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:
Category: Blog
This blog contains music, cats, and things of less importance.
How Not To Get Me To "Like" Your Band Page!
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!
Elvin Bishop Testifies In Joel Selvin's Basement Record Library
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!
Stiff Richards by Stiff Richards
This was recorded in about 3 days at Sharkbite in Oakland. One of the standout tracks for me is “Fell In And Out Of Art” by Paul Jackson. Typical of Paul’s compositions, the individual parts don’t make complete sense when played solo, but when they’re all played together, they create a moving tapestry of chords and melody and mayhem. It was fun playing guitar on that song, and the whole album. I sang lead on a few tracks as well, including our cover of the Nervebreakers’ “My Girlfriend Is A Rock.”
Available in all the digital places.
From Russia With Love: English Translations of Soviet Era Songs, by Andrei Marcon
Before Moscow native Andrei Marcon emigrated to California as a young man in the 80’s, he acquired some cassette tapes of Russian underground music, which were passed around person to person against the wishes of the Soviet authorities. He has since taken it upon himself to translate into English some of these songs which he loved as a kid. They were “hits” of a kind, in the Soviet era, in that many people heard and loved these songs, and shared and sang them. But it was all on the down low. Thing is, if you got caught distributing music, you could find yourself in serious trouble. You could be arrested, charged, convicted and even sent off to “the camps” for “unlawful commercial activity and/or private entrepreneurship!” Activities like building amps, hiring a sound engineer for a recording, organizing shows – anything where money changed hands – including duplicating and distributing cassettes, were all verboten.
But music, being the universal language, has a way of getting around. Andrei related to me that in fact, western popular music was also passed around surreptitiously in this way. 5th generation cassettes of everything you can think of, found their way to the hungry ears of Russian music fans and musicians. I had heard about this back then. But what I didn’t know, is that there were also homegrown music stars in the Soviet Union, somehow recording and releasing their material to the public. Songs that connected with people were shared widely.
In that setting, there were some notable songwriters and bands, none of whom I had heard about until Mr. Marcon generously shared this information with me a few years ago. At that time, he sang and played for me a few translations he was working on, faithfully rendering these lost gems from his native tongue in his 2nd language, English. Since then, he has recorded and posted some of these versions on youtube. The results are brilliant, and in fact, if I didn’t know these were translations, I’d easily assume they were written in English.
Without further ado I’d like to share with you a few of these songs, performed solo by Andrei Marcon, starting with “The Fiddler” by Konstantin Nikolsky. You can also find these vids and more at Andrei’s youtube channel.
This next one, “Who Is To Blame” is originally by Alexei Romanov of Voskreseniye, a famous Russian band which started in the 70’s and remains active today.
And here finally is Voskresenye’s 1979 Russian undeground hit “I Have…”.
Hope you enjoy! Please share if you like, and who knows, maybe these versions will also be covered! Music traveling beyond borders and time, as it has always done.
UP-Fest in Berkeley, Friday, August 9th!
The UPTONES are doing a one-night-only midsummer show at Ashkenaz on August 9th, with The TITAN-UPS (the best Jamaican Rocksteady style band in San Francisco) and The RAVEUPS – an awesome band with guys from The Rubinoos, Santana, Psycotic Pineapple, and other bay area rock champs. It wasn’t until we had the show confirmed and the bands booked, that I realized all three bands have “UP” in their names. So I’m calling it an “UP-Fest.” ‘Cos I can.
If ya don’t know already, Ashkenaz is ALWAYS All-Ages, and they serve beer, wine and excellent food, AND they have a fantastic wooden dance floor AND a great sound system! Fact is, you can count the number of remaining venues in the east bay that can say ALL that, on one finger. I’m proud to bring The UPTONES show, with all my skankin’ foolz, to our stalwart hometown dance hall again, and I hope you will join us!
Twelve Tones, Laser Bats, Music Theory, and Inspired Fabulous Genius Fun
An absolutely wonderful study of tonality, composition, music history and theory, copyright issues and bats. It’s a half hour long and it just gets better and better every minute. The finale is as apocalyptically beautiful as it is informative. An inspired, complete, hilarious, mind-boggling bit of delightful genius. I could gush some more but it would be gushing. Have a look and a listen. Damn fine work.
The Fashion Slaves "GO INSANE" EP
This 4-song studio recording is the latest from The FASHION SLAVES. The band name was originally inspired by the song “Suffer For Fashion” which I co-wrote with young singer Emily Jayne. Recorded “live in the studio” old school style at East Bay Recorders, produced by Matthew King Kaufman and Michael Rosen. Eric Knight on bass and Pete D’Amato on drums, with Emily on rhythm guitar myself on lead, made for a pretty monstrous little combo. We played a bunch of shows and made a couple of CD’s in two years or so and then we went insane. This EP tells the story.
Available at iTunes and all the other digital gizmos.
Jesse Michaels' Punk Blog Settles Everything
There is a lot of bad information out there about punk rock. What is punk rock? Who started it? Is it dead, when did it die, is this band or that person truly punk, or a sellout, etc. Important stuff, and here to clear it all up once and for all, is renowned punk expert Jesse Michaels. Impressively, he covers it all in less than two minutes.
The Quiet Death Of IODA Promonet
Most people don’t know what IODAPromonet is, or was. And I don’t see any news articles about it closing, so I’m making a little post to say goodbye to what was a remarkable resource. IODA (now merged with Orchard) is an online distributor of recordings: they take the music made by independent labels and feed it out to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and other online music retailers and subscription services. Promonet was a site that IODA created, which gave bloggers some tools to easily post and promote music in the IODA catalog. The idea was to encouraged people to discover and promote music in the “Long Tail” – the vast, undiscovered or under-discovered bulk of contemporary recorded music. I used it extensively, posting links to hundreds of records and promotional free mp3s that I found there over the years. Word is that as of today, the site is going dark along with all the content in it. I’ll miss it. But it isn’t a huge surprise. In the evolution of music and commerce in the digital age, there are hundreds of former sites. I’ve been following this stuff since IUMA. What a long strange tail it’s been.