a cupboard after nearly forty years, and if they’d been recorded this morning they’d sound like they came from the future.
Occasionally, the centre fails to hold and Can are pitched off in different directions: such is the price of freedom. Still, on those rare occasions where the music is slightly ragged, it remains relentlessly inventive. The single most jaw-dropping thing about Can was this unstoppable originality – what stands out most clearly here is that even at the point of exhaustion, where anyone else would fall back on shopworn blues riffs and keyboard-demo drum fills, Can were utterly incapable of cliché. And when all five members coalesce – which they do more often than not, more often than pretty much any other group who ever relied on improvisation and daring – the results are incomparable, sometimes indescribable.
so what are you waiting for? Money is for spending, not hoarding…
and this is a good definition of the band’s aesthetic as any:
The music of Can was never explicitly political, but it was always radical. A synthesis of Stockhausen, Sly & The Family Stone, ‘Sister Ray’ and Ornette Coleman would be musically incendiary at any time, but in these times it was more than that. Can’s aesthetic choices may have been instinctive, but they weren’t coincidental: they were drawn to African rhythms, to the music of Eastern European gypsies, to non-hierarchical systems, personally and musically (crucial to their sound was the abuse of those strict tonal relationships enforced by the Third Reich’s cultural guardians). They were, in Nazi parlance, Entartete Musik – degenerate music – taken almost to its limit. This was not necessarily a deliberate choice on their part. But with that mindset, in that country, at that point in history, there was no choice.
Rolling Stone Magazine has published a list of their top 70 Bob Dylan songs (and a few variant versions, mostly live versions, or bootleg versions with The Band in their Woodstock hoedown days) in the print edition called The 70 Greatest Dylan Songs – online has different lists, and their top ten Dylan songs. Of course I had to make an iTunes playlist for these songs, and am listening to it now.
Is Like A Rolling Stonemy favorite Dylan song? No, probably not, but if I haven’t heard it in a while, I can appreciate it for the revolutionary track it is…
The next issue of Rolling Stone – on stands and in the digital archive on May 13th – celebrates Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday (happening on May 24th) by ranking his 70 greatest songs. Bono, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jim James and many other artists discuss their favorite Dylan tracks. “Every songwriter after him carries his baggage,” Bono writes. “This lowly Irish bard would proudly carry his baggage. Any day.”
Selected in Playlist: 70 Dylan 93 songs, 7:35:24.839935302734 total time, 716.9 MB
#
Title
Album
Year
1
Like A Rolling Stone
Highway 61 Revisited [2010 mono version]
1965
2
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1963
3
Tangled Up In Blue
Blood On The Tracks
1975
4
Just Like A Woman
Blonde On Blonde [2010 Mono version]
1966
5
All Along The Watchtower
John Wesley Harding (2010 Mono Version)
1967
6
I Shall Be Released
The Bootleg Series
1967
8
I Shall Be Released
The Basement Tapes
1987
9
It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Bringing It All Back Home (2010 Mono Version)
1965
10
Mr. Tambourine Man
Bringing It All Back Home (2010 Mono Version)
1965
12
Visions Of Johanna (Take Eight)
Bootleg Series, Vol. 7 No Direction Home (Disc 2)
1965
13
Visions Of Johanna
Blonde On Blonde [2010 Mono version]
1966
14
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Bringing It All Back Home (2010 Mono Version)
1965
15
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Alternate Take)
Bootleg Series, Vol. 7 No Direction Home (Disc 1)
1965
16
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Live 1966
1966
18
Subterranean Homesick Blues
Bringing It All Back Home (2010 Mono Version)
1965
19
Desolation Row
Highway 61 Revisited [2010 mono version]
1965
20
Highway ‘61 Revisited
Highway 61 Revisited [2010 mono version]
1965
21
Simple Twist Of Fate
Blood On The Tracks
1975
22
Positively 4th Street
Biograph
1965
25
This Wheel’s On Fire
The Basement Tapes
1975
26
Ballad Of A Thin Man
Highway 61 Revisited [2010 mono version]
1965
27
Blind Willie McTell
The Bootleg Series
1991
28
Blowin’ In The Wind
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1963
29
Mississippi
Love And Theft
2001
30
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1963
31
Forever Young
Planet Waves
1974
32
Forever Young (Continued)
Planet Waves
1974
33
Lay Lady Lay
Best Of
1994
34
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid
1973
35
Masters Of War
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1963
36
Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands
Blonde On Blonde (2010 Mono Version)
1966
37
The Times They Are A-Changin’
The Times They Are A Changin’ (2010 Mono Version)
1964
38
You Ain’t Going Nowhere #1
Genuine Basement Tapes (Volume 4)
1967
40
You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
Essential Bob Dylan
2000
41
Girl From The North Country
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1963
42
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? (single version)
A Musical History
1965
43
Chimes Of Freedom
Another Side Of Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1964
45
Idiot Wind (Unreleased Version)
The Bootleg Series
1974
46
Idiot Wind
Hard Rain
1976
47
Isis
Biograph
1975
48
Isis
Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue (Bootleg Series Vol. 5)
1975
49
Isis
Desire
1976
50
The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll
The Times They Are A Changin’ (2010 Mono Version)
1964
51
Maggie’s Farm
Bringing It All Back Home (2010 Mono Version)
1965
52
Maggie’s Farm (Newport Folk Festival)
Bootleg Series, Vol. 7 No Direction Home (Disc 2)
1965
53
My Back Pages
Another Side Of Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1964
54
Hurricane
Desire
1976
55
With God On Our Side
The Times They Are A Changin’ (2010 Mono Version)
1964
56
I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
John Wesley Harding (2010 Mono Version)
1967
57
I’ll Keep It With Mine
Biograph
1965
58
I Threw It All Away
Nashville Skyline
1969
59
Gotta Serve Somebody
Slow Train Coming
1979
60
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
Blonde On Blonde [2010 Mono version]
1966
61
It Ain’t Me Babe
Another Side Of Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1964
62
Spanish Harlem Incident
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
1964
63
Sara
Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue (Bootleg Series Vol. 5)
1975
64
Sara
Desire
1976
65
Up To Me
Biograph
1985
66
Not Dark Yet
Time Out Of Mind
1997
67
Things Have Changed
The Very Best of Bob Dylan
2007
69
Tears of Rage #3
The Genuine Basement Tapes Vol.2
1970
70
Tears Of Rage
The Basement Tapes
1975
71
When I Paint My Masterpiece
A Musical History
1971
72
4th Time Around
Blonde On Blonde (2010 Mono Version)
1966
73
If Not For You
New Morning
1970
74
You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
Blood On The Tracks
1975
75
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Highway 61 Revisited [2010 mono version]
1965
76
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Take 5)
Bootleg Series, Vol. 7 No Direction Home (Disc 2)
1965
77
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Live 5/14/66, The Odeon, Liverpool)
A Musical History
1966
78
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Live 1966
1966
79
Percy’s Song
Biograph
1963
80
Million Dollar Bash #1
The Genuine Basement Tapes Vol. 3
1968
81
Million Dollar Bash
The Basement Tapes
1975
82
Buckets Of Rain
Blood On The Tracks
1975
83
Buckets of Rain
Hard Rain
1975
84
I’m Not There
Genuine Bootleg Series Vol 2
1967
85
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
Highway 61 Revisited [2010 mono version]
1965
86
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (Take 9)
Bootleg Series, Vol. 7 No Direction Home (Disc 2)
1965
87
Queen Jane Approximately
Highway 61 Revisited [2010 mono version]
1965
88
If You See Her, Say Hello
The Bootleg Series
1964
89
If You See Her, Say Hello
Blood On The Tracks
1975
90
Abandoned Love
Biograph
1975
91
Tough Mama
Planet Waves
1974
92
Shelter From The Storm
Blood On The Tracks
1975
93
Shelter From The Storm
Hard Rain
1976
94
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
Blonde On Blonde [2010 Mono version]
1966
95
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Take 1)
Bootleg Series, Vol. 7 No Direction Home (Disc 2)
1966
96
Every Grain Of Sand
Shot Of Love
1981
97
One Too Many Mornings
The Times They Are A Changin’ (2010 Mono Version)
1964
98
One Too Many Mornings
Live 1966
1966
99
One More Cup Of Coffe (Valley Bellow)
Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue (Bootleg Series Vol. 5)
1975
100
One More Cup Of Coffee
Desire
1976
101
To Ramona
Another Side Of Bob Dylan (2010 Mono Version)
1964
If you come over to my house, I’ll let you listen to the MP3s. Or even better, pick up the box set called The Original Mono Recordings.
Pop hitmaker, cult hero, and Memphis rock iconoclast Alex Chilton has died.
The singer and guitarist, best known as a member of ’60s pop-soul act the Box Tops and the ’70s power-pop act Big Star, died today at a hospital in New Orleans. Chilton, 59, had been complaining of about his health earlier today. He was taken by paramedics to the emergency room where he was pronounced dead. The cause of death is believed to be a heart attack.
His Big Star bandmate Jody Stephens confirmed the news this evening. “Alex passed away a couple of hours ago,” Stephens said from Austin, Texas, where the band was to play Saturday at the annual South By Southwest Festival. “I don’t have a lot of particulars, but they kind of suspect that it was a heart attack.”
The Memphis-born Chilton rose to prominence at age 16, when his gruff vocals powered Box Tops massive hit “The Letter.” The band would score several more hits, including “Cry Like a Baby” and “Neon Rainbow.”
After the Box Tops ended in 1970, Chilton had a brief solo run in New York before returning to Memphis. He soon joined forces with a group of Anglo-pop-obsessed musicians, fellow songwriter/guitarist Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens, to form Big Star.
The group became the flagship act for the local Ardent Studios’ new Stax-distributed label. Big Star’s 1972 debut album, #1 Record met with critical acclaim but poor sales. The group briefly disbanded, but reunited sans Bell to record the album Radio City. Released in 1974, the album suffered a similar fate, plagued by Stax’s distribution woes.
…
The group made one more album, Third/Sister Lovers, with just Chilton and Stephens — and it too was a minor masterpiece. Darker and more complex than the band’s previous pop-oriented material, it remained unreleased for several years. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine would name all three Big Star albums to its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
I’ve loved Big Star for as long as I knew their music (probably late 1980s or early 1990s), and the box set, Keep an Eye on the Sky was my favorite collection of last year. Big Star rewards repeated listens, especially with headphones.
Sigh. I’m sure there will lots of obituaries around the web, Big Star and Alex Chilton had influence far beyond their units-sold1.
Nothing great here to hear, but nothing objectionably bad either. I’m too mentally drained at the moment to bloviate about each track, so just imagine me telling you amusing anecdotes as to why these particular songs ended up in my library.
A few interesting links collected January 5th through January 8th:
Letters of Note: Art is useless because… – Included in the preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is the now famous and often misconstrued line, ‘All art is quite useless’. In fact, following the novel’s original publication in 1890, Oxford undergraduate Bernulf Clegg was so intrigued by the claim that he wrote to Wilde and asked him to elaborate. The following handwritten letter was Wilde’s response.
The Airport Scanner Scam | Mother Jones – Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work—and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.
Buddyhead’s Best and Worst Records Of 2009 | BUDDYHEAD – Animal Collective – “Merriweather Post Pavilion”Lazy music journalists tried to act like these nerds armed with bongos and delay pedals were the second coming of The Beatles or some shit. Everyone from Mojo to Rolling Stone to Pitchdork seemed to have these fruitcakes somewhere in their top five records for 2009. These dudes couldn’t write a song if their lives depended on it, they are to songwriting what “Alvin and The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” is to cinema.
At a glance, the far corner of the main floor of J&R Music looks familiar to anybody old enough to have scratched a record by accident. There are cardboard boxes filled with albums by the likes of Miles Davis and the Beach Boys that could be stacked in any musty attic in America.
But this is no music morgue; it is more like a life-support unit for an entertainment medium that has managed to avoid extinction, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. The bins above the boxes hold new records — freshly pressed albums of classic rock as well as vinyl versions of the latest releases from hip-hop icons like 50 Cent and Diddy and new pop stars like Norah Jones and Lady Gaga.
And with the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with reel-to-reel and eight-track tape players, has been reborn.
A few interesting links collected September 1st through September 2nd:
Will Chicago See a Hotel Strike? – Chicagoist – Chicago's hotel workers are clocking in today without a union contract, as negotiators from UNITE-HERE Local 1 and the Hotel Employers Labor Relations Association has yet to reach an agreement on a new pact. The previous contract expired at last night at midnight. “It’s been a fight to even just get to the table,” a spokeswoman for the hotel workers’ union told Crain's. “We’re not close, and I think we’re looking at the possibility of a major fight.”
JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me"
I would add, they sound fine if they are recorded at a high enough sample rate.
Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch – And if it is indeed the case that the Washington Post is recycling the public views of ideologues, hacks, and torture-tourists like Marc Thiessen as inside scoops, then Finn, Warrick, and Tate granted anonymity to their sources because naming them would by itself discredit the story. There is a place for anonymous quotes in journalism, but this is not it.
