Q: Are We Not Men?

Michael Fournier Hidden Wheel tour

Mike Fournier, author of the 33 1/3 on The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, will be hitting the west coast this week doing some readings in support of his novel Hidden Wheel.

Here are the dates:
3/9: Las Vegas, with Coastwest Unrest. Blackbird Studios. 7 pm.
3/12: Los Angeles, CA. Stories. 7-ish?
3/13: Santa Monica CA. Track 16 Gallery. 7:30 pm.
3/14: San Francisco CA. Sub-Mission Gallery. 7:00 pm.
3/15: San Francisco CA. Satellite 66 Gallery. 7:30 pm.
4/7: Easthampton, MA. Flywheel. W/Sam McPheeters (ex-Born Against, Men’s Recovery Project), others TBA.

And here are some recent reviews of the book, from The Noise (scroll all the way down), and New Artillery.

Still here!

While there hasn't been much in the way of new content on the blog in a couple of weeks, we should mention that the comments thread in the 33 1/3 Call For Proposals post has been very active and full of useful questions and answers for anyone interested in submitting a book proposal this time around. The window for submissions approaches! March 19-April 30.

Also worth noting: the 33 1/3 facebook page soldiers on with the videos of the day project, currently on volume #38, Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand.

And the 33 1/3 twitter features groundbreaking and crucial links, such as this one.

Also, for some reason the comments spam filter will occasionally catch a useful question about submitting a proposal while letting many many messages about flowers, sneakers, electronics, and handbags through the net. We sort everything out and purge and release every couple of days, so don't panic or think we're ignoring you if that's the case.

Crowd Control

This recent piece in the Montreal Mirror by Erin MacLeod about Celine Dion's popularity in Jamaica has a quick comment at the end of the piece by Carl Wilson. And it also reminded me that I was recently reading Dave Tompkin's incredibly entertaining history of the vocoder, How To Wreck a Nice Beach, when I came across the following quote. It's an interesting parallel to Garnette Cadogan's quote about the Celine Dion Effect in the Jamaican ghetto from Carl's 33 1/3 on Celine. See below:

______________________________

From How to Wreck a Nice Beach:
While Good Fred’s Accentuator would flourish with Ice Cube and khaki in the Comptonian future, the vocoder and the Uncle Jamm parties couldn’t survive as venues grew increasingly nervous about gang insurance. Egypt remembers the shift. “The gangs would have one fight and say, ‘I’ll see you at the next Uncle Jamm’s Army party,’ and then have another fight at the next one. It got so they’d say, ‘If they’re coming, we ain’t coming.’ Ninety percent of the gangsters came to have fun. It was the ten percent who couldn’t get a girl. They were the ones starting problems. There were so many women there—women outnumbered us five to one. This was at the Sports Arena. Everyone was selling dope and making money back then. Gangsters with money—no problems. But play Michael Jackson—that will make you fight. The Rolling 60s Crips would shoot up every-fucking-body. Slow songs and ballads make the gangsters fight. No room for Michael Jackson. Sorry, Mike.”

______________________________

From Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste:
One of the most astounding tales of Céline’s global flexibility comes to me from Jamaican-American music critic Garnette Codogan, who says she may be Jamaica’s most popular non-native musical figure. And not just for grandmas.

“I wish I could give you an explanation beyond Jamaicans’ love for saccharine tunes, but that may be satisfactory enough,” Codogan wrote me.

"And the places she turns up in Jamaica are all the more curious. I remember being at sound-system dances and hearing everyone from Bob Marley to Kenny Rogers (yes, Kenny Rogers) to Sade to Yellowman to Beenie Man being blasted at top volume while the crowd danced and drank up a storm. But once the selector (DJ in American parlance) began to play a Céline Dion song, the crowd went buck wild and some people started firing shots in the air. . . . I also remember always hearing Céline Dion blasting at high volume whenever I passed through volatile and dangerous neighborhoods, so much that it became a cue to me to walk, run or drive faster if I was ever in a neighborhood I didn’t know and heard Céline Dion mawking over the airwaves.

I sometimes shared this little anecdote with other Jamaican friends, only for them to laughingly comment that they had a similar practice. The unofficial rule seemed to be, “If you hear Céline Dion then you’re in the wrong place.” That’s not to say that roughnecks (as gangsters are also called in Jamaica) are the only ones who appreciate and publicly show their love for Saccharine Céline. It’s just that, for some reason, they show her more love than just about any other group."

Codogan asked around, including a few roughnecks, and the reason given was, “to quote one fellow, ‘Bad man have fi play love tune fi show ’dat them a lova too.’”

36 Years of the Fleshtones special offer

To celebrate this, the 36th year of The Fleshtones existence, we are offering copies of Joe Bonomo’s excellent biography of the band, Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band at 50% off until February 10th (US only) when you use the promo code BLUEWHALE at checkout on the [offer expired!] Continuum website:
http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=130883&SearchType=Basic

"Joe Bonomo has written a fine book; a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance." —Nick Tosches

Call for Proposals for the 33 1/3 Series

Bloomsbury is thrilled to announce a call for new proposals for the acclaimed 33 1/3 book series, previously published by Continuum. (Bloomsbury acquired Continuum in July 2011).

The series – each volume of which focuses on one popular music album of the last several decades – started in September 2003 and has published 85 titles to date. Books in the series so far have taken a wide range of approaches, on subjects ranging from albums by the Kinks to James Brown, from Bob Dylan to Prince, from the Pixies to Public Enemy, and from the Beastie Boys to Celine Dion.

In these new proposals, we’ll be looking for original research, for stories in the history of popular music (recent or otherwise) that haven’t been told too often (if at all), and for perspectives that will broaden and develop the discipline of writing about music, as read by a global readership of music scholars and fans.

Proposals will be considered for books about any album that hasn’t already been covered in the series, or isn’t already under contract. (The Wikipedia page on the series can help with this.) Your choice of album is precisely that: yours. Titles in the series typically sell 4-5,000 copies or more: if you’re convinced that enough readers around the world would rush out to buy your book, then go ahead and persuade us!

All resulting books published in the series as a result of this call for proposals will be published under the Bloomsbury Academic imprint during 2013 and 2014. (All existing titles in the series will also be re-branded as Bloomsbury Academic titles, in due course.)


We will be accepting new proposals between the dates of March 19th and April 30th, 2012. Nothing sooner, nothing later.

Interested authors should send in one proposal, about one album. Multiple submissions cannot be accepted.

All proposals must be submitted via email. The address for submissions is as follows:

33proposals@gmail.com

The subject line of your email must use this format: “Proposal for Madonna’s Ray of Light”. (That’s an example only, of course…)

Only proposals sent to 33proposals@gmail.com will be considered – no exceptions! Any questions about the proposal process should be posted to the comments section of the 33 1/3 blog , or on the wall of the series facebook page: we will answer them there.

All proposals will receive an automated reply, acknowledging receipt. Once the window closes at the end of April, we will need around 3 months before our publishing decisions are made: everybody will be notified in person at that point.

Word count on the books signed up will be between 30,000 and 40,000. No exceptions allowed.

There will be royalties payable on all print and electronic editions of your book, as well as foreign rights deals, etc – but no advances will be paid against those royalties.


Your proposal must contain all of the following in order to be considered:

1. Your professional CV/resume, including full contact details;
2. A draft annotated table of contents for the book and an approximate date of completion;
3. A draft introduction/opening chapter for the book, of around 2,000 words;
4. Your analysis of the most relevant competing books already published about the artist in question or the scene surrounding that artist – and how your book will differ;
5. A one-page sheet of how you would help Bloomsbury Academic market your book – websites/forums/listservs you’d contact directly; any artist involvement you might expect; any college-level courses on which you think your book could be used, and so on;
6. Up to 1,000 words on which book, or parts of books, already published in the series you would aim to emulate on some level;

You should attach all of this in a readable format to your email as a PDF or .doc or .docx file – if you could include it all as one full document rather than several attachments, we would appreciate that enormously.

Finally, please do share this call for proposals on message boards, listservs, facebook, twitter, blogs, and with any interested colleagues – thank you. We look forward to receiving and reading your proposal!

David Barker PhD
Publishing Director, Bloomsbury Academic US
www.33third.blogspot.com
www.facebook.com/33.3books

Our latest arrival

Due to publish in April 2012!


Related: here's a Talking Heads related episode of Studio 360 from last weekend.

Le Blues de Memphis

From The Observer's Very Short List...

“Le Blues de Memphis” is an incredibly cool 11-minute video tour of two iconic music studios. Made for French television forty-some years ago, it starts off at a Brook Benton session in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and then (after a quick stop at Elvis Presley’s Graceland) takes us behind the scenes at Stax Records—where Booker T. and the MGs are recording “Time Is Tight” and a slicker-than-silk, saxophone-playing Isaac Hayes is putting the studio’s horn section through its paces.

On Point with Aretha

Aaron Cohen was recently on WBUR's On Point discussing Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace with Alexander Hamilton (the choir director on the album) and Bernard "Pretty" Purdie (drummer extraordinaire). Even if you aren't in a spot where you can listen to the archived audio at the moment (but you should bookmark it, because it's fantastic), the page here is well worth visiting for the photos, embedded videos, excerpts, and all the other bells and whistles.

A collection of 33 1/3 author interviews

Rock Cellar Magazine's debut issue arrives in style, with an interview with our own David Barker about the 33 1/3 series, followed by six interviews with 33 1/3 authors who are also musicians or artists from other fields, namely...

Elizabeth Vincentelli (ABBA's ABBA Gold)
Warren Zanes (Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis)
Bill Janovitz (Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street)
Franklin Bruno (Elvis Costello's Armed Forces)
Joe Pernice (The Smiths' Meat is Murder)
LD Beghtol (Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs)

(NOTE: you have to click on the album covers at the top or bottom of each interview to get to the next one.)

I've read my share of interviews with 33 1/3 authors over the years, and I have to admit that I learned a thing or two reading these interviews. Well worth your time!

Early '70s Radio event in Austin

Kim Simpson will be talking about and signing copies of Early '70s Radio in Austin at Book People on Wednesday, January 25th at 7pm. It is worth noting that St. Arnold Brewing Company will be supplying free beer.

Early '70s Radio was also featured in the Austin American Statesman recently. You can read that here.

And there's some more info on the book at the Continuum Film & Media Studies blog.

Clips of the day roundup

David is going through the series posting a video (or two) from each volume of the series over on the series Facebook page... Here are the first six days presented without comment!









Pink Floyd BBC1 1967 Astronomy Domine Unedited (embedding disabled)

and for good measure, here's Echoes Live at Pompeii...


Keep up with the facebook page for your daily dose. I believe we are due for ABBA today...

RIP Lou Rawls

Thought this particular video might be Friday the 13th-appropriate.

We've hit a bit of a dry patch over here at the blog, but over on Facebook, David is posting a music video per day for each of the volumes in the series.

And just for kicks, here's a tumblr of album covers recreated using clip art and comic sans. And here are some mundane stories about meeting pop stars.

Bob Seger Acapella Hollywood Nights

Not to be confused with this vocal track.