33 1/3

Call for Proposals for the 33 1/3 Series

2012-01-26T18:11:00.005-05:00

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

2012-01-25T16:08:00.003-05:00

Due to publish in April 2012!

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

Le Blues de Memphis

2012-01-23T12:00:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-19T15:08:00.002-05:00

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

2012-01-18T14:07:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-18T09:35:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-17T09:54:00.002-05:00

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

2012-01-13T11:28:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-13T08:59:00.002-05:00

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

2011-12-30T16:39:00.001-05:00

Not to be confused with this vocal track.

How To Sell Records Like The Smiths

2011-12-15T15:32:00.002-05:00

Some sage words for the music industry from our friend Mike Fournier:

How to Sell Records Like The Smiths

"So the irony of the holiday season is pretty heavy (and tasty). In 2011 the model that could have kept the industry afloat is sitting right in front of us in the few record stores that are left, repackaged in a shiny new box for the holidays:

The Smiths.

I'm serious."

Snapshots from a Van Halen in-store appearance in 1978.

2011-12-14T11:16:00.002-05:00

The kids in these pictures are the very definition of "at-risk teens."
Click away.

Oxford American Music Issue

2011-12-09T13:54:00.003-05:00

It's Oxford American Music Issue Day here at the office, as we just got our copy in the mail (better late than never). A quick count of Continuum authors in the table of contents yields the following:

David Kirby (Little Richard) on Bo Diddley
Michael T. Fournier (The Minutemen) on Hayden Thompson
Megan Mayhew Bergman & Kate Schatz (PJ Harvey) on The International Sweethearts of Rhythm
Nicholas Rombes (The Ramones, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk) on Henry Green
LD Beghtol (Magnetic Fields) on Southern food.
Plus a review of Richard Henderson's 33 1/3 on Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle.

Not to mention Mark Winegardner on Syl Johnson, Peter Guralnick on Howlin' Wolf, Oliver Wang on Charles Wright, and pieces by Roseanne Cash, Jack Pendarvis, Roy Blount, Jr, Nick Hornby... the list goes on.

Now that I've read the table of contents to you, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.

R&R Hall of Fame Inductees

2011-12-07T11:21:00.003-05:00

Generally, I take this sort of thing with a grain of salt, but there's not too much to argue about here.

Here's some worthwhile reading on two of the inductees:

Eric Weisbard on Guns n' Roses' Use Your Illusion I & II

Dan LeRoy on The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique

You might also check out some of the full bios of the lesser-known (but no less fascinating) inductees. For example, Tom Dowd... or Cosimo Matassa.

Aretha reviewed in the New York Times

2011-12-02T16:44:00.003-05:00

NOT BAD! We'll take it!

AMAZING GRACE
By Aaron Cohen.
Continuum, paper, $12.95.

As with all the books in Continuum’s 33· series, this one looks at a single album — in this case, Aretha Franklin’s 1972 live gospel set, “Amazing Grace,” which Cohen (an associate editor at DownBeat) argues is her “artistic peak.” That’s no small claim, and to back it up Cohen uses one of the more dogged, simple and effective approaches in the series: sit down, cue up the music and expound on an album’s merits, cut by cut, while bringing in choice factoids, testimonies and eyewitness accounts. Of course, Cohen’s palpable wonder regarding Franklin’s legendary foray into gospel music helps the cause, but his enthusiasm never undercuts his judicious accounts of how a given track functions, and what made Franklin’s methodology so different from that of any other soul singer turned church musician (or, in Franklin’s case, church musician turned soul singer turned church musician). The detective work is formidable as well, and invaluable, given that “Amazing Grace” owed almost as much of its success to its behind-the-scenes players as it did to Franklin. Cohen calls the recording team “as unique as the situation,” and there’s an impressive breakdown of what went on in postproduction, which sometimes reads like a mash-up of biblical citations and digital patois: “The sermonette is cut and pasted together so that the New Testament tale is sandwiched between the Exodus parts.” Aretha completists and neophytes alike will have reason to take to bended knee in gratitude for Cohen’s delineation of the differences between the original album and the bells-and-whistles reissue.

Nick Rombes in the Oxford American

2011-12-02T09:37:00.004-05:00

The author of the Ramones 33 1/3 has a wonderful piece in the Southern Music Issue of the Oxford American, http://oxfordamerican.org/articles/issues/latest_issue/ on obscure Mississippi bluesman Henry Green.

Mike Fournier's Hidden Wheel

2011-11-18T15:16:00.003-05:00

Michael Fournier, author of the excellent 33 1/3 on The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, has just released his debut novel Hidden Wheel with Three Rooms Press. More importantly, he has a Kickstarter page going to fund a book tour in the spring that is bound to be a wild ride. Here's the link to the Kickstarter page with more info on the project.

The Novel

The novel focuses on the art and punk scenes of the Midwestern city Freedom Springs, where an opportunistic trustfunder named Ben Wilfork starts an all-ages art/show space names Hidden Wheel. Max Caughin, who tags under the name Faze, gets famous quick with a series of paintings on CD covers. His buddy Bernie Reese donates sperm to raise money for a new drum kit so his two-piece noiserock band Stonecipher can record. Bernie's romantic interest (and former chess prodigy) Rhonda Barrett does dominatrix work by day and paints her life, sixty words at a time, on giant canvases by night. Their fates intertwine in a story reconstructed by William Molyneux, a 24th Century scholar reconstructing the Hidden Wheel scene after a solar flare erases all digital data in his era.

The Band

Dead Trend started as a fictional band in Hidden Wheel, Freedom Springs' biggest musical export. As I wrote the book, I also wrote Dead Trend songs -- short blasts of punk focusing on 1986 topics like Reagan, the Berlin Wall and Chernobyl. Some friends and I put the band together this summer, with me playing drums and doing backing vocals. We have a 7" coming out soon on Baltimore's Save vs. Poison Records. In the meantime, our music is available via cassette tape -- demo versions of our songs recorded this summer, as well as a live set recorded in Orono, Maine.

David Smay on Early Sixties Horror Films

2011-11-15T13:50:00.003-05:00

It's always nice to see writing from 33 1/3 authors pop up elsewhere. David Smay, author of Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones, is doing a series of pieces on early sixties horror films for hilowbrow.com.

Did you know that Psycho, Peeping Tom, Black Sunday and Eyes Without a Face all came out in 1960 alone?

Here's an excerpt of the first installment, and a link to the full piece.
http://hilobrow.com/2011/10/31/early-60s-horror-1/

"In 1960 alone, Psycho, Peeping Tom, Black Sunday, and Eyes Without a Face played in theaters. Yet that clutch of five-star masterpieces only represents a fraction of that year’s important work which also saw the Japanese vision of hell, Jigoku, two Hammer horrors in The Brides of Dracula and Two Faces of Dr. Jeckyll, Roger Corman’s first gothic, The Fall of the House of Usher as well as his cult cheapie Little Shop of Horrors, Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses, and Village of the Damned.

There was really no way to see this happening as it occurred. Psycho dominated both the box office and the mainstream press, and the avid and active horror fandom of the time was too busy looking backward in a happy wallowing glut of old horror movies on television. Even as late as the ’80s with Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and the ’90s with David Skaal’s The Horror Show that early 1960s era was seen as a period of horror quatschification, the uncanny cozily commodified by “Monster Mash” and Famous Monsters of Filmland, horror hosts like Ghoulardi and model kits of The Mummy.

The years between 1960 and 1963 not only saw an unprecedented explosion of masterful film horror, but it was also the golden age of the television horror anthology with great work airing on The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller. Even Roald Dahl hosted his own series for one season in 1961, Way Out. If you think of Psycho as the Never Mind the Bollocks of the era, with Black Sunday as The Ramones’ Leave Home, you can see the shorter, sharper shocks of TV horror as the ceaseless spew of fantastic punks singles by Stiff Little Fingers and The Ruts and The Only Ones. (By this analogy, The Twilight Zone stands as the great singles band of the era. In short, it’s the Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady.)" -David Smay

And here's the second section which just went up today, where Smay talks about The Haunting, Italo Calvino, Val Lewton and Sir Walter Scott:

http://hilobrow.com/2011/11/08/early-60s-horror-2/

Smay will be doing about two installments a week covering movies like The Innocents, NIght Tide, Blood and Roses, Burn, Witch Burn (based on Fritz Leiber's great Conjure Wife) and others.

Eleven

2011-11-11T10:15:00.002-05:00

Dusty Groove

2011-11-11T10:10:00.003-05:00

Nice to see a good selection of the series at Dusty Groove in Chicago (and of course nationwide if you are of a mailorder persuasion).

Aretha in Booklist

2011-11-08T14:18:00.003-05:00

This Booklist review of the volume on Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace really nails it:

In the newest addition to Continuum’s terrific 33-1/3 series, which focuses on such landmark albums as Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and Patti Smith’s Horses, Downbeat associate editor Cohen, winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, tells the full story of Aretha Franklin’s innovative, even daring Amazing Grace. On this double-platinum double-LP recorded live in 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Church in Watts, Los Angeles, Franklin performs both gospel and secular works, accompanied by her sure-shot band, the choir, and Reverend James Cleveland. Writing with the confidence and fluency born of deep knowledge and drawing on remarkably fruitful interviews, Cohen chronicles key moments in Franklin’s creative life, beginning with her first recording session in a Detroit church in 1956, at which the already hard-pressed 14-year-old daughter of the famous Reverend C. L. Franklin sang with surprisingly “rough fervor and conviction.” Widening the lens, Cohen presents an incisive history of black gospel music and its tradition of protest and empowerment. In all, an electrifying appreciation of Franklin and her magnificent voice, musicality, artistic vision, and courage.

Easy Listening

2011-11-08T13:48:00.003-05:00

It's 5 o'clock somewhere which means it's drinkin time.

Not sure what to drink?

Well, that depends on what you're listening to. Go to Drinkify.org, type in the artist and within seconds a cocktail recipe will appear.

I suggest you try: Brian Eno, Kanye or Alan Jackson.

A taste...

“The "Weird Al" Yankovic”

1 oz. Gin
1 oz. Wheatgrass juice
1 oz. Lime juice

Combine in highball glass and serve. Stir vigorously. Garnish with olive.

33 1/3 in the Design Observer

2011-11-04T14:55:00.003-04:00

We are extremely flattered that Rick Poyner at the Design Observer has some very kind words to say about the design of the series. I've included the first paragraph here, but it's worth reading the whole piece if this is your cup of tea.

In the field of popular culture, there are two superb, long-running series of critical monographs. These projects, intellectually ambitious yet accessible and popular, should be inspirational case studies for any publisher, writer or writing student that aspires to produce equally engaging writing about design for a broad audience. One series is the BFI Film Classics, which devotes an entire volume to each film — I might return to these books another time. The other venture is Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. Here, too, each volume concentrates on a single work, in this case an album of enduring impact and artistic value.

More Aretha!

2011-11-04T14:48:00.002-04:00

Two nice reviews of the Aretha Franklin 33 1/3 below!

The Black Gospel Blog:

"With a journalist’s gift of observation and language, Aaron Cohen provides us with a glimpse into how a work of musical art is created – those million minute details, the unpredictable group dynamics, the missteps and makeovers, the flashes of genius and the priceless moments of musical transfiguration when talent and preparation align to create enduring art.
Amazing Grace is as engaging and entertaining as it is thought-provoking, a pleasure to read."

Louisville's LEO Weekly:

"Cohen is associate editor of DownBeat magazine and has written extensively on gospel music. The passion he has for his subject is obvious, with many asides and stage whispers shared in a recent conversation, mapping out Aretha’s connections to gospel music’s first stars — the Clara Ward Singers, Mahalia Jackson and the Gay Sisters."

Happy Loveless Birthday

2011-11-04T14:43:00.002-04:00

Why not celebrate the 20th anniversary of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless by reading this appreciation of MBV's influence from Wired? And, if you haven't already, wash it down with Mike McGonigal's 33 1/3 volume on the album.

Aaron Cohen / Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace

2011-11-01T15:28:00.009-04:00

Last Thursday Aaron Cohen and Amanda Petrusich had a reading at Barbes in Brooklyn. Amanda kicked things off by reading from her work-in-progress on collectors of 78 rpm records due in 2013 or 2014 from Scribner. I'm really looking forward to that. Very good stuff.

Aaron finished off the evening by talking about Aretha background in both the church and gospel music as well as the soul and jazz parts of her career that led up to the recording of Amazing Grace, and even played some video footage from the recording that is available on youtube. (it's a treat.)

Aaron has a couple other gigs coming up that we haven't yet announced here, so do yourself a favor and check him out if you're in Louisville or Cleveland:

Thursday, November 3rd, 4:30pm

Ethnoise Ethnomusicology Workshop

University of Chicago in Goodspeed Hall

Chicago, Illinois

Friday, November 4th, 7pm

Carmichael's Bookstore

2720 Frankfort Avenue

Louisville, Kentucky 40206

Saturday, November 5th, 1:30pm-2:15pm

(though really you should check out the whole day of programming if you have the means)

American Music Masters Conference

A reflection on the career of Aretha Franklin and her impact on rock and roll music

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foster Theater

1100 Rock and Roll Boulevard
Cleveland, Ohio 44114

Wednesday, November 16th, Chicago

Reading/signing at Book Cellar

4736 N. Lincoln

Chicago, Illinois

Sonic Bodies excerpt

2011-11-01T13:40:00.001-04:00

Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing published in the US back in September, and is due for UK release in early-mid November. It occurred to me that we haven't posted an excerpt from the book on the blog yet, so allow me to rectify that right now. The book is a groundbreaking and in-depth study of the cultures that spring up around sound systems, investigating the auditory, corporeal, and sociocultural implications of this particular brand of "sonic dominance." The book is illustrated throughout, and I've included a selection below. The excerpt follows the illustrations. Enjoy!

Bass and base culture

Jamaican sonic culture has a particular affinity with the auditory values of sound itself, as well as with speech and music. It is of course the audio engineers who are responsible for production of the bass-heavy signature of the sound system – deserving as much credit for the sound of Jamaican music as their better-known music producer cousins such as King Tubby or Lee “Scratch” Perry, who invented dub music in the recording studio. The special value of sound in the popular culture of Jamaica comes to the fore in many different ways, some of which have already been made evident whilst others will be elaborated upon in the chapters that follow. One of them is the sheer size and music power of the sound system equipment, with several speaker stacks the size of a double-decker bus around the open-air dance-floor, delivering up to 20,000 watts of music power that can be decisive in a competitive “clash” between sound systems. Another indication of the value of sound is the secrecy surrounding the audio-engineers’ work, leading them to wire the electronics of their sets in cables of a single colour, rather than the usual colour coding – to prevent industrial espionage by rival sound systems.

The effort and inventiveness that has gone into the development of the sound system equipment is also indicative of this value, such as the five-way music signal split from treble to sub-bass, with amplifiers dedicated to each frequency on each channel, as was reproduced in the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound” stage sound system. This, along with other aspects of the fine-grain detail of the expert embodied knowledge and connoisseurship of the engineers, gives them an extensive sonic vocabulary, and can cause them to spend several days working to fine-tune equipment after a repair (as described in Chapter Three).

There are a least two key characteristics of Jamaican auditory culture, one sonic and the other social. On the auditory frequency spectrum, Jamaican auditory culture is a bass culture. It is the high volumes, low frequencies – rather than mid or top – and distinctive rhythmic patterning that make Reggae’s auditory vibrations memorable, quickly becoming culturally laden, or “fully loaded,” as would be said. On the Dancehall scene the term “massive” is used for the crowd and their intensive, immersive, visceral experience of sonic dominance. These powerful low frequencies resonate with embodied movement and furthermore bleed into the cultural spectrum to become a carrier frequency, as it were, for Africa’s musical gifts to its diaspora. There are patternings, entrainments and syncopations between these auditory vibrations and the breaths, pulses and heartbeats of the crowd’s corporeal vibrations. This makes a phonetic connection – where none exists etymologically – between bass frequency and base matter, as the corporeal embodiment of the crowd.

This is the bass and base of the flesh-and-blood body that finds expression in Bradley’s Bass Culture (2002), which gives a very useful account of Jamaican sound system culture and history, as well as Cooper’s Noises in the Blood (1993). It further reverberates through the UK dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s 1980 album Bass Culture, with the lyric:

muzik of blood

black reared

pain rooted

heart geared …

it is the beat of the heart,

this pulsing of blood

that is a bublin bass,

a bad bad beat

pushin gainst the wall

whey bar black blood

The bass culture of the sound system may be contrasted with what Marshall (2010) calls the “treble culture” of earphone listening. Both bass and treble cultures are tailored to and by their particular phonographic technology, each inevitably favouring particular aesthetic forms. The mode and manner of listening is also distinct, with the shared socialité of the sound system delivering the bodies into sound with, by contrast, the isolated privacy of mobile devices delivering sound into bodies.

As well as bodily being, heartbeat and blood pulse, this idea of base extends further – into the body politic. The base is the means of production on which Marxist materialist philosophy is founded – as well as society’s ideological superstructure. Indeed, the sound system sub-culture has itself been described as a “cultural apparatus,” with “its own aesthetics and a unique mode of consumption,”34 escaping and even reversing the dominant political ideologies of racism of society. Reggae music forges such resistance out of the intensities and dynamics of the material vibrations of sound itself at about the same historical moment of the 1960s and early 1970s as it was being rendered verbally as “black power,” drawing on a political history that began with Marcus Garvey in Jamaica in the 1920s. This is bass and base as the bottom line of sound, upon which the “vibes” bass culture has been “built,” to use the studio producer’s phrase. This idea of the special resonance that bass has for the substance of sound was also picked up by the American novelist Ralph Ellison (1947), as Alexander Weheliye (2005) discusses. In The Invisible Man Ellison provides an early iteration of the idea of a bass culture where he discusses the special significance of “the lower frequencies” for his hero’s sense of identity.35 The Invisible Man pumps his cellar not only with light, but also with sound, delivered by five radiograms simultaneously playing Louis Armstrong. The record playing on the turntable? Famously, it was (Why Do I Always Feel So) Black and Blue, recorded in 1929.

A further resonance between bass and base is suggested by the gendering of the sound system. Though this is certainly enjoyed by women, it is produced entirely by men. In patriarchal societies, the gendered voicing of sound associates bass with male and the positive values of strength and authority, with conversely the higher pitched woman’s voice being associated with hysteria and other psychological disorders, as Carson (1995) explores with reference to ancient Greek society. It is also interesting to note the contrast this bass inflection provides with current trends in metropolitan listening habits. Here the technological limitations of the iPod – a similarly phonographic apparatus – severely compress the dynamic range of amplitudes and drastically cut the bass frequencies. There is indeed a pronounced contrast between on the one hand the shared social experience of music in which the whole body is immersed, as in the dancehall session, and solipsist in-ear listening on the other.

This idea of bass culture has also been accompanied with that of “low end” theory as a marketing theme on the current London Dubstep scene, with Burial’s second album Untrue.39 The distinctive sound of Burial’s music tracks explores the textures and colours of sound to achieve a particular late-night, after-the-club, urban feel, developing the distinctive London sounds of the 1990s Jungle and Drum & Bass, and more recently Grime. Dubstep, along with many forms of electronic music, is also inspired by Dub. This musical genre was invented in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the sound engineers such as King Tubby, Lee “Scratch” Perry and others in Kingston recording studios and the dancehalls. Their techniques exploited recording and phonographic technologies to excavate the textures, timbres and resonating depths of sound itself. To dub is to copy, underlining what can be described as the actual grain of sound, as Barthes (1977) famously discusses with “the grain of the voice” at the limits of language.41 Similarly at the limits of music, the particular tone and tenor characteristic of the Jamaican sound provide cues for thinking through the vibrations of the material waveband of sounding. These are without recourse to ideas about authenticities, origins or essentials, or referring to the structural features of melodies, harmonies or even rhythms, or attempting any musical homology with social and political structures. Instead these vibrations give attention to the ebb, flow and flux of sound waves themselves.

On the social spectrum, Dancehall is also a base culture; it comes from the street, indeed the often unpaved ghetto street. It is a subaltern popular form of expression. This is one of the reasons why the Jamaican sound system scene makes a compelling object for investigation – at a contrasting extreme of the social spectrum to the experimental vanguard of European classical avant-garde traditions to which most musicological attention is given, such as, for example, IRCAM (Born 1995). In fact, experiments in the use of sound to make music were made in the 1970s in Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Arc studio in Kingston, for instance, that were similar to those going on in Paris with Gerard Grisey’s “spectral” compositions. Indeed the Dancehall scene is bursting with an inventiveness and creativity to which this research project aspires. Every night of the week and every week of the year, the maintenance crews set up their huge stacks of speakers and massively powerful amplifiers and large live video projection screens. These sessions are attended by crowds of hundreds and flourish amidst the poverty, hardship and violent gang warfare of inner-city Kingston where they began over 50 years ago. Jamaican sound systems have proved themselves to be amongst the most resilient of social and cultural institutions. For many from poor backgrounds the sound system scene provides a livelihood; for others it is a way of life; and for many more it is a source of consumer-led style, fashion and entertainment. In terms of economic importance, identification and numbers, the only comparison to the sound systems would be the local football teams or the Jamaican churches. The sound system scene is also of research interest as a base culture, as distinct from a culture of the superstructure, which is presumably what fuels Jamaican middle-class criticism. Dancehall is undoubtedly a creation of the street. It is working-class – vulgar, subaltern and lumpen, given the levels of unemployment – and marginal, given its involvement in the black or grey economies and criminal activities, as for example with “The British Link-up Crew” (Hope 2004). It is the creature of those in Jamaica called the sufferahs (as lyrically expressed in Bounty Killer’s 2003 hit of that title). The values are those of materialism, conspicuous consumption and “bling,” readily imported from the USA, only an hour’s plane ride away in Miami, or the multitude of American satellite channels whose footprint falls on Jamaica. Urban geography reflects what has long been acknowledged to be a society sharply divided along colour and class lines. In terms of local entertainment, as well as everything else, the poor downtown Kingston areas and other ghetto communities consider themselves to be largely isolated and excluded from mainstream civil society. Formerly middle-class and prosperous areas, these downtown inner-city locations in West Kingston might now be likened to favelas or shantytowns in other parts of the world. For decades they have had only minimal access to economic and educational opportunities and a marginal position in relation to government agencies and the institutions of the Jamaican State, principally the police. The prevalence of poverty and violence has, however, encouraged an alternative unofficial political patronage system to establish itself in which local-area Dons provide resources, authority and protection for their communities, known as “garrisons.” Inner-city schools and churches often constitute the only local institutions whose representatives the local media can call upon for comment on local issues. In this respect, sound systems operate at the margins between their own world downtown and that of the mainstream.

One of the earliest studies to research Jamaican popular culture was my father Fernando Henriques’ Family and Colour in Jamaica (1953). This described some of the popular cults with fieldwork conducted in the late 1940s in Portland, a rural parish on the north-east coast of Jamaica. The collective all-night music-making rituals, where drumming is particularly important, such as with a Kumina “duty,” as it is called, have much in common with a dancehall session. Henriques describes Pocomania as being “… publicly practised. In its group activity the individual can feel identification with something greater than himself. This identification acts as a form of compensation for the general ills of life which affect everybody.” He writes:

As all cult groups are strongly condemned by the upper and middle classes it is probable than many individuals are reluctant to admit their connection with Pocomania. The attendance at “meeting houses” in Portland suggests a substantial support from the lower class … Pocomania is essentially a proletarian movement.

Trained at Oxford by the leading post-war social anthropologists Radcliffe Brown and Meyer Fortes, Henriques’ work initiated an interest in Jamaican popular culture that I would like to consider my own research as developing. It certainly encouraged the development of Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies approach in the UK.

Continuing with the social side of Jamaican auditory culture, to describe the sensibilities of Dancehall as a base culture draws attention to their grounding, as expressed literally through Dancehall choreography and its African-inspired folk traditions. Its baseness is the ground of the earth, soil, dirt or “dutty,” as is it called in the lingo. With flat-footed stomps and stamps the dancers emphasise their earthly connection, as a distinct contrast to the pirouettes and leaps of the European classical tradition that aspire to have as little contact with the ground for as long as possible. Furthermore, the dancing is literally bottom-up, with its signature sexually explicit choreography, “bumper-grinding.” Here the bass note is struck by the body itself – celebrating its own fecundity. Such an aesthetic continues to scandalize Jamaican middle-class opinion. For the middle classes, “base” denotes crude, unrefined, vulgar and even animal. Dancehall is therefore criticised in the register of sexuality as “slackness,”56 and the dancehall session is condemned as the source of this corruption. Such basic lower frequencies and embodied resonances are considered as distinctly inferior to the higher notes that only the mind and not the body is considered capable of perceiving – with the refined sophistication of “high” culture. So what radiates from a session is not only the material vibrations of sound itself, and the corporeal vibrations of a new “riddim” or dance step, but also the word of mouth on the next session, not to mention all the gossip about who was there, with whom, what they were wearing and generally “what-a-go-on.” All this, as well as the cable TV broadcasts, DVD videos and compilation CDs, serves as a medium for the expression of the style, fashion and values of the Dancehall scene.

One Week / One Band: Portishead

2011-10-31T12:06:00.002-04:00

R. J. Wheaton, author of the 33 1/3 on Dummy, will be talking about Portishead this week over at One Week / One Band.

(By the way, it's worth checking out the backlog at One Week / One Band as well. Good stuff.)

The joys of indexing

2011-10-28T10:52:00.003-04:00

A nice snapshot from the index of the upcoming PB edition of Gavin Hopps' book about Morrissey.

I particularly like the juxtapositions of Kajagoogoo with Kant, of Melville with George Michael, and of Laurel and Hardy with Philip Larkin.

Austin, TX and Early 70s Radio

2011-10-19T16:40:00.002-04:00

If you're in Austin, Texas next week, check out Kim Simpson at KUT's Views and Brews series.

On Monday, 10/24, at 6 PM at Austin's Cactus Cafe, Early '70s Radio will be featured as part of KUT-FM's "Views and Brews" series. I'll be there to talk about the book, answer questions, and will perform a special acoustic medley of '70s radio hits, including "Rubber Duckie," "(You're) Having My Baby," "School's Out" and more.

Kim also has some blog posts well worth reading over at www.early70sradio.com.

Forthcoming Titles

2011-10-12T15:42:00.003-04:00

In response to a question left in the Comments section by John, here's where the series currently stands regarding upcoming titles:

Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace - just published
Portishead's Dummy - just published
Talking Heads' Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem - this will publish in March/April 2012
Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold - we don't yet quite have the final manuscript, but fully expect to publish this in May/June 2012

Weezer's Pinkerton - this project has been cancelled
Wu Tang Clan's Enter the Wu Tang - this project has been cancelled
Tori Amos' Boys for Pele - this project has been cancelled
Funkadelic's Maggot Brain - this project is still alive, and partially written, but I wouldn't hold your breath...
Outkast's Aquemini - this project has been cancelled
The Clash's London Calling - this book is deeply, profoundly cursed. If you pre-ordered it in 2004 when it was first announced, I can only apologise...
Lucinda Williams' Self-Titled LP - 90% written, but cannot be confident of a publication date
Kate Bush's The Dreaming - unlikely this will ever happen, but not yet officially cancelled

And that's it, for the moment! Apologies for the messiness and frustration caused by late and cancelled titles, but that's part of the fabric of the series. It's more difficult than it seems, to write 30,000 original and insightful words about a favourite record...

Were you aware of it?

2011-10-12T12:56:00.000-04:00

I recently came across NYCtaper.com, which, in their own words "is a live music blog that offers a new paradigm of music distribution on the web. The recordings are offered for free on this site as are the music posts, reviews and links to artist sites. All recordings are posted with artist permission or artists with an existing pro-taping policy."

But that's putting it very modestly. The recordings are all very high quality, and they have archives going back to 2007. Here is Earth from All Tomorrow's Parties on October 2nd, and here's Megafaun (currently on heavy rotation in my ipod) at the Mercury Lounge on September 24th.

Amazing Grace goings on in October-November

2011-10-11T11:52:00.000-04:00

First, I would like to direct your attention to this interview with Aaron Cohen about his 33 1/3 on Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace from the always excellent Soul Sides blog. If you are familiar with Soul Sides, you already know that it's top notch. Do check it out.

Aaron is also going to be busy throughout October and November...particularly in Chicago, but there is one Brooklyn date in there as well. See below for the details:

October 16—Chicago
Book launch at the Chicago Cultural Center at 2:00pm
78 E. Washington, Chicago
Along with a short multimedia presentation on Aretha and this crucial recording, the author will host a roundtable/performance with some of Chicago’s gospel royalty whose legacy shaped this album. Honored guests will include members of the Gay Family (Franklin covered the Gay Sisters' 1950 hit "God Will Take Care Of You" on "Amazing Grace") and Inez Andrews from The Caravans (Franklin's rendition of Andrews' version of "Mary, Don't You Weep" was so close to hers, that Inez received songwriting credit on "Amazing Grace").
www.explorechicago.org

October 20—Chicago
DJ set at Maria's Bar
960 W. 31st, Chicago
Set list including The Queen, her own sisters (Erma and Carolyn) and a host of stellar women from the great era of r&b and funk---Ruby Andrews, Bettye LaVette, Tammi Terrell, Betty Wright, Little Ann, Vicki Anderson, Loleatta Holloway, and so many more...
www.community-bar.com

October 27—Brooklyn
Reading/signing at Barbes
376 9th Street, Brooklyn
Featuring Amanda Petrusich, author of the 33 1/3 on Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.

November 3—Chicago
Ethnoise Ethnomusicology Workshop
University of Chicago in Goodspeed Hall at 4:30pm
www.cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/ethnoise/

November 16—Chicago
Reading/signing at Book Cellar
4736 N. Lincoln, Chicago
www.bookcellarinc.com

Terry's Madness Podcast

2011-10-10T09:24:00.002-04:00

Our friends over at The Quietus have kindly posted Terry Edwards' 50-minute podcast about the Madness album One Step Beyond, about which Terry wrote for the series a couple of years back.

As with everything Terry produces, it's highly recommended and well worth a listen. You can do so here.

Why Portishead Still Matters

2011-10-07T11:54:00.002-04:00

RJ Wheaton is interviewed by Anupa Mistry in the Toronto Standard about "Why Portishead Still Matters" ahead of their live shows in Toronto this weekend. A sampling:

They combined music in a way everyone is replicating now—without the help of YouTube or FilesTube.com.
Portishead spent years refining their unique combinatory approach to music. “Barrow’s biggest inspiration was hip-hop, and same with Utley although he came from a jazz background,” Wheaton points out. “And Beth doesn’t come from a soul, R&B or jazz background; she did a lot of new wave stuff with a singer-songwriter bent.” This very real mix made Portishead so distinctive. Wheaton feels trip-hop’s packaging forced musicians away from the “fertile ground” of a great moment in experimentation between electronic music and production techniques, with genres like lover’s rock and dub and reggae and hip-hop. Danger Mouse, of Gnarls Barkley fame, has clearly nerded out on Portishead’s production techniques—a casual listener can hear it in his dense atmospherics. It has thinned out traces in James Blake and Toronto’s The Weeknd. More than anything, says Wheaton, it’s licensed people to bring influences together they normally wouldn’t.

Click here to read an excerpt of Wheaton's 33 1/3 on Portishead's Dummy... and here to buy a copy. (or you could go to your friendly neighborhood bookshop!)

New Release! Portishead's Dummy

2011-10-06T15:17:00.005-04:00

We are very please to announce that R. J. Wheaton's 33 1/3 on Portishead's Dummy is on shelves as they hit the US and Canada for a series of concerts throughout the month of October. We've got an excerpt from the book for your reading pleasure below. Feel free to hit up @dummy333 on Twitter as well.

* * * * *

Geoff Barrow recalled in 2010 of Dummy that:

The strangest thing, and the most annoying thing, is that “chill-out” thing, that’s come out of it. For me. Dummy as chill-out, yuppie, shagging music. It wasn’t supposed to be about that. It wasn’t like something to kind of like chill to. It was actually supposed to be quite harsh, and alternative, and noisy.

That potential for easy listening was something that the band had worked against from the outset. Barrow remembered, as the band added the guitar parts to “Glory Box,” “we were like, ‘What are we doing?’ It just seemed so horribly commercial. I hated commercial music.”

The commercial reception troubled Beth Gibbons too:

You write songs and you hope you’re gonna communicate with people — half the reason you write them in the first place is that you’re feeling misunderstood and frustrated with life in general. Then it’s sort of successful and you think you’ve communicated with people, but then you start to think you haven’t communicated with them at all — you’ve turned the whole thing into a product, so then you’re even more lonely than when you started. But when you think about something like the mannekins [sic] in Blade Runner, the only reason they think they’re human is the pictures they hold.

* * *

The band left State of Art at the end of 1993 and moved to Coach House Studios to complete the album. Adrian Utley recalled that “We did go down to a big London studio to mix, but we hated the result because we weren’t used to it. We know that the studios around us have got what we need and we know the sound of them.”

It was not possible to recreate some of the State of Art material with the same character, so the original 16-track demo tracks were laid down to the 24-track at Coach House. Adrian Utley told Sound on Sound that “When you first get that vibe of the moment, it’s a pain in the arse trying to recreate it. Once it’s on tape, as far as I’m concerned, that’s it, even if it’s got little mistakes in it. To us, saying, ‘Okay, let’s go to a real studio now and do it for real’, is a ridiculous concept.”

Tim Saul describes the process as “demo-it is”:

As a producer you’ll go through months of working on a track and in your mind you’ll think, “I’m going to tidy that up later.” In the final mix. And then actually when you get to the final mix you tidy it up and you realize that you’re taking out something which actually gives it its character.

“We were quite commando at that stage,” recalls Dave McDonald. “We knew what we were doing to a degree but we weren’t sort of high-end studio bods. It’s a policy that … it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as it sounds okay.”

No rules. “There’s nothing you can’t do,” Barrow said in 1997. “To achieve a sound on a beat or on a vocal or on a guitar or whatever, there’s nothing that is wrong to achieve that sound.”

There was an aesthetic of imperfection. “I’m not so keen on modern technology,” Geoff Barrow told Spin in February 1995, “that’s why a lot of our stuff sounds rough. If you polish everything up too much, it sounds stale. Like plastic music.” Talking to Michael Goldberg in 1997, Barrow railed against the restrictive production methodology of the ’80s — “everything had to be cleaner, everything had to be tighter. It kind of squashed a lot of the emotion and mistakes and all kinds of things that go to make good music out of the music.”

The band was deliberately trying to produce music that would challenge quick absorption into the culture, a too-easy integration into the collective aural imagination.

Tim Saul remembers that:

Beth would kind of goad Geoff into not making the music sound too — not that he was [inclined to] — too formulaic. I can remember times where she would just say, “That sounds too normal.”

* * *

There are numerous moments on Dummy that confound your first reaction, that present discoveries to additional listening. Moments that defy easy listening. The album’s imperfections. “We’ve put some trapdoors in our music,” Barrow told Jaan Uhelszki in 1995.

Among them the willful detritus of the recording process. Dave McDonald remembers:

We sampled one of Adrian’s guitar loops, and it was picking up the radio. The amp was picking up the radio for some reason, just as we were doing the take on it. It was talking about Roy Orbison … that was the only take which was the perfect take. But it was damaged because it had this vocal sound in it. But we kept it — and that’s on the album somewhere … I always remember that as being very very bizarre.

The opening chords of “Roads,” so smothering, thick, so absolute, are nonetheless occasionally smudged, individual notes landing fractionally out of time with one another. At 1:25 in the same song there is a noise in the background which sounds very much like someone dropping something. It’s perfect.

There are of course the vocal intrusions — Gibbons’ voice captured to a closeness beyond intimacy. The moment, for example, near the end of “Roads” where you can clearly hear her swallowing. There is what sounds like a failed vocal sustain right at the end of the final note of “Pedestal”: a moment of gorgeous fragility. As Adrian Utley told Phil Johnson: “There was an awful lot of time spent on it though there are still things that we didn’t get right, like an out-of-time piano on one track, so there’s still a rough edge to it.”

New Release: Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace

2011-09-26T16:56:00.003-04:00

Aaron Cohen's just-released 33 1/3 on Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace is the first in the series to tackle a gospel album... and what an album it is. There's not a single song on this record that doesn't have at least one spine-tingling moment of transcendence. If you aren't familiar with it, I highly suggest you get to know it. Here is the first chapter of Aaron's book to give you a taste...

* * * * *

Aretha Franklin could have proclaimed whatever she wanted when she walked up the aisle of the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles, on January 13, 1972. Her performance would be the first of two nights there and her introduction, the audience’s cheers, and an arsenal of microphones and cameras, gave her the foundation and anticipation to shout in a voice that had become internationally familiar. Still, at that church, when Franklin wasn’t singing, she hardly said anything.

Franklin was away from Detroit, where she was raised, and New York, where she lived, but a longtime friend, Rev. James Cleveland, led the New Temple service in front of his choir and her working band. Another minister, her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was in the house — as were her sisters and a couple of mentors. Her Young, Gifted and Black album would be released less than two weeks later, but she never mentioned that in the church. Neither did Cleveland nor her father. Aretha’s sense of style spoke for itself. On both nights she wore bright gowns, and dangling jeweled earrings, yet not an amount of glitter that could be called distracting. Her eyeliner and lipstick enhanced what may have been a shy smile. During those two nights, she sang religious songs with a fervor that incited ecstatic shouts from the congregation, and almost the same reaction from the seasoned musicians working alongside her. Other than unleashing her luminous vocal sound, nothing that Aretha Franklin said pronounced her as one of the most popular and influential singers on the planet. On those January nights she just seemed appreciative and eager to collaborate. About six months later, Atlantic would release the double-album Amazing Grace, which documented those nights. It remains the biggest selling LP of her career.

Franklin never had to say outright how much recording in the church meant to her. But it can be inferred from her 1974 appearance on the television quiz show “What’s My Line?” When asked about her trajectory, her answer was the sort of laconic statement that has always typified her interviews: “I did sing in the young people’s choir in my father’s church — I started there,” Franklin said simply. “And from there, here.”

She left out a few high points on that quiz show. As the world knows, most of her hit singles had been recorded by that time. National magazines featured her on the cover, and she had become a generational icon even before a nostalgia industry conceived of such a role. Still, Franklin’s polite and brief words on “What’s My Line?” summing up where she came from, and what she’s accomplished, didn’t acknowledge any of that, as if none of it mattered. But through her polite terse statement, she indicated the one thing that mattered a great deal.

The familiar Franklin narrative goes like this: Daughter of a famous minister, Aretha Franklin began singing gospel as a girl; crossed over to jazz-inflected pop; achieved little initial success; then, working with a street-smart producer, brought her earliest church background to a grittier take on r&b became American soul royalty.

All of which contains some truth, yet misses the most interesting part of the story.

Here’s another version: Daughter of an influential minister, Aretha Franklin accompanied her father on the gospel circuit, where she remained close with the music’s most celebrated singers. She was only about a generation re-moved from this genre’s creation. Going secular, she eventually worked with a consistent team of musicians who ideally complemented her voice during the late ’60s and early ’70s. Franklin brought that group and her family to that Baptist church in Los Angeles and recorded Amazing Grace during those two January nights in 1972. For generations of gospel singers, the album is more influential than any of her internationally adored secular songs. Almost 40 years later, Franklin remained tied to her church roots, holding revivals in Detroit and singing at Albertina Walker’s Chicago funeral in 2010, a few weeks before her own serious health concerns curtailed several months of public and media appearances.

So Aretha Franklin began in the church and — as she and her father said time and again — never left. She just stayed on her own terms. Unlike Dinah Washington, she made the road from God to earthly romance a two-way street. Unlike Al Green, she never became ordained while making this circular trip. And, unlike Sam Cooke, few minded when Franklin moved back and forth from this divide. Even today, to call her a gospel artist is not a misnomer. True, her most recognized songs are secular (though maybe not so purely: at the Hollywood Bowl, in June 2009, she ended “Freeway of Love” by calling out to Jesus — an odd juxtaposition, but not that rare). [The combination recurs in r&b performers’ arsenal: at the 1989 Chicago Blues Festival, Ernie K. Doe called out to his savior during a 20-minute version of “Mother-in-Law.”] And her mezzo-soprano delivery owes as much — if not more — to her family, friends, and gospel legends such as Clara Ward, as it does to blues/jazz hero Washington. While gospel fans debate whether the music was at its creative height in the late ’40s/early–’50s or late-’60s/early-’70s, Franklin grew up in the center of the action during the former era and achieved her artistic and commercial peak throughout the latter.

Amazing Grace also became a milestone because of Franklin’s call-and-response with her collaborators. Within the church, singer/pianist/arranger Cleveland’s vocal tone and compositions are even more influential than Franklin’s voice. He also brought choirs to a higher level of precision. But Cleveland never worked with a more accomplished rhythm section than on this album, primarily Franklin’s working band of bassist Chuck Rainey, drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie and guitarist Cornell Dupree. The group and environment gave Franklin the space and support to sing with more freedom than she had when she cranked out two- or three-minute singles throughout the preceding decade.

“It was just an overwhelming sunshine wonderful moment in time,” said Atlantic engineer Gene Paul, who worked on Amazing Grace. “Because of the love and not worrying about making a hit record. I saw [producer] Jerry Wexler looking at her like she was really in her place. Perhaps the most delightful moment in making a record is not having to be involved in making a hit, and just making beautiful music.”

Still, the popular media rarely present her journey from a gospel perspective, and so this album remains frequently overlooked. For instance, when Rolling Stone named Franklin the greatest singer of the rock era in November 2008, Amazing Grace wasn’t mentioned in Mary J. Blige’s written tribute that accompanied the cover. A few months after Franklin’s 50th birthday in 1992, Rhino released the four-disc compilation, Queen of Soul: The Atlantic Recordings, yet included only one song from her most successful LP.

During those two January nights in Los Angeles, Franklin’s family, colleagues, and congregants inside the church helped shape the music, but Amazing Grace also touched on social and political changes far outside its doors. She took the bold step to co-produce an album that connects the historic music of the African American church, contemporary pop, and Afrocentric fashion, and in so doing presented herself as a modern black woman who could make her own artistic demands. As critics, scholars, and Franklin herself have weighed in on how “Respect” and “Think” reflected the burgeoning black pride movements of the ’60s, the optimism that infused Amazing Grace con-veyed its own meaning during the tumultuous early ’70s. Still, while the album looked to the future through its arrangements and delivery, Franklin consciously reached back to the roots of a tradition: most of the songs on the album were those that she heard, and first sang, at her father’s side. All of which made this record stand out from the gospel-pop crossovers that had been in vogue at that time. Rather than writing or interpreting new compositions (as The Staple Singers did) or focus on mixing current pop with reworked hymns (as the Edwin Hawkins Singers did), most of the repertoire was written a couple of decades earlier. Few soul stars of that time emphasized an older generation’s style and songs on albums. Her contemporaries in rock — The Beatles, Rolling Stones — were not averse to interpreting, say, Little Richard or Howlin’ Wolf. But unlike Franklin, they didn’t grow up with their earliest influences visiting their homes.

If all of this seems like a heavy load for four sides of vinyl, Amazing Grace has shouldered this responsibility for nearly 40 years. Poet Nikki Giovanni, a friend of Franklin, points to the title track for how it bundles the singer’s personal history, the state of black America and an image of composer John Newton’s immoral career in human trafficking.

“The song itself is, in my opinion, post-civil rights,” Giovanni said. “Because you had this slaver who began to understand that, ‘Oh, this isn’t a good idea selling human beings.’ Aretha is just so key to everything: She too is saying, ‘We have to change. That’s all “Amazing Grace” stands for. It’s time to change. We can no longer do what we did. And she’s going to be the person to reach generations. She’s going to go back to my mother, my grandmother and she’s going to go forward. So she’s in the same position as what the title of the album is saying. Didn’t James Brown sing, ‘Money won’t change you but time is taking you on/ Get it, get it, get down with it’? But it’s not James carrying the cultural weight that Aretha did. I’ve got nothing against James, but Aretha was a princess, she came with credentials, so she had to be taken seriously.”

More on Clint Eastwood and Paul Nelson

2011-09-25T16:55:00.000-04:00

Conversations With Clint Eastwood

2011-09-12T10:24:00.002-04:00

Though it may not be explicitly music-related, we figured that quite a few of you might be interested in a film book we are very excited about around these parts lately. We are very proud to publish the late journalist Paul Nelson's lost interviews with Clint Eastwood later this month, in a volume edited by Kevin Avery titled Conversations With Clint: Paul Nelson's Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood 1979-1983. These intimate and revealing interviews come from a pivotal time in Eastwood's career as he was beginning to make the leap into directing his own films as well as acting in them. Originally planned as a cover story profile of Eastwood for Rolling Stone (Nelson was most widely recognized as a music critic), the interviews were never synthesized into a finished piece and never saw the light of day...until now.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has run some excerpts from the interviews in this morning's edition, including the foreword by novelist (and future 33 1/3 author) Jonathan Lethem, which you can read here.

2011-09-09T15:21:00.005-04:00

I've had these posts from the WFMU blog bookmarked for a while now... time to set them free.

If you like these kids playing My Bloody Valentine songs at home (some of them even go full Jazzmaster!), you might like Mike McGonigal's 33 1/3 about Loveless.
If you are a fan of these awesomely heavy (and rare) early Kraftwerk live videos, I would like to suggest our edited collection of essays on Kraftwerk edited by Sean Albiez and David Pattie.
If you found this Velvet Underground vs. Emerson, Lake & Palmer bar graph amusing, I've got two recommendations for you: Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s and Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 on the first VU record. And for good measure, here's another inside joke for the prog fans out there.
In a similar vein, this very scientific graph titled "Harpsichord Sales, 1600-2010" is worth it for the comments alone.

Thanks, WFMU! Keep up the good work...

The League Table, Sept 2011

2011-09-07T19:04:00.002-04:00

It was pointed out to me that we haven't posted one of these in a while... So, if you're into this stuff, here's a chart showing how the books have done - with the bestselling title (never to be dethroned?) at the top, obviously.

For some added info this time around, I've included the year of publication for each volume; of course, the longer the series goes on, the more of a mountain the newer books have to climb.

Neutral Milk Hotel 2005
Celine Dion 2007
Rolling Stones (Exile) 2005
Radiohead (OK Computer) 2004
The Kinks 2003
Velvet Underground 2004
Joy Division 2004
The Smiths 2003
The Beatles 2004
David Bowie 2005
Bob Dylan 2006
The Beastie Boys 2006
The Beach Boys 2006
My Bloody Valentine 2007
The Pixies 2006
Led Zeppelin 2005
Pink Floyd 2003
DJ Shadow 2005
Neil Young 2003
Love 2003
The Band 2005
The Replacements 2004
Jimi Hendrix 2004
Jeff Buckley 2005
Captain Beefheart 2007
Black Sabbath 2008
Sonic Youth 2007
Steely Dan 2007
R.E.M. 2005
Brian Eno 2009
Magnetic Fields 2006
The Ramones 2005
Slayer 2008
Dusty Springfield 2003
Elliott Smith 2009
Nirvana 2006
Minutemen 2007
Tom Waits 2007
Bruce Springsteen 2005
Guided by Voices 2006
Prince 2004
Elvis Costello 2005
Belle & Sebastian 2007
James Brown 2004
The Who 2006
Nick Drake 2007
Stone Roses 2006
Big Star 2009
Throbbing Gristle 2008
The Byrds 2007
U2 2007
Joni Mitchell 2006
Jethro Tull 2004
Patti Smith 2008
Afghan Whigs 2008
Sly and the Family Stone 2006
The MC5 2005
Pavement 2010
Abba 2004
Public Enemy 2010
Wire 2009
Ween 2011
Stevie Wonder 2007
Nas 2009
The Pogues 2008
Flying Burrito Brothers 2008
PJ Harvey 2007
A Tribe Called Quest 2007
Radiohead (Kid A) 2010
Madness 2009
Nine Inch Nails 2011
Slint 2010
Guns N Roses 2006
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole 2009
Flaming Lips 2009
Richard & Linda Thompson 2008
Rolling Stones (Girls) 2011
Van Dyke Parks 2010
AC DC 2010
Johnny Cash 2011
Television 2011
Fleetwood Mac 2010
Dinosaur Jr 2011

Something worth hearing in NYC on September 11th

2011-09-07T12:44:00.001-04:00

REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11:
ON THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF SEPT. 11, 2001
WILLIAM BASINSKI: THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS
WORLD PREMIERE LIVE ORCHESTRATION
MUSIC OF SCHNITTKE, MARSHALL, & GOLIJOV
THE WORDLESS MUSIC ORCHESTRA
RYAN MCADAMS, CONDUCTOR

A free concert on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, at The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Wordless Music Orchestra will perform a world premiere live orchestration by Maxim Moston of William Basinski's ambient masterwork The Disintegration Loops, dlp 1.1, preceded by three other works of musical memory and remembrance: Ingram Marshall's Fog Tropes II, Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae, and Alfred Schnittke's Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief, as arranged and generously provided for this concert by the Kronos Quartet. This program will be performed on Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 3:30 p.m., and is fully free with museum admission to audience members of all ages. This concert has been made possible by The Metabolic Studio and is co-presented by Wordless Music and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Staff Picks - August 30

2011-08-30T11:18:00.004-04:00

Just in case you're interested, we've asked various members of our staff to contribute a little cultural tidbit/random thought/funny link...we're calling them "staff picks." Here's a list of what we're into this week and stay tuned for bi-weekly updates.

John Mark:

Online, I’ve been reading Brand New, which covers the world of corporate logo re-designs and its sister site Art of the Menu, which is about menu design. I have no idea why I enjoy these so much, but find them oddly compelling. http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ and http://www.underconsideration.com/artofthemenu/

Offline: Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov from Melville House's excellent reprint series The Neversink Library. Utterly heartbreaking and engrossing so far... http://mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=543

Ally Jane:

There are hundreds of photography blogs devoted to creepy abandoned places, but no one does creepy and abandoned quite like the Japanese. They even have a word for it: Haikyo, literally “abandoned place.” http://www.haikyo.org/ . Years of neglect after periods of boom have lead to an incredible array of abandoned real estate developments, theme parks, hospitals and factories. One Haiyko photographer explains the mysterious ruins of the “Royal House” in a twisted and fascinating story here: http://gakuranman.com/the-royal-house-haikyo/.

Katie:

Book: Madam Bovary – still reading it, and waiting for the big ‘thrill’ that is to be had while reading this modern novel

Movie: Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies – how the beginning of filmmaking affected these artists and their cubist movement. Interesting concept, but the movie got stale. Not sure if all those voiceovers would have been allowed, had Scorsese directed it….

David:

I’m just starting Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the follow-up to his brilliant The Magicians from a couple of years ago. Fantasy is a genre about which I know very little so I’m guessing that 90% of the references buried in these books fly right over my head – however, one of the best things for me about Grossman’s writing is that he finds it wonderfully difficult to resist a silly joke. In this new novel we’ve already had “Fillory Clinton” and there are dozens of fun, childish passages like this:

“Jesus Christ” was an expression the younger Fillorians had picked up from their new rulers. It was impossible to explain to them what it actually meant. They were convinced it was something dirty.

And here’s some linkage for you: Dan Kois, author of our excellent 33 1/3 volume on Iz, reviewed The Magician King for the NYT the other day:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/the-magician-king-by-lev-grossman-book-review.html

How I spent my hurricane vacation:

2011-08-30T10:45:00.003-04:00

Watching old youtube clips from The Dukes of Hazzard featuring country musicians performing at The Boar's Nest to pay off trumped up speeding tickets from Boss Hogg's Celebrity Speedtrap. Enjoy! (Embedding has been disabled on several of these videos, unfortunately, but you can click through.)
Buck Owens
The Oak Ridge Boys
Johnny Paycheck
Tammy Wynette

Necessary viewing

2011-08-25T15:50:00.001-04:00

Stevie Nicks gets her hair did.

Television on the Radio

2011-08-16T15:45:00.005-04:00

Bryan Waterman (Television's Marquee Moon) will be on WNYC's Soundcheck on Wednesday, August 17 from appx 2:30-3:00pm EST. If you can't tune in live, ~~I will update this post with an archive tomorrow.~~ here's the link!

Wayne Coyne & Mark Richardson

2011-08-10T09:55:00.000-04:00

Ed McKay bookstore in Raleigh, NC is curating an amazing series of artist and author talks and panels September 8th, 9th, and 10th. The last of the series features Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and our own author of the 33 1/3 on Zaireeka, Mark Richardson. But I'm going to repost the entire lineup because it all looks fantastic.
THE EDWARD MCKAY USED BOOKS & MORE ARTIST AND AUTHOR SERIES AT HOPSCOTCH 2011

Thursday, Sept. 8
Raleigh City Museum, 3–5 p.m.
Present the Past: Honoring and Outstripping Influences
Everyone has influences, from parental figures who shape your attitude to friends who influence your actions. This panel gathers artists who turn what they’ve learned from clear, identifiable forebears into something altogether different. William Tyler, for instance, is an acoustic guitarist who has clearly moved beyond the mold of John Fahey acolytes, while Jamie Stewart’s magpie tendencies in the band Xiu Xiu create a fascinating, fresh web of references and meanings. Today, they’ll talk about how they’ve gotten beyond the past.

WITH

Rhys Chatham
William Tyler
Jamie Stewart (of Xiu Xiu)
Cheyenne Marie Mize
Yair Yona
David Daniell (of Rhys Chatham Guitar Trio, San Agustin) Brian Corum (of Lonnie Walker)
Moderated by: Grayson Currin

Friday, Sept. 9
Raleigh City Museum, 3–5 p.m.
Simple Words: The Power of Narrative Songs
The number of ways you can write and then record a song are infinite. But some songwriters seem to find a way to tell us a story that, though it may be personal to them, feels personal to us, too. The Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood is among the best ever with these sorts of songs; he’ll join this panel of fellow standout writers and the head of a record label built on such traditions to talk about why narrative in music can be so very compelling.

WITH

Patterson Hood (of Drive-By Truckers)
John Vanderslice
Dolphus Ramseur (of Ramseur Records)
David Menconi (of The News & Observer)
Heather McEntire (of Mount Moriah, Bellafea)
James Jackson Toth (of Wooden Wand)
Ross Flournoy (of Apex Manor)
Moderated by: David Klein

Saturday, Sept. 10
Raleigh City Museum, 3–5 p.m.
The Bubble: The Limits of Pop Music
The Flaming Lips’ 1997 album, Zaireeka, consisted of four compact discs, each holding one stereo track for each of the eight songs on the album. In order for the album to be properly heard, these four discs had to be played simultaneously. Indeed, if any act in the past two decades has challenged what the notion of pop music might be, it’s The Flaming Lips. The band’s Wayne Coyne will be joined by Mark Richardson, the Editor in Chief of Pitchfork Media and the author of a recent book about Zaireeka. Others who have explored the core and fringes of pop, both as musicians and critics, will also speak.

WITH

Wayne Coyne (of The Flaming Lips)
Mark Richardson (Editor in Chief of Pitchfork Media and author of Zaireeka)
Peter Holsapple (of the dB’s and R.E.M.)
Julianna Barwick
Sam Herring (of Future Islands)
David Tompkins (author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks)
Moderated by: Brian Howe

MORE INFO HERE.

Early '70s Radio

2011-08-04T17:17:00.003-04:00

We are proud to announce the release of "Early '70s Radio" by Kim Simpson. The title speaks volumes for the content and there's a bit about the book over on Continuum's Film and Media Studies Blog.

Kim Simpson explores the different formats that emerged from both a technical and a historical perspective, definitely Required reading for the radio enthusiast. Whoever thought the "pod cast" would replace the radio show was seriously disturbed.

Ohh and if you like radio, I mean really like radio, check out these two radio history-heavy 33 1/3rds.
John Dougan's "The Who's The Who Sell Out"
and
Bruce Eaton's "Big Star's Radio City"

Kim Simpson has a blog about the book which is quite mesmerizing. www.early70sradio.com

Distilled Christgau

2011-08-03T13:11:00.002-04:00

I once had a professor who tried to explain the frustration around translating Russian curses (or was it Hungarian? Or Czech?) into English, saying that for a native speaker on a real tear, each curse added to the string multiplies the previous curse exponentially and lays a foundation for the next, so in effect you have an insanely intricate and interconnected castle of curses being constructed around the speaker.

Courtesy of the WFMU blog, here is the music criticism equivalent to slavic cursing:

The Consumed Guide is a text composed from thousands of negative words and phrases assembled from 13, 090 reviews by Robert Christgau and turned into a single review.

Brilliant.

Bono & Steve Catanzarite's 33 1/3 on Achtung Baby

2011-07-28T15:04:00.006-04:00

For certain volumes in the series, it is not unfathomable for the author to get to meet their book's subjects. But for artists at a certain echelon of fame...well, you just don't expect it to happen. Here's the story of one of those unlikely meetings from Stephen Catanzarite, author of the 33 1/3 on U2's Achtung Baby.

"Standing backstage less than a half-hour before U2 hit the stage in Pittsburgh, writer and FOB (Friend of Bono) Neil McCormick presented Bono with a copy of "Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall." Neil is a fan of the book and had offered to get a copy to the man himself. It took him two years -- he wanted to make sure the timing was right. He certainly delivered. U2 is set to release a 20th anniversary box set of "Achtung Baby" later this year, and the band has been playing several tracks from the album on its massive 360 Tour. He also scored the author with a private meeting with the legendary singer. Neil told Bono of the premise of the book: "Stephen says your album is really about the Fall of Man." Bono nodded and said "That's right, it is." He then turned to me and said "Do you know what we were going to call the album?" "Sure, 'Adam'," I replied, to which the superstar laughed and said "You're good, man." He took a copy with him, but also signed a copy for my wife. McCormick also told Bono of my theorizing of a "conservative voice" in the songs of U2. "You're a statesman in the same mold as your fellow Dubliner Edmund Burke" I said, to which Bono replied "Well, thanks -- that puts me in fantastic company."

Music writer Neil McCormick presenting Bono with a copy of the 33 1/3 volume on "Achtung Baby" as author Stephen Catanzarite looks on.

Bono and 33 1/3 author Stephen Catanzarite, taken backstage at Heinz Field, Pittsburgh.

Bono's imprimatur on the 33 1/3's "Achtung Baby" (inscribed to the author's wife).

Odds and ends...

2011-07-27T16:56:00.002-04:00

Our friends at WNYC's On The Media briefly discuss the volumes on Paul's Boutique and It Takes A Nation of Millions and conclude that "it seems like absolutely no one likes Russell Simmons." [The weekly staff picks on the blog are well worth checking out. Actually, everything about that show is worth checking out. Highly entertaining.]

The blog Psychobabble has some very nice things to say about the volume on Marquee Moon:

[Waterman's] book serves as a well-researched biography of the band’s earliest days, which means it tells the portion of Television’s story that will most interest fans...Compact yet comprehensive, Bryan Waterman’s Marquee Moon crams a lot of interesting information and insights onto its 211 tiny pages.

Oh, and also, THE WU-TANG CLAN NEEDS AN INTERN.

Pretty Hate Machine / Song Cycle

2011-07-22T09:57:00.001-04:00

I've got two very nice items to share with you today:

The first is a fantastic review of Richard Henderson's volume on Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle from Crawdaddy.

"Henderson’s impeccably researched volume tells the story of a young vagabond landing in Los Angeles and falling in with an elite circuit of musicians and intellectuals. Henderson traces Van Dyke Parks’ climb through Warner Brothers Records’ ranks, from a low-rung arranger to top-shelf solo artist with seemingly unlimited resources. ...Like The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross’ ability to make dense topics accessible, Richard Henderson excels at embracing the technical innards of music in a universally fascinating manner."

The second is this fascinating in-depth interview with Daphne Carr from the KEXP blog about her volume on Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine (and much more). It's very very good.

Tiny Music Makers

2011-07-21T15:35:00.002-04:00

From way back in 2005, here are some nice pocket histories of five short but ubiquitous songs, if you could call them that, in the words of their composers (Apple start up chord, THX sound, Microsoft sound, etc.)

"He had developed what is now called the THX sound system. It was to premiere with Lucasfilm's "Return of the Jedi." They were making a logo to go before the film. I was asked by the producer of the logo piece to do the sound. He said he wanted "something that comes out of nowhere and gets really, really big!" I allowed as to how I figured I could do something like that."

2011-07-19T17:45:00.002-04:00

Sesame Street breaks it down from Wonderful Creative.

Some recent reviews...

2011-07-14T16:14:00.005-04:00

Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal was selected by Flavorwire as one of “10 Great Books about Music by Female Writers”

Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson (“Erudite and eye-opening”) and John Darnielle's volume on Black Sabbath's Master of Reality were both reviewed as part of Pitchfork’s “Our 60 Favorite Music Books” feature. Here's a quote from the Sabbath review:

“Darnielle-- who worked as a nurse in a mental hospital and presumably met quite a few smart, lost kids like Roger-- speaks to the soul-damaging aspects of locking up problem teens and offers a piece of music criticism that illuminates the edifying qualities of heavy metal.”

Bryan Waterman's volume on Television’s Marquee Moon was reviewed on Crawdaddy!:

“Waterman [has done] extensive research, culling from NYU’s archive of Richard Hell’s papers, rock journalist reviews from the era (Christgau, Bangs, Kent, et al.), and extensive interviews, making sure to maintain the composure of an academic thesis, and not a fan boy rag.”

A review also appeared in This Ain't The Summer of Love:

"Fans of the band should consider "Marquee Moon" as required reading. The book will also be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of anyone who is seriously interested in the history of the CBGB scene and the early-mid 70's era musical and artistic landscape of New York City as a whole."

And Bryan was also interviewed by Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

And last but not least, Tony ~~Toth~~ ~~Yost~~ Tost's volume on Johnny Cash’s American Recordings was reviewed in the Milwaukee Express

“Tost is like a foster son of Greil Marcus, beating his own path into old, weird America through the life of the Man in Black.”

As the summer kicks into full gear, I would do well to remind you of the wonderful podcast that is Tony Tost's America (also findable and free in the itunes store). Seems to go well with heat and dust.

Nation in Love with Girl from Record Store

2011-07-12T21:59:00.002-04:00

One of my all-time favourite Onion stories, from June 2001...

"[Metzler] works at the coolest record store in Athens, and she's totally up on all the latest stuff," said Ryan Griggs, 48, a television repairman from Salem, OR. "You have no idea how many people go in there every day and buy some obscure Go-Betweens B-sides collection or the latest Stephin Merritt side project just to try to impress her."

Guest Blog: Scott Tennent on pre-Slint band Maurice

2011-07-12T09:27:00.002-04:00

Maurice (Pre-Slint) Demos Now Available

If you've read my book on Spiderland, you know that one of my main arguments in the opening chapter is that the significance of Squirrel Bait in the pre-Slint soup is somewhat overstated, considering David Grubbs wrote the majority of that band's music and lyrics and that Brian McMahan and Britt Walford were not really in the band at the same time. But there's a recorded documentation of Squirrel Bait and all those names are in the liner notes, so there you go. Rather, in my interviews for the book, it was made pretty clear to me that another band had a much more direct tie to Slint: Maurice...

Linkage to the full post: http://prettygoeswithpretty.typepad.com/pgwp/2011/07/maurice-pre-slint-demos-now-available.html

David Pajo has made the full demos available on his bandcamp page: http://music.davidpajo.com/releases

Enjoy!

Cash / Clash

2011-07-07T11:39:00.008-04:00

A little reminder that Tony Tost will be talking about his 33 1/3 on Johnny Cash's American Recordings at Ravenna Third Place in Seattle TONIGHT, July 7th at 7pm.

[Mnemonic: 7/7 at 7.]

You can read an excerpt from Tony's book in the Arkansas Times here.

It's also worth pointing out that the Cash book, Rolling Stones Some Girls, Television's Marquee Moon, and Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me are all available in Kindle format now, along with 50-odd other titles in the series.

And now for something completely different: Clash Magazine has a cover story on New Order's 30th anniversary, and here's a little piece on the designer's approach to the cover art concept. Pretty cool.

Seattle: Johnny Cash Event, Thursday July 7th

2011-07-03T19:46:00.002-04:00

News on Tony Tost's excellent book about American Recordings...

First up, if you're in and around Seattle, please do stop by Ravenna Third Place Books this Thursday (July 7th) to hear Tony reading from and discussing his book - it kicks off at 7pm. Further details can be found here.

You can also read reviews of Tony's book:

In TinyMixTapes here

In the Nashville City Paper here

and in the Sun Post Weekly here

2011-06-30T10:30:00.007-04:00

Images from Tuesday's event at Word Brooklyn...

Video evidence!

2011-06-29T15:31:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Greco at pigeonsbutterfliesandairplanes, we have video evidence of last night's event at Word Brooklyn.

2011-06-28T09:58:00.004-04:00

Cyrus and Bryan will be talking Stones and Television on WFMU in about 30 mins. Stream here. They'll also be at Word Brooklyn tonight at 7pm.

* * * * *

Here's Henry Rollins interviewing Dinosaur Jr. in NYC while someone throws his shoes at him.

His response is great... Once upon a time he probably would have jumped into the audience and started cracking skulls, but he seems to have mellowed to the level of Fugazi's legendary, more cerebral, crowd control.

* * * * *

Via WFMU's blog, rare "Tiger Mountain"-era promo video of Brian Eno:

Party time in Brooklyn

2011-06-27T10:15:00.004-04:00

Two events worth checking out this week in North Brooklyn regarding the 33 1/3s on Rolling Stones' Some Girls and Television's Marquee Moon.

FIRST:
Tuesday, June 28, 7pm (free!) at Word Brooklyn in Greenpoint: reading/signing/discussion/etc. Here's the facebook page.

SECOND:

Thursday, June 30th, 8pm ($10) at 285 Kent in Williamsburg: Launch party with bands on stage (Real Estate, Widowspeak, Vacation)

Complete info is HERE. See you there?

End Tymes Noise & Liberation Festival

2011-06-21T11:01:00.003-04:00

Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation :: June 24-26 @ Silent Barn & Outpost :: Ridgewood NY

A 3-day festival dedicated to DIY experimental music and video art. With workshops, discussions, screenings, and live music performances.

Phill Niblock (NYC)
GX Jupitter-Larsen / aka The Haters (CA)
Gen Ken Montgomery (NYC)
AMK (CA)
Damion Romero (CA)
The Rat Bastard Experience (FL)
Yellow Tears (NYC)
Bruce Tovsky (NYC)
Katherine Liberovskaya & Al Margolis (NYC)
David Linton (NYC)
Vertonen (IL)
Mike Shiflet (OH)
Crank Sturgeon (ME)
IDM Theftable (ME)
Andrew Coltrane (MI)
Tom Grimley (CA)
Sick Llama (MI)
Cowards (NYC)
Work/Death (RI)
Dog Lady (MI)
Bran(…)Pos (CA)
Novasak (CO)
Fatale (IL)
BWT (IL, ex-Is)
KILT (NM/NYC)
Monsturo (CA)
Page27 (CO)
Postcommodity (OK/NM)
Brown (OR)
Jeff Carey (MD)
Liam Mooney (CA)
Don Haugen (OR)
Twisty Cat (NYC)
Hex Breaker Quartet (NYC)
Kyle Clyde (NYC)
ISA Christ (NYC)
EID (NJ)
Rust Worship (NYC)

Tickets here. Interviews with a few of the founders/participants here.

More NYC playlists courtesy of Waterman & Patell

2011-06-20T14:09:00.002-04:00

Kicking things off in this installment is our own David Barker...

David Barker

This afternoon’s installment in our guest playlist extravaganza comes from the 33 1/3 series’ mastermind, David Barker. David, a UK native with a PhD in English from Newcastle University, is U.S. Editorial Director at Continuum Books in New York. He conceived and launched the 33 1/3 series in 2003. (Here’s a 2005 interview conducted by Daphne Carr, who six years later is the author of the series volume on Nine Inch Nails.) Cyrus and I owe David a special debt for accepting our proposals and keeping our volumes on track. Thanks, too, for participating in this playlist series.

Peter Kay

This morning’s list comes from our friend Peter Kay, who describes himself as a NYC native who works in book publishing” and adds: “He wishes he had gone to see New Order at the Ukrainian National Home instead of Marshall Crenshaw at the Pier.” Follow peter on twitter @pkay225

Jonathan Williger

This afternoon’s installment in our NYC-themed playlist marathon comes from Jonathan Williger, WNYU and #wny11 alum and founder/proprietor of the Brooklyn-based label Blackburn Recordings. (Pelly Twins interview from early 2010.) He writes: “I was trying to write little blurbs about each one and then remembered I’m not a music writer. hopefully this is a nice change of pace.” Follow Jonathan on Twitter at @blackburnrecs

Bart Plantenga

This morning’s list comes from Bart Plantenga, host of the Amsterdam-based radio show Wreck This Mess (formerly on WFMU). He’s also author of the (NYC set) novel Spermatogonia: The Isle of Man and another novel, Beer Mystic, which he describes as being “about beer and mysticism in NYC c. 1987 and is currently going around the world excerpt by excerpt via the world’s longest pub crawl.” Follow him on Twitter @bartplantenga.

Jen Pelly

Our Friday afternoon playlist comes from Jenn Pelly, a Brooklyn-based music writer and recent NYU grad in English and journalism. Her music writing, often about the current BK DIY scene, has appeared on Altered Zones, Thought Catalog, and elsewhere and she maintains the weblog Pelly Twins with her sister Liz, who writes about music for the Boston Phoenix. Jenn is a WNYU alum (though she’ll host the New Afternoon Show through this summer) and is also a veteran of #wny11 and the first run of my Downtown Scenes course last summer. Follow her on Twitter @jennpelly.

Previous installments of the guest playlist series related to Patell and Waterman's 33 1/3 volumes on The Rolling Stones' Some Girls and Television's Marquee Moon can be found here and here.

NYC folks: here's a rundown of a few events on the schedule.

Monday, June 20 (tonight!): 7 pm at McNally-Jackson in Soho

Sunday, June 26: Launch Party with time/place tbd, but somewhere in Williamsburg

Tuesday, June 28: 7 pm at Word Books in Greenpoint

And because I've got your attention, I'll just throw this song into the mix:

Television/Stones reading at McNally-Jackson

2011-06-16T14:52:00.002-04:00

Monday, June 20th at 7pm: Cyrus Patell (Rolling Stones' Some Girls) and Bryan Waterman (Television's Marquee Moon) will be reading at McNally-Jackson in NYC.

52 Prince Street
(between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York City, NY 10012 (map)
212.274.1160

If you can't make this one, they'll also be reading on the 28th at Word in Brooklyn.

More NYC playlists

2011-06-15T11:32:00.003-04:00

We have some new NYC-centric guest playlists from 33 1/3 authors Patell and Waterman's blog. The first roundup of guest playlists can be found here. By way of (re)introduction, Cyrus Patell wrote the just released 33 1/3 on The Rolling Stones' Some Girls, and Bryan Waterman wrote the just released volume on Television's Marquee Moon. They've asked some friends (including a few 33 1/3 authors in this batch) to fork over some essential NYC tracks, and here they are. Click on the name to go to the playlist.

Trouble (WFMU)
This morning’s playlist comes from veteran WFMU DJ Trouble, whose show remains on the summer schedule in its current Tuesday morning position, 9 to 12. (Be sure to tune in on June 28, when she’ll host Cyrus and me to talk about our books and NYC music in the 70s.) Trouble’s list, she writes, is “heavy on the art and outer borough essentials that propel nyc…”

Daphne Brooks
This morning’s playlist comes from Daphne Brooks, who teaches in Princeton’s English Department and Center for African American Studies. Her books include Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 and the 33 1/3 volume on Jeff Buckley’s Grace, which she treats not only as an inroad to the East Village in the 80s and early 90s, but also as a window onto the long history of race and popular music in America. She’s also a teacher and member of the board of directors at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls.

E-Squared, aka Eric E.
This afternoon’s installment in our NYC playlist marathon comes from Eric E., aka Esquared, long-time denizen of the downtown blogosphere and virtual friend of PWHNY who describes himself as “a gentrified new yorker who’s finally appreciating the past, and slowly appreciating the present, and hopefully the future of nyc.” You can follow him on Tumblr or @cire_e on Twitter.

Amanda Petrusich
This afternoon’s playlist comes from Amanda Petrusich, a staff writer for Pitchfork and senior contributing editor for Paste. Her books include It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music and Pink Moon (33 1/3 series). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Spin, the Village Voice, the Onion A.V. Club, the Oxford American, ReadyMade, eMusic.com, MSN.com, and elsewhere. She compiles the weekly pop listings for the Times. She’s currently at work on a book about record collectors, as will probably be plain by her selections below. Follow her on Twitter at @amandapetrusich.

I hope you are enjoying these as much as I am. Bryan and Cyrus assure me there are even more in the pipeline.

Quintessentially NYC

2011-06-13T14:06:00.006-04:00

Cyrus R. K. Patell and Bryan Waterman are two NYU professors who have written just-released 33 1/3s on two crucial NYC albums of 1977: The Rolling Stones' Some Girls and Television's Marquee Moon, respectively. Over on their blog, they have asked some contributors to share their lists of "favorite NYC records," loosely defined. What follows is a proper schooling taught straight out of the textbook of youtube. There are more to come, but here is a roundup of what I've been remiss in posting in the last week. Click the name at the top of each paragraph to go to that person's list.

Marvin Taylor
Our first list comes from Marvin Taylor, Director of Fales Library and Special Collections at NYU, which hosts an extraordinary collection of material related to New York’s Downtown Scene in the 70s and 80s. Taylor also edited The Downtown Book, which we highly recommend.

Tim B, aka Karateboogaloo
This morning’s list comes from Tim B, proprietor of one of our favorite rock ‘n’ roll ephemera blogs, Stupefaction, a constant source of pleasure. He’s also one of the minds behind The New York Nobody Sings. Follow him on Twitter @karateboogaloo.

Caryn Rose
This morning’s playlist comes from our friend Caryn Rose, a Brooklyn-based writer and photographer who documents rock-and-roll, baseball and urban life. Her first novel, B-Sides and Broken Hearts, will be released in Summer 2011. Follow her on Twitter: @clr & @metsgrrl.

Dave Mandl
This morning’s playlist comes from Dave Mandl, WFMU DJ and music editor at The Brooklyn Rail. Follow him on Twitter: @dmandl.

Alex Smith
This morning’s list comes from Alex Smith at Flaming Pablum, a Village blog with a 70s-80s East Village soul. He also contributes to The New York that Nobody Sings.

Nathan Larson
This morning’s list comes from author/musician Nathan Larson, who began his artistic life in the DC hardcore punk scene, playing in bands such as Swiz and eventually serving as lead guitarist in Shudder To Think. He relocated to NYC in 1989. Today he is best known as a film composer, having scored upwards of 30 films, including Boys Don’t Cry, Dirty Pretty Things, and The Woodsman. His debut novel The Dewey Decimal System was released May 2011 on Akashic Press. Nathan lives in Harlem with his wife Nina Persson and their son Nils. Follow him on Twitter at @natoism.

More to come...

More from Seattle:

2011-06-13T10:59:00.002-04:00

Staff recommendation from Ravenna Third Place Books for Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 on Celine Dion.

"Let’s Talk About Love is less about Celine Dion and more an exploration of taste. Wilson, who is not a Dion fan, sets off to understand why she is so poular. Wilson puts Dion in context and questions whether our artistic preferences are based on innate beauty or social conditioning.

-Andrew

Ann Arbor: 33 1/3 Reading & Listening Parties

2011-06-09T12:35:00.002-04:00

As part of the 2011 Summer Festival and the Fresh Ink Literary Arts Series in Ann Arbor, there will be a series of readings/listenings with local writers, journalists, and music aficionados reading excerpts from 33 1/3 books, followed by a guest DJ mixing from the oeuvre of the featured artist of the evening, beginning June 20th, and running for 3 weeks. A very cool idea...

Monday, June 20
Guest Reader: Bob Needham | Entertainment Director, AnnArbor.com
The Pogues’ “Rum, Sodomy & The Lash” by Jeffery T. Roesgen
WCBN DJ: Sue Dise

Monday, June 27
Guest Reader: Jeff Meyers | Managing Editor, Concentrate Media
Tom Waits' “Swordfishtrombones” by David Smay
WCBN DJ: Saramin

Monday, July 4
Guest Reader: Emlyn Chand, Writer and Book Publicist
Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” by Geoffrey Himes
WCBN DJ: Aaron Smith

All events are free. 7-9pm. Location: Arbor Brewing Company's ABC Brewpub

Sonic Boom in Seattle

2011-06-08T12:43:00.003-04:00

Spotted at Seattle's Sonic Boom Records.

You Shark Me All Night Long

2011-06-03T08:29:00.003-04:00

Interesting new research from Australia, where it appears that Great Whites are loving a bit of AC/DC.

"I've seen the sharks rub their faces on the cage where the sound is coming from as if to feel it."

They'll be rubbing their faces all over Joe Bonomo's book, next...

Do you like American Music?

2011-06-02T14:18:00.005-04:00

America now has her own National Jukebox! The Library of Congress has digitized thousands of 78s and made them available online, so you can get your fill of opera, blues, ragtime, bluegrass, yodeling, sermonizing, country and western, jazz, and so on. But be warned: the homepage features this disclaimer. "WARNING: Historical recordings may contain offensive language."
There is also a very cool slideshow of the archival preservation and digitizing process.

Hat tip to author Joe Bonomo for the link.

New Dinosaur Jr. Book from Nick Attfield

2011-06-01T12:43:00.006-04:00

Nick Attfield's incredible book is now available in stores and on the internet!

Please enjoy an excerpt below...

Also, Dave Markey's documentary film 1991:The Year Punk Broke will finally be available on DVD this Fall!

Introduction: Punk Breaks

Ever seen Dave Markey’s documentary film 1991: The Year Punk Broke?

A true classic. Disappointment that it has not yet made it to DVD, fear that it may never. For now, available only in fond memory, and on something you have to rewind.

Markey’s camera chases six American alternative rock bands as, in the dying summer of the title year, they maraud their way through the ancient cities of northwestern Europe. A kind of intoxicated grand tour, its two weeks are condensed for us into 100 minutes of film. Plenty of time to boast some good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll excess, pushed toward particularly gruesome extremes.

In one memorable moment, Thurston Moore, one of the mop-topped Sonic Youth guitar heroes, and Markey’s tongue-in-cheek narrator, tells a French interviewer about a forthcoming show. “I’m immediately gonna, like, puke on the stage,” he says, “and then douse the puke with lighter fluid, and light it, and then kick it into the audience – this entire field of 100,000 people is going to go up in flames.” And before the last performance, he promises the shattering of the last taboo. “Tonight,” he states in his trademark rhyming sing-song, “I am going to defecate on stage, because I think that is the only way to express the nature of my soul according to rock ’n’ roll: that of waste, and that of especially good taste.”

He doesn’t, but the filmed performances that intersperse the offstage antics often degrade from tight riff and lyric into skittish noise-sludge, a kind of sonic diarrhea. Mid-performance, drumsticks and other objects violate guitar necks, one example only of a catalog of traumas these instruments suffer at Sonic Youth’s hands, before, unstrung, they are put out of their misery, swung high and smashed to pieces on the stage. Kurt Cobain, meanwhile, lurches around like a drunk fighting an invisible enemy, all the while singing in a profoundly unsettling falsetto; in what will become famous scenes from the Reading Festival, he is spun around on Chris Novoselic’s shoulders before diving, brown leather and ripped denim, into the surging crowd, black Strat first. Later, decked in shorts, sweat socks, and what can only be described as some kind of white labcoat, he headbutts a floor amp before attempting to run over the top of the drum kit; the rabble roars its approval. Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more, stress his lyrics over and over, Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more.

Sonic Youth and Nirvana are Markey’s undisputed stars. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, a curiously conventional beautiful people, they prance around in the sunlight of the film’s opening sequence like pagan children. Their cultural gaucheness in these European surroundings generates much of the film’s wry humor (“What the fuck is a bratwurst? What the fuck is a bockwurst? We can’t tell the difference between a bratwurst, a bockwurst, a currywurst, a liverwurst, a knockwurst – all the wursts”). And Moore’s mock sermonizing tone, made all the more bizarre by the French subtitles that run throughout, comes to them as fluid as mother tongue. “People of the universe,” he screams, from high above a street of perplexed mid-European onlookers, “tonight will be the night that the skies will open, and spray forth the divine hand with pointed finger – and say, ‘Everybody, you are not just a duck! You are human! Go forth and thrash!’”.

Vous n’êtes pas qu’un canard, vous êtes humain! Allez de l’avant et THRASH!!!

And at the margins of these magnificent scenes, there is someone else. We first catch sight of him in crowds: waiting, bored, in the lunch line in Essen, or slumped at a plastic dinner table. Shuffling past the front apron of the stage, or ducking out of shot in the VIP tent. No Aryan wonderkid at all, he wears his dark hair long and straggly, and sports an outsized yellow trucker hat and big reflecto shades, a shirt with a gas pump, a dinner plate, and a bed on the front. He chews constantly: a roadie, surely, or soundman. Someone employed to drive a big van, or lift something heavy, knees improperly bent.

At one point, Kim Gordon – another of the luminous Sonic Youths – interviews this peculiar individual. She is playful, gently cajoles and kid-brothers him. He sounds as bored as he looks, his voice a downturned drawl, releasing only a slow-cooked, stodgy spew of irony at a rate of about ten words a minute. He edges around the same motif as Thurston Moore (“… the other day, some guy lit himself on fire on the common, and no-one even cared …”) and yet this similarity serves only to emphasize the difference between the two. Moore, the grandmaster of improv nonsensical sing-song; this man, a tuneless mutterer, from whom all passion and effort seems to have been burned out, so sarcastic that he reaches beyond sarcasm into a place where, who knows, he might actually be serious.

If only this film weren’t populated by so weird a crew of suddenly invigorated oddities, it would be a surprise when he – J Mascis – and his band – Dinosaur Jr. – appear on the festival stage, in Göttingen or Groningen or wherever. His singing voice might be only slightly less glacial than his spoken one, and his interest in those listening still minimal, but everything else is different. The hat and glasses, for one thing, are now gone, the gas pump shirt replaced by a psychedelic paisley button-down number, oddly ensembled with pristine white trousers, such as one might wear to play cricket, or make cheese.

And the playing is anything but lazy. The song, after all, is fierce as punk, and demands some serious engagement. J, answering the call, and in a direct provocation to his sciatic nerve, folds over his guitar and works it hard, one knee bent, instep inwards, as if he were performing some intensive woodworking procedure. Stepping forward to activate a pedal, he responds to the different effects unleashed as if hit by a right hand, stumbles back, loses his footing. Then head down, he launches into about two minutes of vertiginous solo, leaving it unclear at times if he is playing the guitar, or if the guitar might be playing him – flesh fist hammering metal string, or wooden body yanking sympathetic sinew.

Wherever it comes from, all this virtuosity is caught tight within the framework set out by bass and drums. Where Sonic Youth deliberately smash open their songs, halting the rhythm section to let wild sound bleed out in an unstaunched ooze, J’s band remains completely rigid. The song stays afloat: everything, more or less, keeps to the instruction manual, J’s rig is left entirely intact, and he doesn’t headbutt anything. So if it is excess, then it is also control, good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll in the most hidebound fashion; perhaps, weirdly, the most controlled few minutes in this crazy film. No bodily fluids are expressed whatsoever.

* * *

For all that J Mascis stands at the margins of Markey’s film, he is also, in a funny way, its most central character. He and his music are, after all, best prepared of any to accept the doublespeak of its title. Because if punk breaks, then punk breaks: if 1991 was the year punk broke – in the sense of broke through to mass ears – then it must also mark the moment at which it broke down, finally coughed up its revolutionary insides and accepted the white handkerchief of the mainstream. Not that J particularly approves of this transaction. It’s just that he and his music don’t much seem to care.

Whereas Thurston Moore’s sensibilities are obviously rattled. “1991 is the year that punk finally breaks through to the mass consciousness of global society,” he laments in the film’s morosest scene, sitting politely next to a croissant, breakfast napkins neatly folded. “Modern punk, as featured in Elle magazine … Mötley Crüe singing ‘Anarchy in the UK’ in a European arena in front of a hundred thousand screaming people … one of the most sickeningly candy-assed versions you’ll ever hear of it … and you read an interview with John Lydon, he just doesn’t give a fuck. To him it’s a larf.” And even when he talks the anarchic talk, it’s empty of commitment – a verbal stunt or riff of language only, the same as the unfulfilled promise of the onstage shit and puke. Surrounded by four gawky German teenagers, he answers his own demand for a manifesto: “I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture by mass marketing and commercial paranoia-behavior-control, and the first step to doing it is to destroy the record companies, do you not agree?” Well, no: Christian, Jens, and the others cannot agree, since, as he well knows, they clearly have not even the faintest idea of what he is talking about.

When punk breaks, Markey’s film seems to suggest, it is not Sonic Youth that will thrive. They are too much the children of the fifties, the adolescents of post-1968. It will have to be the next alt-rock generation, a decade Sonic Youth’s junior. This includes Nirvana, of course, but they will burn out shortly anyway. And, considerably less reckless, Dinosaur Jr. J’s focus seems to be turned inwards, not outwards; he seems just to do what he does, with no intent to make any particular statement to society. Completely aloof, a total “slacker,” he seems somehow less constrained: free to shrug his shoulders at anything anyone says to him, and, onstage, free to fuse punk abrasiveness with the indulgence of rock much more traditional.

The bottom line is, they love it all. Moore, the manic MC, can’t help but throw out references to J throughout the film. (“Is J Mascis your boyfriend?” he asks two little German girls waiting for a bus). Kim Gordon’s big-sister affection is obvious. And, in an oddly out-of-place, but telling mainstream-rock moment, the crowd sings back to J what has fast become one of his most celebrated lines, the last of a culminatory verse that strikes a particular chord in this world of 1991. It demonstrates its author’s paradoxical position – a central subject of investigation for this book, a condition stuck awkwardly out there somewhere between total alienation and total inclusion:

Sometimes I don’t thrill you

Sometimes I think I’ll kill you

Just don’t let me fuck up will you

’Cos when I need a friend it’s still you

* * *

Gil Scott-Heron, RIP

2011-05-28T09:08:00.001-04:00

Summertime 33 1/3 Love on Flavorpill

2011-05-26T14:43:00.002-04:00

The folks over at flavorpill sure know what's up. They've recommended all three new 33 1/3s for their 10 Most Anticipated Summer Reads list.

http://flavorwire.com/180879/flavorpills-most-anticipated-summer-reads/4#post_body

81... 82... 83

2011-05-26T13:51:00.003-04:00

Three brand new volumes, fresh from the printers. These are advance copies so it's still, I expect, another couple of weeks before the books are on sale through the usual outlets.

In the meantime, more information can be found here:

Marquee Moon

Some Girls

You're Living All Over Me

Enjoy!

Look out, kid.

2011-05-24T14:51:00.003-04:00

Here's a quick roundup of some nice Bob-related press surrounding Dylan's 70th birthday that people have sent my way... Feel free to add your own links in the comments!

And I'm sure there are others, but I'm at work here, people.

Beyond and Before - A Prog Rock Sampler

2011-05-23T11:07:00.003-04:00

The publication of our much-anticipated Prog Rock book is fast approaching. We expect to see the book in stores during the first week of June.

Martin Halliwell and Paul Hegarty have put together a really brilliant book detailing the history of Prog Rock, or at least that's what Simon says.

"Examining every aspect of progressive rock - words and music, theatre and politics - Hegarty and Halliwell deftly unpick the tangled threads of tradition and radicalism that make up the genre's tapestry. In addition to shedding vital new light on an often maligned and misunderstood phase in rock's history, this probing and incisive study tracks prog's continued and unexpected reverberations through popular music long after punk had supposedly vanquished and banished it." Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past and Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84

We've got a little treat for you as well. Clicking the link below will direct you to a sample of the book which included the introduction, Chapter 13 and various bibliographies.

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/56070053?access_key=key-1ij9pnr06noktb5hr0aa

And if you'd like to be alerted when the book becomes officially available (a one-time only deal - we promise never to email you again after the book is published!), send a quick note to:

progrocksampler@yahoo.com

Serendipitous reading

2011-05-23T07:10:00.001-04:00

It was kind of nice to read this great overview of 4AD and Vaughn Oliver at WFMU's blog right before reading this Peter Mendelsund blog post about book production quality and design. Seems to be a similar vein running through the two... I'm always interested in brands/labels/imprints whose design sensibility works in tandem with what is between the covers to command a following.

Quickly...

2011-05-19T10:11:00.002-04:00

The Paris Review has a really interesting interview with Michael Azerrad, author of the fantastic book Our Band Could Be Your Life.

"Shoulda, but didna..."

2011-05-18T15:12:00.001-04:00

Following up on last Wednesday's post, the Carnival Saloon has invited Tony Tost to list his top 5 songs that Johnny Cash should have covered before he died. The link is here. The original versions of the songs are helpfully embedded in the post for your convenience.

Happy Birthday, Bob!

2011-05-17T11:24:00.007-04:00

Bob Dylan turns 70 years old on May 24th. (Click the covers for more information.)

In Bob's own words:
"Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them."

Carnival Saloon, Cash, & Tost

2011-05-11T09:49:00.002-04:00

Carnival Saloon has a really lovely and enlightening interview with Tony Tost about his 33 1/3 volume on Johnny Cash's American Recordings, the album's producer Rick Rubin, social justice, and songwriting.

Do you think the film Walk the Line would have been made if Johnny hadn’t made American Recordings?

I don’t think Walk the Line gets made without the Rick Rubin resurrection narrative, no. And American Recordings was the start of that. Walk the Line is basically the prequel to the Hurt video. And we don’t get the Hurt song or video without the preceding stunt covers of Danzig, Soundgarden, Beck, Depeche Mode that Rubin encouraged.

I’m waiting for the sequel to Walk the Line, which I think would be a very different kind of movie. You’d have Cash’s career decline and missteps back into addiction and into adultery. You’d have Johnny and June’s corresponding religious fervor. There’s the traumatic robbery they suffered in Jamaica, when their son John Carter was held at gunpoint while thieves ransacked the place. There’s the infamous ostrich attack on the Cash property, with Johnny getting sliced open after picking a fight with the bird. That’s also a part of the Cash story. I’m interested in how one generates meaning and identity in the midst of all of this tawdry kind of crap, as opposed to the fairy tale of Walk the Line, that somehow suggests all the crap is erased by the redemptive powers of true love.

Tom Waits Tour Bus Rides Again

2011-05-06T08:55:00.003-04:00

It's springtime, which means that David Smay (author of Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones, which you can buy here) is coming back to Los Angeles to lead his Tom Waits bus tour again! Link Here: http://www.esotouric.com/waits

This is the definitive tour of Tom Waits' formative creative life in Los Angeles, and the people, places and late night pastries that shaped it.

Calling all rain dogs, gin-soaked boys and Gun Street girls! Climb aboard as your hosts David Smay and Esotouric's Kim Cooper (a Zoetrope Studios intern who'll tell how she used teenage subterfuge to arrange a private concert by Tom) lead you on a scrupulously researched ride through Tom's epic misdeeds and shenanigans, from the Trashing of the Troubadour to epic nights at the Tropicana.

June is going to be a great month...

2011-05-03T14:46:00.003-04:00

click on the covers for more info.

Johnny Cash at The Rumpus

2011-04-29T11:50:00.002-04:00

The Rumpus has an excerpt of Tony Tost's just-published 33 1/3 on Johnny Cash's American Recordings. This particular passage touches on Cash, Tom Waits, Jerry Lee Lewis, and philosophies of salvation. Highly recommended. Here's the link.

Tony also has an excellent podcast of old weird American recordings called Tony Tost's America that is worth delving into. I'm going to recommend Episode 14, "Where the Train Goes Slow," to match up with the excerpt above.

When you've finished checking all that out, you can go here to watch a fascinating crowd-sourced Johnny Cash animated video.

Musical Fanthropology, Distance, and the Critical Gaze with Daphne Carr

2011-04-27T14:13:00.002-04:00

Don't forget: Tomorrow, April 28th at 7pm at Housing Works in Soho!

What has become of contemporary fan communities in the age of online communities, comments, and democratized criticism? Join Daphne Carr (Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine, Continuum 2011), Laina Dawes (What Are You Doing Here? Black Women in Metal, Hardcore and Punk, Spring 2012), Village Voice music editor Maura Johnston, and writer/filmmaker/activist Raquel Cepeda in a reading of their works on fandom and a panel discussion about the changing meanings, technologies, intimacies, and authorities around pop devotion.

Later this year: Portishead

2011-04-26T12:31:00.003-04:00

One of the volumes we'll be publishing in the autumn is RJ Wheaton's study of Dummy.

Here's a taste of what's in the book:

**

During the Dummy sessions, Portishead turned towards producing their own samples, recording Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley and performances from a host of other musicians, many of them from Utley’s extensive network. Many of these musicians — Clive Deamer, Jim Barr, John Baggott, Gary Baldwin, Andy Hague — later became part of Portishead’s extended band for touring.

Dave McDonald remembers that:

Once you find loops or find an idea, there’s an idea of creating this loop yourself. And modifying it. And doing what you need to do to it. So we would create the loop — Adrian and Geoff would come in and Geoff would play some drums, Adrian would be doing his guitars and bass on it and stuff, I’d be recording it. We’d get this loop and — we’d get loads of them onto DAT. And then we would get them all pressed up on vinyl. So you would end up with like a 12-inch with say thirty samples on.

This process not only allowed the band greater creative control over their samples, but also to move away from the risk of being easily imitated immediately upon a track’s release. As Barrow explained to an interviewer in 1995:

What happened was, within hip-hop, if you sample a beat, that record’s out there, so what happens is a week after, someone else might use it, and that takes away your fresh sound.

Given the local experience with reggae versions and dubplates, McDonald recalls it being relatively easy — and inexpensive — to “find these little places where a guy’s got a cutting press… and get a couple of acetates cut.”

But the process of recording original samples was actually more labor-intensive than simply sampling a break. It was important to the band that the aural fingerprint of old vinyl was preserved — that the ‘made’ samples sounded every bit as aged and authentic as ‘found’ samples.

They were concerned to capture all the extraneous noise that it might otherwise have been impossible to remove from an old record. Fragments of a vocal line that had just finished. Reverb and decay from instruments on the other side of the stereo mix. ”You go into every little, tiny little bit of what makes a good break,” recalled Barrow, “and just do it yourself.”

Tim Saul recalls making the “loop slightly off so it sounds a bit like a sample”, deliberately mis-timing a break so that “the listener hears it and realizes that it’s a loop, an obvious loop.” McDonald elaborates:

There was a lot of tricks that we used to use with loops which were slightly out of time, where within the loop you’d have the next, the slight bit of the next bar within the loop so it gives it a falling feel, but it’s still a loop… A loop is normally 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4. But if you were to do a loop, if you go 1-2-3-4-51-2-3-4-5 you don’t end up with a circular loop, you end up with a sort of egg-shaped loop. So it gives the track a roll.

This extended to preserving the sound of vinyl itself. As Geoff Barrow noted in 1997, “to incorporate the sound of vinyl is as important as the instruments playing.“ Dave McDonald recalled what would happen when a freshly pressed acetate of the band’s samples was received:

You would spend the next day or couple of days with this vinyl on the record decks — and almost like a lathe, you know, Geoff cutting them backwards and forwards to wear the record out so then it creates an age to it, so it sounds very authentic and old. I always remember that process. The aging process. Like a good steak.

**

The book has a website which you can check out here. And for those of you like to tweet and face, there are additional sites for the book here and here.

2011-04-25T17:00:00.001-04:00

Joe Bonomo and Jim DeRogatis to Speak in Chicago

2011-04-20T09:33:00.004-04:00

Next Thursday, April 28th, 33 1/3 author Joe Bonomo and rock critic Jim DeRogatis will be speaking about music writing at Columbia College in Chicago.

Where: Columbia College, Ferguson Lecture Hall, 600 S. Michigan Ave. Rm 101
When: Thursday, April 28th 6:30 PM

Daphne Carr @ Housing Works 4/28 + other odds and ends...

2011-04-19T10:39:00.008-04:00

Daphne Carr (Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine) will be at Housing Works on April 28 at 7pm, joining Laina Dawes (What Are You Doing Here? Black Women in Metal, Hardcore and Punk, Spring 2012), and Village Voice music editor Maura Johnston in a reading of their works on fandom and a panel discussion about the changing meanings, technologies, intimacies, and authorities around pop devotion.

Also, Daphne has created a website for the PHM book: www.prettyhatemachines.com

Marvin Lin has a nice long interview about Kid A over at Stereo Subversion.

The French journal Cercles on Nick Rombes and his Cultural Dictionary of Punk.

Rick Moody talks with Moby about his obsession with vintage drum machines at the Rumpus.

NY Times coverage of Greenlight 33 1/3 event

2011-04-11T10:22:00.002-04:00

Jessica (standing) & Hank & Daphne & Christopher & Bryan. (Not pictured: standing room only crowd). NYT coverage can be found here.

Rock Book Show

2011-04-07T16:21:00.001-04:00

While Joe Bonomo was in Austin for SXSW, he was interviewed by Kimberly Austin (no relation) for Rock Book Show about his book about the Fleshtones, Sweat.

More info on the Rock Book Show website. Looks like there are some pretty great interviews in the works for the future...

From 9 Years Ago

2011-04-07T16:12:00.002-04:00

A tiny piece of 33 1/3 history: a 2002 prototype, with front and back covers (for the Kinks and Dusty books respectively - the first two manuscripts I ever received for the series) taped on to a copy of Stefan Zweig's Casanova, published by the Pushkin Press.

The ebooks are coming!

2011-04-07T10:12:00.004-04:00

We are pleased to announce that many of continuum's books are now available as ebooks! We have created our own platform so our books will look very pretty on your computer, ipad or other reading device. It's actually quite swanky....http://ebooks.continuumbooks.com/

Many 33 1/3 titles are available now and many more are on the way.

A sampling of what you can download now:

ACDC's Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Facing Future by Dan Kois

Pavement's Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

Here's a bit about the store and our plans for the future:

The ebook store features a wide selection of titles from across Continuum’s Humanities, Education, and Religion lists, available for download in Adobe PDF and ePub formats. The majority of Continuum’s frontlist titles will be released as ebooks on the store, simultaneously with the publication of print editions, and an extensive conversion project will see a vast number of the publisher’s backlist made available for instant download. Around 2,000 titles will be available on the platform by the end of April; Continuum expects this to climb to 3,500 titles by June.

Initially the store will be open to individuals, but the publisher expects to offer packages aimed at academic institutions from the end of June 2011.

Visitors to the store can preview a selection of pages from all of the ebooks, and can build wish-lists and save searches. The store also features ebook widgets that can be embedded on websites such as authors’ blogs, allowing ebook previews and links back to the title’s page on the store for purchase. Continuum sees particular benefits to academics and professionals in the world of education, and it expects its titles to be bought by individuals and for library collections. The books will be read on computer screens and handheld devices. Ambitious plans are to publish the majority of our 8,500 titles, in ebook form.

Unsound NYC!

2011-04-06T00:16:00.001-04:00

The Unsound NYC festival kicked off over the weekend in New York. This is the second year that the Krakow-based festival of electronic and experimental music has done its thing in New York, featuring talks, workshops, screenings, and of course, performances.

Here are a few events worth checking out:

Thursday in Brooklyn! 33 1/3 Night at Greenlight

2011-04-05T12:32:00.003-04:00

Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene , Brooklyn will be hosting Hank Shteamer (Ween-Chocolate and Cheese) along with Bryan Charles (Pavement-Wowee Zowee), Daphne Carr (Nine Inch Nails-Pretty Hate Machine), and Christopher Weingarten (Public Enemy-Nation of Millions) on April 7th. Mark your calendars.

Full info here: http://greenlight.indiebound.com/event/evening-music-writing-33-13

Make an evening of it... Get some BBQ, have a cupcake, follow up with a drink, or a drink, or a drink, etc. You get the picture.

33 1/3 Love From Canada

2011-04-05T09:23:00.003-04:00

Somebody up there likes me!

Indigo Books, a large Canadian chain bookstore (with a much nicer/better designed website than any US chain bookstore I'm aware of) has published a list of the top 5 Music books by editor Justin Sorbara-Hosker and Bill Janovitz's Exile on Main Street made the list!

http://blog.indigo.ca/non-fiction/item/291-my-top-5-music-books.html

Infographs Kill Rock

2011-03-30T09:43:00.005-04:00

Click for higher-resolution:
via very small array.