TUNING

Coy-ometer Dangerously In The Red

The Beatles Complete On Ukulele pretty much does what it says on the tin with an effort to round up every song in the Beatles catalog that was ever performed on a ukulele and recorded. This only points up those frequent Beatles songs that (Ahem) do not lend themselves to a ukulele rendition. Still and all, the versions are at least mildly innovative, and at their worst are polite.

Like Punk Never Happened - Brian McCloskey's Smash Hits archive

Thank the god of your choice for Like Punk Never Happened

If It Rocks like fuck, it must Be Belgium

One doesn't normally think of rockin' when it comes to Belgium.
Then along comes  Twist and Frit  to change your mind, irreprably I might add.
Beneath those cardigans and polite haircuts beats the heart of something wild.
Of special note are Gus Derse & The Kili-Jacks ,  (at Left)The real Muscles From Brussels. These leek -eaters don't know that you are not supposed to combine the cha cha, surf music, and early fifties R&R to  make some of the finest dance music Norton records never heard of.

The obvious practically sits up and begs to be stated

Really Bad Lyrics

The Song Remains The Same, I Mean The Title Remains The-Oh Fuck It

Sleevenotes sort of rewrites a press release about KMFDM rockin Teutonicly for 25 years , and their new album 'Blitz'. Blitz is apparently a return to the five- letter album name; an 18-year tradition interrupted by ten-letter name albums "Tohuvabohu" in 2007, and "Brimborium" in 2008.
One concession to uniformity that never waivers will undoubtedly be album art that positively screams "Wait- don't I already own this?"
My Giveashitometer must be broken, because I'm just not getting a reading. I've got nothing very little against KMFDM , but I've never aquired any of their product because if I have the urge to listen to some, all I have to do is look up some of my high school punk rock aquaintances.
You know , the ones who haven't bothered to get a new truck in 15 years and are still art movers.

Doug Ashdown- The Saddest Song of All

The mediated zeitgeist of the sixties was such that the vibes didn't really die out until 1975, in Australia , even more so.
It seems that starting in 1968, if you were a second tier folkie on a major label (in this case CBS) it was mandatory that you had to have a song about the sadness of John Q Salesman and his inability to laugh or hear the children playing.
You also got double bonus points if your album cover had you posing on a park bench wearing a fleece lined courderoy jacket, your battered guitar case sitting next to you.
Triple bonus points if you were also eating corned beef on rye.
This last bit occured more often than you would guess.
Doug Ashdown fits all the criterea. Watch for Doug's "Fuck , this wasn't a good idea but I need the exposure" smile/grimace as the orchestrated bit comes in full force.
Even though this song is maudlin as fuck, it's a grower-so here's the mp3 to shove in yer pod and whatnot, a fine addition to any playlist:
Doug Ashdown The Saddest Song of All mp3
Official Site
Doug on EBay

Why Is The New Robot Uprising Strangely Familiar With 18th Century Church Architecture?

Free Audiobook site Books Should Be Free seemed like a good idea at the time.
As far as I'm concerned it still is, but it brings to light something I was unaware of in the field of audio books.
Get this, some books are read by robots .
I appreciate that these books are free .but even Asimov's Robot Trilogy shouldn't be read by automatons. It would seem that it takes just as much time to prep a book to be read by Rossum's finest as it would to have a meat puppet read the thing.
Friedrich Nietzsches' Thus Spake Zarathustra comes round to actually being appropriate to this method, but for sheer whatthehell? you simply must try  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3"Brescia" to "Bulgaria" .
Even if the damn thing was read by Sir Anthony Hopkins instead of a disembodied machine, it doesn't make a goddamned bit of sense as an audio book
Deathless prose like:
" BRESCIA (anc. Brixia),
a city and episcopal see of Lombardy, Italy, the capital of the province of Brescia, finely situated at the foot of the Alps, 52 m. E. of Milan and 40 m. W. of Verona by rail. Pop. (1901) town, 42,495; commune, 72,731. The plan of the city is rectangular, and the streets intersect at right angles, a peculiarity handed down from Roman times, though the area enclosed by the medieval walls is larger than that of the Roman town, which occupied the eastern portion of the present one. The Piazza del Museo marks the site of the forum, and the museum on its north side is ensconced in a Corinthian temple with three cellae, by some attributed to Hercules, but more probably the Capitolium of the city, erected by Vespasian in A.D. 73 (if the inscription really belongs to the building; cf. Th. Mommsen in Corp. Inscrip. Lat. v. No. 4312, Berlin, 1872), and excavated in 1823. It contains a famous bronze statue ..."
would benefit greatly from, I dunno, pictures maybe?
Rightthinking Avantgaurdist that I am, I tried various applications of this audio.
Freinds,  I am here to tell you It does not work it does not work as a sleep aid, its'  seemingly soporific drone only brings up horrid nightmares of bolt necked Victorian Mechanical  Men rabbiting on about wainscoting.
Neither can it be used in an amusing post -modern fashion in the creation of electronic dance music.
It toils not, neither does it spin.
Social Historian and R&B hero Edwin Starr might well have seen this coming if he was a prescient sort .
To paraphrase his smash hit "War"- " The machine read audio Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" what is it good for?
Absolutely nuthin-say it again"

Here's an example of what I mean .

Librivox  is a slightly better alternative where you can subscribe to chapters of books in the public domain in iTunes or from an rss feed.

CANINE CRITICS

Why Dogs Don't Enjoy Music- [Scientific American]
Dogs can only dis­criminate resolutions of one third of an octave. They must fucking love house music.

Lagubrious Dollybirds Mope Their Way Through "You Can Have Him"

After sacking their choreographer, girl group also-rans The Cake suddenly realized they had a gig on Ready, Steady Phoooor Thwacket.
Fuck it, let's just get through it, (barely)

OBSCURE HULLABALOOIST DEMANDS PORK

Linda Clark-Looking For My Pig

Dig the screaming teens-are they screaming at the horror of loosing the pig , or are they screaming in favor of loosing pigs?
In any event, the subject matter is not something I would do the Swim in an over-sized sweatshirt over.

DIAL A GOATHERD

Telemegaphone Dale is a seven metres tall wind powered loudspeaker on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway.
Call +4790369389 to have your voice piped through the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale below.
They've naturally been getting quite a few calls , so give it a couple hours to reset if you don't get through at first.



Here's a Greenwich Meantime Map of Norway (with city and telephone info.)

Take A Message To Mary- But Don't Tell Her Our A&R; Man's In Jail

Quick, name a song the Everly Brothers shouldn't sing ... Actually, only one of them sings it, but it doesn't stop the thing from going Pete Tong by bar 11 or so. It makes you wonder what business Ibsen had writing 60's pop songs*

*He didn't but this sounds like he might have done. [ed]

Good Night Cafeterium! We Love You!

"A Where Are They Now? for those who never were, then.

This is a sonic history of the American pop band. Our goal is to capture data about every band to have been formed by teens with that perfect mixture of big dreams and questionable talent in suburban garages, high school music rooms, and college dorms across America. And to preserve them cryogenically with the very dry ice they once merited, for future generations."

For Those Who Tried To Rock lets failed high school bands have their day in the sun.

Weird Scenes Inside The Girl Mine

I like girl groups and I like 'em weird- to wit:
I Just Dont Understand Ann Margaret discovers tsuris,with help from the Jordanairs.

Dead Dana Gillespie, you're bumming me out in a supreme fashion. Thanks though.

The Powder Puffs tell me You Cant Take My Boyfriends Woodie . Taken at face value, I don't forsee any problems along these lines. It's a shame that Surf/Girl Group crossovers have to sublimate to the patriarchy.

Tonight You Belong To Me Everything Liberty records finest non live performers Patience and Prudence ever recorded could serve as perfect ironic counterpoint to the creepiest scenes in a slasher movie. This shit gives me the shivers every time I hear it.

We Can't Sing Rhythm and Blues. No one really asked you to Patience and Prudence, and this song is more than enough rhetoric to prove your point.

It Means Whatever You Want It To Mean

I've always liked the expression I Ain't Fattening Frogs For Snakes even though I'm not altogether sure what it means. The Larks try their best to explicate this for me but wind up with a kind of cyclical redundancy that is none the less bluesy, gospely , and all together great.

Be Bop Wino has kindly posted "Up With the Larks: The Uptempo Apollo Recordings 1951-1955 featuring such provocatively titled cuts as: "Eyesight to the Blind" "Little Side Car" "Honey From the Bee" , "Coffee, Cigarettes and Tears", and the classic "My Reverie".

To these ears it sounds like the place where jump blues meets close harmony gospel singing and nobody cares about any sort of boundries, secular or not. Highly reccomended. I'm off to fatten a frog for a snake, just one could'nt hurt, right?

THE LARKS ON YOUTUBE
The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise
Danny Boy
Shadrack- This is the kind of music God likes, I bet.

Roll On, Viagra, Roll On

" To succeed with the opposite sex, tell her you're impotent. She can't wait to disprove it.”- Cary Grant

The folk idiom is rife with tales of sexual bravado and errant potency.
The hokum blues is choc-a bloc with with entendres about grindin' daddy's et al, such that given the frailty of the recorded medium and the overdose of euphamisms, it's often confusing as to what's exactly going on.
You know it's really dirty, but only because of the liner notes

The Ballad Tradition of Great Britain has it's own take on priapism, cloaked in modesty- but smutty if you know where to listen. There is an emphasis on making cuckoldry somehow heroic, knights and highwaymen promise to return to thee after uh, "kneeling before ye...."

The chicks in these ballads being comely ( a euphamisim for having a great personality) and , above all,
way fucking naive, wait for the return of these clanking studs on horseback and wind up dying of a broken heart, or preemptively throwing themselves into the sea or over a cliff.
Not that there isn't some form of revenge in a few of them.
Lord Randall gets fed some spotted eels by his "True Love" for dipping his wick elsewhere.
Spotted eels don't sound good, because they are not good-as it turns out they are poisonous.
but then again who says "Mmmm... a dish of eels, sure hope they aren't spotted, the spotted ones are poisonous you know, munch munch oh , fuck me they are spotted and I fain' would lie doon........."
Don't even get me started on "Little Musgrave" a tiny dude who cuckolds the hell out the gentry and when they catch him says " Yeah, I'm tiny and whatnot, but dudes, I totally cuckholded you.... " The response to this is to quarter him post haste.

It is refreshing then, to find blues and folk songs about impotence. I know of only two, which I present to you below.

Bo Carter My Pencil Wont Write No More mp3
Armenter "Bo Carter" Chatmon performed with and managed "The Mississippi Sheiks" and had a solo career in "hokum" Blues that is ecellently represented on The Yazoo Collection Banana In Your Fruit Basket[buy] . The other songs are typically filthy, but this one is almost a lament. What other old blues mack daddy would pre-emtively tell the ladies he couldn't get it up? That would be no one.
How crazy is Bo Carter? Did you not hear what I just said?
He wrote a song about how impotent he has become and then sang it to some ladies.
It's jaunty and he just doesn't care , obviously. That's how nucking futz Bo Carter is.


Maddy Prior & June Tabor My Husbands Got No Courage In Him .mp3
Maddy Prior and June Tabor came together in 1976 to form " Silly Sisters" during a lull in Steeleye Span's touring schedual , and gameness on June's part .
This song, from the eponymous 1977 album, is a standout amongst several academic sounding olde ballads.
Asking the musical question "Who's a girl gotta do to get out of the Scottish Highlands?" then being more than willing to have a go with hubby, in fact insisting on it, the heroine of the song is thwarted by Lord Noodle Crotch.
Well, if that's the way it's going to be, might as well let the whole town know about it.
Hark the village, wait! Indeed.
I'm not sure if this is a rare example of women's empowerment in traditional balladry, or just randy kvetching.
Either way, it's fantastic.

Ironicly, Not Farts

First Sounds "is an informal collaborative of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists, other individuals, and organizations who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time."
Thrill to the sound of the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad from 40 feet away (1878 Phonautogram) and barely decipherable French people played back at different speeds.
This is history folks!

Rappin and Sleepin

If you care to let's have luncheon, every day here just the same, but sweetheart-if you talk in your sleep, don't mention my name
"If You Talk In Your Sleep"- by Sammy Fain ,The Singing Composer

Somniloquy or sleep-talking is sleep disorder that usually occurs during the 4th stage of NREMsleep. The fourth stage of NREM ( non REM sleep) does not produce as many dreams as REM sleep, and dreams in this state are not as vivid as in REM sleep.

The content of dreams produced in this Slow Wave Sleep mode tend to be disjointed.
Parasomnias, or sleep disorders,- including sleepwalking, sleepeating, sleep sex, teeth grinding, night terrors, rhythmic movement disorder, REM behaviour disorder and restless legs syndrome occur in this state, and any number of these can be an adjunct to Somniloquy .
Sleep-talking has been reported in 50% of young children, who usually outgrow it by puberty,with about 5% occurence in adults, where it tends to run in families.

Sleep- talking appears to be of interest only if it is loud, profane or both.
One of the loudest and profanest of sleep talkers was Dion Mcgregor whose songwriting partner Mike Barr managed to record over 500 somniloquies in exchange for giving Mcgregor a place to sleep.
The choicest sleep talk sessions were released as an LP on Decca called “The Dream World Of Dion Mcgregor”, with cover art by Edward Gorey. A book of dream speech transcriptions.with illustrations by Gorey again was published at about the same time.

In Febrary of 1999, Tzadik Records released Dion McGregor Dreams Again, an additional ten dreams by Dion.
Torpor Vigil Soundworks spat out “The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor “ in 2004.

There are several prolific modern- day somniloquists who tend to be self-explotative like:
The Parasomnial Order who couches his morphic utterances in an almost impenetrable faux gnostic schtick
Sleep Talking On The Mic who is quite certain that his sleep disorder is evidence of demonic possesion
Somnography of Somniloquy - Dandan's Sleeptalk who seems to have a healthy handle on it- after all, the colophone to his blog is: “I talk in my sleep. I say weird things. I record it.”
Nate at Night who thinks it’s kinda fucking hilarious
And Ngram .net who just hopes it’s poetry.

Other Resources:
I Talk When I Sleep Support Group
Somnioloquism and the Sleeping Dimension episode of Educational Showdown hosted by Jamie and Adrienne on WRUV 90.1 Burlington Vt.
Dion McGregor On Myspace
Index of choice DM cuts[via Ink Mathematics]

The Winner Take It All .. (To It's Logical Extreme)

I didn't think there was a whole lot of breaking news on ABBA these days , but Mikory's ABBA Blog more than proves me wrong.

Instead of full-on obsessiveness with 1992 style layout and shitty jpegs,you get a well designed site that's ABBAlicious in the extreme with tidbits about what the members are up to now, and choice clippings from back when.

Five Not So Great Auditory Illusions

The comments section says it best about New Scientists' Music Special: Five great auditory illusions .
The popular science mag's website presents 5 examples of supposed fuck -with -yer head-itis that have been artificially created to fool the human ear and brain.
Except why do I feel like it's 1975 and I'm sitting with some balding prat with an over ambitious moustache in a fern bar whilst he tells me that quadrophonic sound is the future?
Cock your fourth ear to these examples and see if you hear what they're telling you you're supposed to.

A PSA ON LSD

The Dukes The Dentist
I thought that this 1968 recording by Germany's scuzz beat psyche merchants The Dukes was going to be a horror freakout all the way through , but then it turns into a public service announcement about the importance of visiting your freindly neighborhood dentist. Who knew? I'm thinking this combo are the same Dukes of "I'm An Unskilled Worker" non-fame.
Come to think of it,that song is ostensibly about the importance of trade schools. Could it be that the Dukes were part of some government program that tried to keep the kids in line with fuzz guitars and Teutonic screaming? I haven't been able to come up with any more Dukes cuts about washing your hands or community gardening , but you never know. Any readers have other songs by The Dukes that fit this civic mould?

She Loves To Yodel

Thanks to the more than excellent Magnets And Lasers I have discovered another yodeling sweetheart in Carolina Cotton .
Billed As The Yodeling Blonde Bombshell, the perfectly named Cotton did it all, radio, tv and B movies, and sang with a who's who of western swing bands.
Let's start with statement of intent-"I Love To Yodel".
"Cattle Call "approaches Desurik Sisters territory which is always a good thing, and then we have the embarassment of riches that is the cyclicly redundant "Yodel Yodel Yodel".

No one ever told Carolina that hoary old chesnut (even for the time) "Nola" was an instrumental showcase.
If they did, she wisely thought "Fuck that noise" and turned in an amazing, pyrotechnic performance.

I Love To Yodel
Mockingbird Yodel
Cattle Call
Yodel Yodel Yodel
Nola

What Makes Bob Holler?

Western Swing wasn't all about Bob Wills you know, it was also about flour- judging by the number of Western Swing bands sponsored by baking supplies.
Western Swing On 78 blog does what it says on the tin- and several adjoining tins- so great is their love, dedication, and altruism in bringing this forgotten music to the fore.
I would also like to thank them from the bottom of my heart for not hosting the downloads on rapidshare, which they could have easily done - they're on mediafire, which, if you're a shameless mp3 hound like me- you know is the good stuff.

Undisputed masters of WS -Milt Brown and His Musical Brownies are conspicuously absent because Milt Brown's estate, which consists largely of empty Nugrape and whiskey bottles, smashed Cadillacs and stale biscuits, is sewn up tighter than,uh, something that's really tight....... No matter, that leaves more room for The Sons Of The West (at Left).
The site has streamlined histories, all- important matrix numbers and not a whiff of acedemia, thank god.
These guys should get some kinda Smithsonian grant ,or something.

The Lord Don't Mind

The Rance Allen Group Talk That Talk pt 1
Having vauge notions of who the Rance Allen Group was/are , I clicked play on this mp3. At first, I couldn't figure out why it sounded kinda stagey- but really good none the less. Then it got to the scat singing part , and at that point I thought "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and ran them through various search engines. A little research revealed why I was immediatly taken with this song-It's secular gospel stuff. And I like that. Mystery solved.


A Soulful Experience [Buy From Amazon}
Rance Allen Group On Myspace (??!!)

The Economics Of AC/DC

University Of Calgary Economics Student Robert J Oxby didn't need fast machines or clean motors to expertly parse the discussion of the Efficiency of AC/DC: Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson .
There's almost a full page of footnotes, none of which really adhere to the age -old (Oh fuck, why not call it aesthetic) argument of who is the better singer; Brian or Bon.
It turns out, in terms of efficiency, Brian is the the better singer.

Ron Murphy Talks About Cutting Records

Lies, Lies Lies, Yeah........... The Secret World Of Vinyl Data

The reliably sporadic , yet never boring kempa.com unearths the fascinating world of Vinyl Data.
What's that you ask? These days, record companies try to get you to buy their product outright by offering dubious CD Rom only content if you buy the prepackadged disc rather than downloading it either legally or illegally.
Apparently, this extra data thing has been going on since the mid -80s with the exception being that the data was packaged as a special edition promo rather than tacked onto existing content, by and large.

In the case of the vinyl data, interested parties would record the specific selections to tape , which could then be interpreted by the mighty Sinclair ZX Spectrum personal computer (with a whopping 48K!).

The article mentions a lot of has beens and never- were's who have added data to their vinyl records (anyone up for a stirring round of the Shakin' Stevens game?) but gives special mention to a full on video game vinylized especially for that purpose by none other than none other than stunting great floppy haired limp -wristers The Thompson Twins. (screen capture pictured at left)
The author admits to not having played it enough to see how it ends, but does mention that "If you go north from the first screen, the Thompson Twins drown en masse. "
A fitting denoument to any game featuring the Thompson Twins, I should think.

The article is replete with emulators and browser playable versions of games and er, things... by artists like the Stranglers, Pete Shelley, The Freshies (Who get a sound critical thrashing, and quite possibly the most thorough history of said group in the proccess) , Information Society and Isao Tomita .

A very thorough overview of something I thought didn't deserve a second glance.
I mean, I knew about the spectrum -bending laser etching on side two of Split Enz "True Colors" album, but this shit is way off the charts- assuming there are charts for crudely drawn stick figure adventures that are hard to translate to a usable medium.

How Vinyl Records Are Made

I find this crap endlessly fascinating.
It's really great how the narration removes any sort of hip cache from the preceedings.
It's really just geeks going through an elaborate process to make something only a handfull of fellow geeks are going to truelly appreciate.
It's almost like the time I had to listen to the guy who ran Chicago's Jazz Record Mart go on and on about lathe settings and vinyl weights just so I could sort through a jumbled up carton of Novelty "cut in " 45s.
What was interesting about the box of 45s was that there where about 400 of them, and none of them were by Dickie Goodman. I don't know why I thought this was historically signifigant, or how this parlayed into me giving a shit, but it was the nineties. Anyway, the record making process is cool;

But Wait, there's more...........

SHAAAAAAROOOON! IT'S THE BLEEDIN' 14TH CENTURY AGAIN, AND THEY'VE NICKED ME CHOONS!

Rondellus are an Estonian Early Music ensemble who cover Black Sabbath songs in Latin on replicas of ancient instruments.
Songs covered include Verres Militares (War Pigs) and Post Murum Somnii (Behind The Wall Of Sleep), but alas-no "Crazy Train"

I Have It On Good Authority That Billie Jean Is Not, In Point Of Fact , My Lover- Oh, And Here's How To Moonwalk

Very detailed instructions on How to Moonwalk

Battle Of The All Midget KISS Tribute Bands!

This week only! (and for all other weeks in perpetuity throughout the universe) it's Tiny Kiss VS Mini Kiss !
Kiss gets short shrift
MiniKISS vs Tiny KISS!
Sploid On MiniKISS vs Tiny KISS
Tiny Kiss Will Have Their Revenge On Vegas

KI$$ MERCH

I'm not such a big fan of Kiss' music but oh man do I love the phenomenology of Kiss Merchandising . This site has it in spades.
There are at least two books about Kiss merchandising alone that make for fascinating reading.

Did I think they overstepped the bounds of propriety when they introduced the Kiss Kasket? No.
Was I perturbed that Gene Simmons his ownself donated a Kiss Kasket to the grieving family of slain Pantera Guitarist Dime -Bag Darryl? Well, yeah.
Am I jumping on a chair at the thought of a chain of Kiss Coffeehouses? -No I think that's a cool idea.
Do I think that theire caution that the Coffee is "hotter than hell" is
A)Alarming
B) Bad marketing
C) Lawsuit Squelching ? -fuck yeah.

KISS' STANLEY IN INCOHESIVENESS SHOCKER

This is an update to a post I made last year, now revised with help from the kind curatorship of Woody from 21 Gun Salute
It Seems that Bret B. had a bit of trouble scraping up the bandwith needed for the overwhelming response to his Paul Stanley post, and understandably so.
Woody took up the mantle of historical banality and informed me of same.

Paul Stanley needs no introduction. Every fucking song at a Kiss live show, however, seems to ........"-Bret B. of Post Punk Junk

Paul Stanley - “People Let Me Get This Off My Chest is an 86 MB zip file, 70 tracks strong , of nothing but Kiss Rhythm Guitarist Paul Stanley's inane between songs patter.

One could ask the rhetorical -to -the- tits question "Why?" but that would interfere with the enjoyment of same.
Great for fans of the "Whe're from Newcastle... where brown ale comes from..." interstitial inanities of hard rockers Venom

Resources, Such as They Are
Paul Stanley.Com
Wikipedia On Paul Stanley-this is one entry that has absolutely no one contesting it. That's No One.
I don't even care if there are any lies sprinkled throughout the article, which seems to be legit. Fascinating tidbits about his surgery and facial deformities abound (abound=are mentioned).

"Stanley was in fact born with Microtia, a congenital deformity of the pinna , or outer ear. "

Stanley badly needed hip replacement surgery but suffered through the Rock The Nation tour first, finally getting the surgery in October 2005. Complications from the surgery required a second in December of that year, and in December 2005 it has been announced that a third hip surgery will be necessary. Stanley regards the degeneration of his left hip as partly the product of thousands of shows performed since the early 1970s. In the "Rock The Nation Live" DVD he spends much more time standing in one place than he has on previous DVDs and tours."-ibid

Paul Stanley's Paradise [Fansite, message board & quarterly fanzine dedicated to Paul Stanley]
"He needs no introduction. [There's that word again-ed.] If you're here, then you must be a Paul Stanley fan and frankly that means you know enough in my book."-from introduction.
Has this webmaster heard of irony?
Methinks not. And by the way, I use "methinks" in the most utterly ironic way possible.
Let's take a look at the ontology of the statement quoted:
"If you are here [Fansite Paul Stanley's Paradise] Then you must be a Paul Stanley fan."
There is a perfectly pitched ring of desperation about the qualifier "must" , turning it from a conditional resolution of a logical proposition into a silent prayer.

Please God, let someone love Paul Stanley as much as I do, so I don't seem like such a confused and obsessive yoik-I will even set up a hit counter that glorifies thy name and shit- Hey Ma, I'm prayin' here, next time knock before you enter a room- it's what civilized people do. Shit now I gott start over....

Let's Stick It To The Man (Sorta)

The Listening Post (part of the Wired Blog Network, and oddly, also part of a balanced breakfast) reports on a hack that lets you stick it to The Man Rupert Murdock. Kinda.
Here's How it works:
The Problem: A band or label has uploaded music to MySpace to be streamed but not downloaded.
You as an omnivorous consumer of music become frustated by this. You want to download the song or songs of that hot new band you've heard about so you can give them a second or third listen at your leisure. Because MySpace stores music (at myspacecdn.com) using long and involved URLs (rather like Amazon items) , you need some help.

The Solution: MyspaceMP3.org lets you enter a band name or whatever abstractword the band uses in their Myspace URL (eg: myspace.com/[fucked up signifyer] URL) and then download any of the MP3s hosted on that page.

The Caveats:
Downloads using this method are stripped of their filenames and ID3 tags, so you have to stop and label/tag each one.MP3s are only encoded at a measly 96 Kbps with a 22.05 kHz sampling rate , so if you enjoy convoluted denoument that sounds like AM radio, then you'll eat this up with a spoon.

My Angry Rebuttal:
Bands should use Myspace for listing their tour dates and ego gratification, not for product placement.
That's what blogs and websites are for. For god's sake, If you have a record out, that means you at least have some money- money that could be used for a web prescence.
If your gonna plead poverty there's always LiveJournal.
Yeah, that's it- take back Livejournal from the goth kids and mass murderers with their allegedly amusing pomo avatars and emoticons, their inarticulate appreciation of cultural phenomena, and their general whining. Only you can prevent forest fires.

A Hype Machine For The Rest Of Us

MEGA SUPER MAMMOTH MP3 Blog List is kind of the anti Hype Machine in a way .
Blog listing are lovingly hand crafted by a single dude and you get mini features on new and nifty MP3 blogs , all the more important considering the fleeting nature of these alleged scoundrels.
The other great service is an extensive list of defunct blogs to help you weed out your blogroll and notation in the listings of how frequently updated some of these suckers are.
Not that I want to add more freight to his already impressive workload, but it would be nice to see alist of blogs that haven't been updated since 2006 or January of '07.
Excellent and much needed work, my freind.

The Teutonic Safety Net Of America's Past

It seems that we have to rely on other countries to preserve our precious musical heritage.

Much like the British Blues scene preserved the obscure and authentic bluesmen who had been forgotten by the mid sixties, It seems that the Germans have taken on the task of preserving the sound of country music before it was even called country music, and rockabilly by the shelfload.

By 1986, Sam Phillips was telling adherents who had made the pilgramage to Sun Studios and wanted to buy singles that "Sorry Hoss, the Germans done got 'em all".

That said, I need to alert those of you who may not know about the German Lable Trikont, and specificly their latest release, Flowers in the Wildwood;Woman in early country music .

Started in 1967 with proceeds from selling Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, the company has become the best archival label the globe has ever seen.

Sound quality is excellent considering the source, (78s mostly) and the annotation is near perfect.
I think It sounds so good because collectors (with the notable exception of Joe Bussard) didn't cotton to early country until the mid 1990s. Country 78's were what you passed over when you were looking for Black Patti Records.

Early country records were also less likely to be stored in crumbling cardboard boxes out in the barn for 45 years.
In short, they were taken better care of , were often recorded for radio play, recorded by major labels, and nobody wanted them. (much).
Thus they remained relatively unplayed and pristine.

If you got into my Dezurik sisters post, you need this CD pronto. Featuring two cuts by the sisters D and Many more sisters and mothers and aunts you have never heard of and will want to hear again.

The CD's liner notes and catalog description make the excellent point that A) There as country music before WWII
and B) Women were most likely the source of a lot of it in the rural south due to the relative inexpensiveness of guitars and autoharps , and the limited access to radio .

Outside of Alan Lomax, real authentic hillbilly music wasn't recorded that much. Come to think of it, authentic shitkickery by males was few and far between.

Doc Boggs and Bascome Lamar Lunceford are the only two artists I can think of who didn't have ties to radio shows sponsored by flour or tea, who are fairly well known in the genre. Boggs got sponsorship later in life on the strength of his recordings and the fact that he would play gigs at the opening of a faucet if you'd let him. Lunceford plucked a banjo in obscurity until 1954, when his first recordings were made.
So it's doubly delightful that these recordings by women were lovingly archived and annotated. Some of it can be a bit irritating at times, especially the dour religious numbers, but all of it is heartfelt and raw and beautiful. I picked my new favorite sister act, the Aaron Sisters to lay on you because they make the hair on my arms stand up.

Aaron Sisters She Came Rollin' Down The Mountain

Aaron Sisters w/ the Songopators How'm I Doin'

Here's where it gets jazzy and wonderful. It sounds like a backwoods version of the Boswell Sisters who you just know
don't really need your approval despite the song's title. Also, you simply must fall in love with contractions like "How'm".
They're what make American idiomatic speech so great. You also must smooch up on a band with a name like "Songopators" . How fucking great is that? Anybody know if they have any more recordings?

Here's where you can get it:
Venerable Music
Amazon Has only one left in stock as of this writing.
Aquarius Records Doesn't have it , but they do have large portions of the back catalog of Trikont, and many more fantastic and hard to find American Primitives, and besides they are the nicest people in the mail order record buisiness.
Down Home Music has it deep in the bowels of its Country Collection list , just keep clicking the "next" button and try to avoid buying all the collections you click past.
Dusty Groove has completely done away with their country section but have many Trikont sides pertaining to what they do best, which is quite frankly, groovin'.
Other Music has a smattering of Trikont titles available via mail order, but if you're in NYC you can bop on down to their retail store and see if they have it. politely bug them to order it for you if the don't.

The Entire Late 60s in Eight Minutes

Are there songs that distill the sixties down to a sonic nub? a nugget of pure, unadulterated zeitgiest that not even Hegel could unravel (assuming that Hegel owned a headshop and was freinds with Roky Erikson) ?

When posed this question, popular avantguardist Alex Keller had the answer at the ready.
Apparently In the heady days of the late 1980s' Alex and his wife , in the aftermath of a drug fueled bacchanale, had composed the ultimate in head music with the toe -tapping yet harrowing "Dirty, Naked, And High".

This mythic opus went on to win the Institute Of Sarcastic Sociologys' "That's Fucking Perfect" award.

If we were less conceptual and more ambitious, Neil Martinson and I would have certainly followed through with the 6 disc concept album "Drugs are Cool-And I Love You" .

We were not, to say the least.

As I recall, the titular song had driving horn charts and an anthemic chorus.
Ok, so it was a less than radical blend of "Cant Judge A Book By It's Cover" and "I Can't get Next To You", but dammnit, it would have meant something to a generation of unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed.

Unbeknownst to either group of hot rockin' Social Historians, the 60s' had already been summed up by authentic practitioners of same.

Sexual Fantasy #8 by willfully obscure 60's mokes "Fate" had firmly closed the coffin lid on all that needed to be said.

What little info I could find says that this record barely made it to a test pressing in 1968 , only to moulder until Shadoks Music out of Germany picked up what they were layin'down. It's also available on the fabulous Shadoks Music Comp [7.99 from Amazon] along with loads of other patchouli scented obscurities from the planet Buzz Click Whirr Twang.

Cease To Exist-Until Somebody Makes a Blog About You...

Shunned By Wikepedian Do-Gooders, Manson Music is an MP3 blog that narrowcasts the everyday evil of one Charles Mills Manson.
Think what you want,or think what you can about this man and his music, but free speech is free speech.
Features interviews and music spanning thirty years.

Rosalie Loves Me Yet (In Case You Were Wondering)

Rosalie , (who has something to do with Palm Pictures) sent me a screener and soundtrack CD for Your Gonna Miss Me; A Film About Rocky Erickson . [Click link for film showings and Roky's tour schedule].

"Don't Slander Me."
"You Don't Love Me Yet."
"True Love Cast Out All Evil."
"I Walked with A Zombie."
"Easter Everywhere."

The thing about Roky's body of work is that nearly every song title in the canon would have made for a fitting title for this film.

Those people looking for clinical proof of Roky's madness will come away dissapointed, as the film makers wisely gloss over concrete examples of their subjects' crazyness, and instead focus on his recovery and redemption.

Transcendence and redemption, along with a profound sadness that that hasn't worked out, are at the core of Erikson's music.

Even when he's singing about zombies , aliens and two headed dogs there is a sense that he's just telling it like it is, punching some sort of haunted spiritual clock like any other Joe Lunchpail- only this time the jobsite's in Hell.
Quite naturally , he would prefer not to be walking with zombies last night, nor pulling a nine to five gig in the seat of Soviet political power overseen by a biheaded canine, but he can't help but paint what he sees. And he'd like to get out.

Get out he did for nearly two decades , after being released from Rusk Hospital For the Criminally Insane in the 70's.

Sent up for posession of a joints' worth of marijuana , Roky was advised to cop an insanity plea .

Granted , the extenuating circumstances of his legendary LSD and heroin use could have just as easily been used as an excuse to institutionalize him but they were not, and to this day, a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia discounts any major drug use as a contributing factor.

The handfull of schizophrenics I know have either overused drugs , or have had signifigant trauma to one or more of the senses at a fairly young age.

The methods of "treating" Roky were either wrong or nonexistant, as born out by the testimony of the retrospectively compassionate good ol' boy officials at Rusk who, in the films' brief interviews with them, manage to apologize enough for my liking at least.

The aftercare, such as it was, consisted of prescribing a fistfull of psychotropics and remanding him to the care of his mother.

I wish there was a feature- length movie on Evelyn Erickson, she's clearly hinting that there should be throughout this film- but one can clearly see the roots of Roky's problems in the strata of unmitigated crap she has in her apartment.

I was cringing every time she Elmer's glued a priceless family photo to an oversized piece of shitty cardboard along with one- of- a -kind letters and lyric sheets.
Hey lady-ever hear of getting a literary agent? That's the way to do it if you want to tell your story.

The DVD extras include two videos Evelyn made that are mind boggling.
The first one , based on Bible stories, features a catatonic Roky being hailed as the supreme leader by a quasi- interested chorus of off camera extras who can't quite belive they're doing this.
The second one , "The Sex Strike" , is a retelling of Lysistrada as performed by Darvon -addled Austin housewives.

The second half of the film is about Roky's brother Sumner's sacrifices to get Rocky healthy again, and he should be applauded for that, but I could have done without the assertions that schizophrenia and mental illness don't really exist and that all you need is some touchy feely New Age Therapy to put things right.

But the important thing, which the film gets to with expediency, is that Roky's back; and Sumner sacrificed damn near everything to get him on a track whereby he could be free to make his own decisions.

Rarely have I wished the subjects of a documentary Mazel Tov with such fervor.
Film:*** 1/2
DVD Extras:****
Soundtrack:*****
Thanks again Rosalie.

The First Mashup? You Are The Jury....

If I were the sort of person who had any respect for the hirarchy of the history of popular music, I would gladly start the argument about what was the first mashup by using dynamic logic principles set forth by those who get in physical rows about Rocket 88 VS The collected works of Milt Brown and his Musical Brownies.

Unfortunately, there aren't any hillbillies or itenerate bluesmen in Hackney, so it's hard to make these kinds of comparisons.

None the less, Australian 60's aggregate The Groop [64-69] released (In every sense of the word) a cover of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" with the backing marimba/horn track from " It's The Same Old Song" by the Four Tops.

The Skinny is that this band packed it in in 69 because half of them were enamored of Music from Big Pink and the other half were content to be a glorified showband.
I'm not saying one can hear the titanic struggle of earthy authenticity VS frilly- shirted professionalism on this track, but at least it's fuckin weird.
Keep in mind the backing track is live- in other words; "They meant to do that."
I think it works in a "people -have- stopped -listening- ages- ago, -so -who -gives -a -shit" kind of way. Here's hoping you feel the same.
PREPARE TO BE MILDLY NON PLUSSED:
The Groop Baby Blue
AND FOR COMPARISON'S SAKE:
The Four Tops It's The Same Old Song

IN WATERMELON STEREO

Very concise overview of the often overlooked recordings of Richard Brautigan. Many of which are available on CD . [See article]

USEFUL TIPS FROM THE MOST USELESS PLACE ON EARTH.

Basic 33 RPM LP Cover / Jacket Repair From Ebay™, of all places.
It's part of their new "Reviews and Guides " feature.
Most of the other tips fall into the "everybody else is lying except me" category, but this guide has some useful techniques.
I don't agree with the section on taping up imperfections though.
It encourages things like people using masking or electrical tape to fix splits and tears; as was the case with an otherwise gorgeous Calypso-Limbo record I found that was delineated with some kind of brown cloth electrical tape whether it needed it or not.
I bought it anyway, but still...........
See Also: The Nickety Split Method to Repair Record Album Jackets

Get Your Jesus Freak On

Heavenly Grooves and The Ancient Star-Song are two mp3 blogs that feature a wide assortment of "Jesus Freak" music in all genres.
Neither blog seems especially ecumenical , which is a good thing, as it allows you to determine the value or oddity of the selections from an often overlooked sub-genre of record collecting.
The selections feature handmade covers and questionable art direction that you probably put in the "maybe" pile at the thrift store and now you don't have to spend that all important $1.68 for something that doesn't even have the lasting kitsch value you so desperately crave.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

Model Citizen... Zero Discipline must know what it's like to be unpopular, or at least have an empathy for the unpopular.
That particular empathy , in the wrong hands, can come across as flippant, dismissive and annoying.
Not so with this thing.
The music on offer here has the wiff of being lived with and lived through . Much of it is too obscure to have entertained any notions of being popular.
It's like hanging out with my high school freinds, at their houses, away from the pulsbeat of what was popular.
The kind of freinds I had in the 80's had a kind of private disdain for the popular that was never voiced. If it had been, It would have meant derision and scorn.
Without them I would have no idea of the nuances of Buddy Rich, Genesis, Beatle Bootlegs, Taj Mahal, Brian Eno and the Dixie Dregs.

Had their been such a device as the Giveafuckometer™ (pictured at left) you couldn't tell from these people that it was working.

When held up to the aforementioned guage, Model Citizen... Zero Discipline continues the happy tradition of making more false alarms for Giveafuckometer™ repairmen.
No one told them you shouldn't care about Souxie and the Banshees offshoot "The Creatures", Ian Gillan, The Pump Up The Volume Soundtrack. and Tuff Darts. Thank God for that. And now I'm telling you you should.

MMMM.... Samba Pie.........

"Read Euler, read Euler, he is a master for us all" - Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace
Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (pronounced Oiler ) published more papers than any other mathematician in history (his collected works fill 60–80 quarto volumes.)
Pretty much all of modern mathematics can be traced back to the dude.

He introduced nearly all of the modern mathematical terminology, including the notion of a mathematical function.
He is such the shit that even Lutherans include him on their calendar of saints (May 24th).

Euler's Samba is Lenny's "Magic 5 Equation " [e to the power πi+1=0], mathamagically sonified (by assigning notes from various musical instruments to the digits 0 through 9) and set to a samba beat by artist Tom Dukich

More of Tom's Math Sonification
Warning: Pi to 500 Decimal Places: Piano Solo. is exactly as tedious as it needs to be.

Rock out with your spock out

Hey! Make your own damn Vulcan Harp! this one's Spock's. Seriously though, this is a blueprint and electronic schematic to make a working model of a Star Trek prop.

Humps Are Inherently Canadian

Alanis Morissette beats the ironists to the punch; and would- be suitors to a pulp, in this cover of " My Humps ".
Morissette parses the inherent sadness of the origional by slowing down to a singer-songwriter dirge. Tee hee.

Aint Nobody Here But Us Dezurik Sisters

You know I loves me some yodeling, right?
So why didn't any of you bastards and bastettes hip me to the Dezurik (AKA Cackle) Sisters
from Royalton Minnesota.
These two amazing vocalists blended yodelling and animal (mostly chicken) sounds to produce a kind of barnyard scat singing .

A depression-era radio audience couldn't find enough spoons to eat this up with , and the sisters appeared on tsome of the top radio shows of the day, including The Grand Old Oprey, The National Barn Dance, and Ralston Purina's "CheckerBoard Time" program, [ from which the tunes above have been taken. ]

The show was cut to transcription disks so that Mary Jane and Carolyn could continue their radio duties with WSM' Grand Old Oprey and WLS' National Barn Dance. Purina rechristened them The Cackle Sisters due to the gals contractual obligations to other radio shows.

The in-studio announcers' interaction with the transcription disks, as well as the ebb and flow of the sister's musical repetoire accompanied by yips, hoots, howls, and of course- clucking and cackling is mind blowing in an "Aw shucks, twern't nutthin '" kinda way.

NPR recently did a kind of condescending story on them, interviewing the guy who wrote an article on them for the much anticipated (in this household) Oxford American Annual Music Issue.

The NPR piece marvels at a quainter America's fascination with this kind of thing, when in reality, I am certain that The Cackle sisters are a talent for the ages.
You are gonna love them. They're cuter than two bugs in a rug-and they sure do know their chickens.


I Aint Gettin' No Place
Big Ball In Texas
I Left Her Standing There
My Horses Aint Hungry
Old Dan Tucker
Shanghai Rooster
Sing Halleluja
Sippin Cider Through A Straw
Yippi Yippi Ye-Ow
Yodel Lady
You Nearly Lost Your Mind
A Spanish Cavalier
Arizona Yodeler
Crawdad Song
HillBilly Bill
Guitar Blues
HillBilly Wedding In June
Little Golden Locket
My Honeymoon Bridge Broke Down
Roll Along Jordan
Silver Bells

Click here for all Dezurik ditties as a playlist.

Variable Bit Rate Totally Rules!

DJ Du of The Juicy Show said to listen to his podcast, so I did. In fact, I'm listening to episode 7 right now.
It takes a certain indefinable something, sounds with that certain j'nessay what the fuck, to make me listen to more than 35 seconds of a podcast. This one deserves at least 3600 seconds.

Broadcasting from an AM radio station in a universe where kittens eat rainbows and puppies stop by later with some gingerale when the kittens have eaten too much rainbow- Dhaval Mehta could care less about being cool.

He just wants you to be happy. You deserve that , don't you? There's really no excuse not to listen, every RSS agregator known to man is just sitting there at the top of the page.
Be Here Now.
Song selection:A+
Audio Tech: B+

You Don't Know The Score

Unusual musical notation on display here and here