This blog contains music, cats, and things of less importance.
This song is about guns, media, and idiocy. It’s from the UpTones’ “East Bay Orbits” alnum, you can get it at iTunes or Amazon, or stream it in various streaming places. Here are the lyrics. My bandmates all really came through on this track, and patiently put up with about 100 re-writes before it felt ready. In the end, I’m happy with how it came out. I wish the subject matter never even existed, but, as the song goes, “It’s always on.”
I was looking for the studio version of this and stumbled on a live performance from 1974 that is just amazing. Rufus plays their Stevie Wonder-penned smash, “Tell Me Something Good” in concert. In bell bottoms. With wah-wah pedal. I would not lead you astray. Chaka Khan’s vocal performance is other-planetly.
1. I am very fond of my antiquated 2008 Apple laptop and do not wish to upgrade. Ever. But I must eventually as this machine will expire. And I will then have to get a new one and be sad. Why can’t it be like a well made guitar, that just works forever if you take care of it? No, everything electronic must be upgraded, thrown away, replaced, so that we may have more landfill and less peace of mind. It’s important. I understand. I am one with the Borg.
2. As part of my experiment in using a non-stealthy browser to see what the hamsters that run the Interwebs will do, I have observed that they like to show me ads for things I have already bought. As well of course, as ads for things I have merely looked at. If you hit some store sites even once, then instantly their ads are everywhere. I’m sure the best minds in advertising and marketing have conventions to discuss and argue the efficacy of this. But for me, there’s actually a backlash effect. You see, I might have bought some shoes yesterday from one particular site, but no, their ads are annoying, it creeped me out that they “followed” me, and just no. It turned me off. So, there they inadvertently spent a few pennies to lose my business. How does that figure into the great revenue model in the sky? Am I an anomaly in this regard? God this is good coffee. I got it from Peet’s. Now if I publish this post, will Peet’s wallop me with ads? Well, nothing will stop me from buying their product. So I suppose it all depends how motivated one is in the first place.
I never thought I’d be in the advertising business. But it seems we all are now, all of us “content providers,” and we would like our content to be “monetized” somehow, thank you. Bands, songwriters, music publishers, authors, bloggers, etc. are “providers of digital content.” One can choose to be utterly horrified, or one can embrace it. I choose both. Anyway, yesterday there was a great April Fools day post on Digital Music News with the headline:
I guffawed. It’s an ongoing battle in the music biz, in which companies attempt to make money off of other peoples’ copyrights and recordings, and pay as little as possible for the right to do that. It’s also an odd moment now where it becomes increasingly clear that the “lean forward” music “user” is a rare bird indeed. Most people are “lean back” music “users” (I just have to put those terms in quotes, or my intestines will leap out my nostrils), meaning they lean back and let others present music to them. They are not scouring the bins at Amoeba or digging through the blog-o-sphere looking for new music discoveries, most people are simply not doing that these days. And who can blame them? There are things like global warming, rent and mortgages, tuitions and vet bills and the existence of Sarah Palin to consider. And of course the lean-forward crowd is largely made of young folks, who generally have less money to spend, and they are also accustomed to the idea that music is readily available for free. What a pickle.
I have the same guitar I have played since 1983. It was a gift from my Uptones bandmate Charles Stella. He received it as a gift from John Oates of Hall and Oates fame, who had received it as a gift from the luthier who built it. It didn’t work so well for their hands, but it immediately worked magically for mine. So I borrowed it and I’ve been playing it ever since. I used it on a recording just this weekend with my Uptones bandmate Mike Stevens at Lost Monkey Studios, and it sounded beautiful. Guitars are funny that way, they are all so different. This is the only electric guitar I play now. Years ago I stopped using a Les Paul or Strat or anything else. I can do anything I want with this one slab o’ wood. The one modification? Recently I had Al Milburn remove the tone pot from the circuit. I never roll off any treble at the guitar anyway, so why have that capacitor and extra wire attached, degrading the signal a tiny bit? And yes, I noticed it sounded even a little better after we did this.
I know many would disagree, but whatever, it’s music, so our subjective opinions rule, in our own little worlds, don’t they? Here goes: passive pickups are good, active pickups are bad. Active pickups (ones that require batteries) sound icky and squeaky clean, like I think a hospital smell would sound like, if it could. Use passive pickups. A single or double coil electromagnetic pickup. This invention was completed decades ago and has not been improved upon since. The electric guitar was perfected by the early 1960’s. Unlike laptops and phones, no need to upgrade, for a lifetime of playing happiness. If you need to get EMG’s or other active pickups, do so because you want to dispose of some money and acquire bad tone. Not because you believe some nonsense about a revolutionary new advancement in electric guitar tone technology. There are none. Tone doesn’t come from a fancy pickup or your amp or your cryogenically frozen alloy guitar strings. Tone comes from your fingers.
Hey, the laptoppy still works. Good. The space bar on this thing is worn through almost like Willie Nelson’s guitar. This post got long. That was good coffee.
Thrilled to find this instructional vid from Leo Nocentelli himself, giving a demonstration of his guitar part on The Meters’ classic instrumental, Cissy Strut. This is from “The Secrets Of Funk: Using It And Fusing It!” DVD, available here. I’ve played this tune many times – we used to open with it as a sort of “sound check” number, especially on nights when we walked in without a sound check! You can’t really go wrong with it once you’ve got the swing. But there are some fine details you can hear in this solo rendition that I never quite caught before. Mr. Nocentelli starts it off slow before bringing it up to tempo, and then he mixes in some other Meters funk magic! Definitely today’s guitar lesson post. Check it out:
Just few links that I found share-worthy this week, for a variety of reasons.
I think he’s completely wrong in his assertion that “Downloading music will not exist in 10 years.” Of course it will, as will CD’s, memory sticks, vinyl etc. But the rest of his points, and some of the comment threads are very interesting if this subject interests you. Digital Music News is full of good reads for musicians and music publishers etc. Things keep changing rapidly in this sphere, and there’s some spirited yelping on that site.
An excellent site with some great articles. I have it bookmarked. Remember bookmarks? I still use bookmarks.
This story puts the “W” in “Weird.” Complex, morally challenging, dark, twisted, and so very 21st century.
Maybe read this one after your coffee! Delightful scientific perspective asserting that we’re actually more doomed than we previously thought we were doomed. I have no idea if his suggested remedies are viable, or absolute quackery. There certainly is a lot of shrieking on both “sides” of the climate “debate” – which I put in quotes because human activity is changing the climate, period. We just don’t know how much, how fast, and what it all means short, medium and long term. One thing we all share in common is we inhabit this planet, which we are trashing like 7 billion Keith Moons unleashed in a nice hotel. Further studies.
Finally, here is a happy child playing with bouncing baby goats.
My good friend Matthew King Kaufman, and bay area rock greats Earth Quake, started Beserkley Records in 1973 in where else, Berkeley! Matthew and his partners nicknamed their label “Home of the Hits” before they ever had a hit. They dubbed their very first album a “Compilation” of “Greatest Hits” called “Chartbusters, Volume 1,” before they ever released anything, much less dented the charts. Matt once released a single called “Silent Knight” which contain 3 minutes of complete silence. It was a success in jukeboxes, because bartenders or waitresses would play it occasionally just to make the music stop for a few minutes. All this may help to explain why Matthew’s record company title has always been “Reigning Looney” instead of “President” or anything else. He is one of a kind, and so was Beserkley Records. Fulfilling their own prophecy, Beserkley had major chartbusting hits in the 70’s and 80’s. As a Berkeley kid himself, Joel Selvin witnessed the story up close from the beginning. Matthew recently visited Joel’s Basement Record Library to play some records and talk.
This is a great listen. I love these records, and all the guys who made them. Brothers Robbie and Tommy Dunbar’s guitar playing still amaze and inspire me to this day. This is power pop at its best. Have a listen at: OpenSourceMusic.com
I felt a little bad posting this little screed the other day about bands asking people to “Like” their FB pages before hearing their music. Today I have a happy footnote to that! A young band sent me a nice email asking if we could put them on a show sometime, with a link to their bandcamp page. So I popped over and pressed play, and it is freakin’ GREAT! So I’m a fan now. So, I went over to their FB page and clicked “Like” and added them to the Uptones’ likes as well. And now I’m posting it here. Because it really rocks my ass, OK? Not because I’m being nice. This is firmly in the East Bay punk / ska / power-pop tradition, and it really stands on its own merit. The lyrics are sincere and smart and passionate, the combo playing is tight and dynamic, the guitar playing and vocals are lovely and powerful, the production is marvelous and look. Here’s the thing. I pressed play on song 1, and it kept my riveted attention all the way to the end, and kinda made my morning. I like it because these kids put in WORK and turned in a real gem of an album, for which I have no problem sharing my “Like” with the world. Let’s see, will bandcamp let me embed this whole thing, along with Buy and Share links? Let’s see.. Yes! Like! Heh.. Where’s the “Love” button? Listen to this:
Sigh. Invited to “Like” a band on FB. I go to their page. Band looks cool. I click Play and it prompts me to Like before I can hear ’em. Not doing it!
I’ve been sharing some of my bands’ music for free on the Internet since 1998. If someone likes us, great! But I’m not going to ask for a “Like” unless you actually like us and want to help spread the word about us. Gawd. That said, you can hear The Uptones at our FB page, heck yeah we’d appreciate your Liking! Love it even more if you like it enough to want to buy our music at iTunes or put it on a playlist in Spotify or play the Uptones channel in Pandora. We get a little revenue from that and it really means a lot to us. Encourages us to release more music, I mean we have a way to distribute our music world wide without having to invest in CD’s or deal with storage and shipping. It’s potentially a great new world emerging for recording artists as the subscription sites and youtube etc. all figure out how to pay the artists and copyright owners in this era of nearly universal access to recorded music.
But the work has to stand on its own merit! If you’re going to compete with a bazillion other records, compete! Make the best record you can, and then let people hear it somehow. I know it’s not easy to choose the best ways to get your work noticed in today’s crazy playing field, but the model of using a “Like” as currency before even hearing the work, is just kukoo. I might just “Like” the band that invited me, then listen to their stuff, but then I’ll be in the awkward position of having to un-Like them if I didn’t dig their music. Or leave the “Like” standing, thus recommending something I’m not down with, and diminishing the value of my real recommendations. I don’t Like either option.
Thus endeth the rant.
Your comments and rants and musical recommendations are always invited.
UPDATE, Jan 30!-> Here’s is how you DO get me to Like your Band Page!
Just really diggin’ this episode of Selvin On The City tonight. Elvin Bishop is such a brilliant guitar player, and his comments in this interview are informative and fun. The tracks are all just burnin’.
Speak, Red Dog, speak!
