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This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl – A Biography by Paul Brannigan

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:50:35 +0000

This Is a Call, the first in-depth, definitive biography of Dave Grohl, tells the epic story of a singular career that includes Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and Them Crooked Vultures. Based on ten years of original, exclusive interviews with the man himself and conversations with a legion of musical associates like Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, DC punk legend Ian MacKaye, and Nevermind producer Butch Vig, this is Grohl’s story. He speaks candidly and honestly about Kurt Cobain, the arguments that almost tore Nirvana apart, the feuds that threatened to derail the Foo Fighters’s global success, and the dark days that almost caused him to quit music for good.

Dave Grohl has emerged as one of the most recognizable and respected musicians in the world. He is the last true hero to emerge from the American underground. This Is a Call vividly recounts this incredible rock ’n’ roll journey.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Paul Brannigan

The former editor of Kerrang! magazine, Paul Brannigan is a respected authority on the punk scene in Washington, DC, where Dave Grohl cut his teeth. He has written about Grohl for Mojo and Q magazines and lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

NeonTommy.com, 11/30/11
“[Brannigan] manages to paint a picture of the musical atmosphere that tracks Grohl’s beginnings in punk, through his place in grunge history with Nirvana and up to the Foo’s latest album, ‘Wasted Light.’ The book is filled with vivid details of the different worlds while following Grohl’s growing influence on them…Brannigan throws color into moments and sets musical scenes that you can actually hear…Brannigan knows exactly where to put in a quote and when to use his own knowledge and criticism to push the story forward. His writing has the rhythms and attitudes of the music he describes…A book worth reading for its scope as a series of snapshots of a legendary musical journey.”

New York Journal of Books, 11/29/11

“Brannigan’s biography of musician Dave Grohl and his era, reaches ambitiously out of bounds for the conventional pop bio, cradling its subject in layers of context, political and social history…Brannigan’s excellent segues, characterizations, and lyrical zip ensure This Is a Call occasionally tips but never topples under its own weight. The result is an educational and highly entertaining read…Brannigan loops a fascinating narrative around a compelling and likeable character…This is high quality, street cred music journalism, artfully meshed with undoubted musicological and cultural history grunt.”

New Music Michael, 12/6/11
“Brannigan’s book is an exceptional companion piece to the documentary, though certainly has the ability to stand alone as an extraordinary work of the history of Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters, and Nirvana, as well as a host of other local scenes and the music world in general…Most of us already know a lot of the stories that go along with Nirvana, but certainly not to the extent, and not to the depth that Brannigan covers…if you’re a fan of Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters, Nirvana, punk music, hell just music in general, you’ll want to get this book for yourself and dogear the pages.”

Dave Grohl: From Antsy Student to Nirvana to Foo Fighters

The New York Times Book Review – January 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

Among musicians, drummers are a breed apart. On the one hand, the drummer is the timekeeper, the one who counts off the song and keeps the other band members on the beat. On the other, the drummer sits behind everyone else and usually doesn’t write songs or sing them, so often he’s “only the drummer.”

Actually, Dave Grohl was in the habit of smiling and saying, “I’m only the drummer,” as a way of sidestepping conversations about the financial affairs of his most famous band, Nirvana. By all accounts, though, he’s one of the best in the business; if you look up Grohl on YouTube, you get a sense of just how good a musician he is. He’s also, according to Paul Brannigan, the Nicest Man in Rock.

That would present a problem for any biographer: it’s hard to write about nice guys. Wisely, Brannigan — a music journalist who first interviewed Grohl 15 years ago, and spoke to him both on and off the record while writing this book — fills his pages by turning “This Is a Call” into a rich history of recent pop music as it moves from punk and hard-core to grunge to indie bands, many of which, like Nirvana, ended up signing with major labels. For his part, Grohl flits in and out of this world like Candide, landing on his feet and making new friends at every turn. [Read the full article...]

Irish Songbook: Inishbofin Ceili Band – The Dear Little Isle

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:02:08 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

As I had written in a previous post (see: Ireland: Inishbofin – The Island Of The White Cow) we have a family connection to the island of Inishbofin off the coast of County Galway in Ireland, and two of my wife’s cousins, Geraldine and Paddy Joe King, are gifted musicians. They are also members of the Inishbofin Ceili Band, and, of course, we do have some of their recorded works at our home here in New England. I am referring specifically to their CD The Dear Little Isle, and my favorite is their rendition of the title song.

Note: The CD is only available through the Inishbofin Community Centre (see: http://www.inishbofin.com/music.html). So, if you need a copy, you need to take the ferry at the pier in Cleggan, Ireland. First of all, it is well worth the visit, and secondly, Desmond O’Halloran’s rendition of The Dear Little Isle is absolutely striking. I have heard versions from other, very talented Irish singers, but none of them reaches the great beauty of Halloran’s voice paired with an extraordinary song.

Desmond O’Halloran, who arranged and sang the song in the Inishbofin Ceili Band’s version, wrote: “I first heard this song from Johnny Joe Pheáitsín in 1983 on Inishbofin, the words of which he wrote for me.” Unfortunately, they didn’t include the lyrics in the CD’s booklet. Another resource I found even stated: “I have found zero transcriptions of this song anywhere. If you want to actually learn to sing this song, simply learn it from a fellow singer or from a recording.”

In fact, the confusion originates in the different titles used for the same song. After all, the song and its lyrics were passed from generation to generation merely through mouth-to-mouth, and there are numerous little variations. Usually known in Ireland as The Dear little Isle or There’s A Dear Little Isle, it is commonly referred to as My Own Dear Native Land. Presumably written abroad by an exile in the early to mid 20th Century, it is now accepted as traditional.

The lyrics as shown in the following represent one version, but, again, renditions may very slightly.

My Own Dear Native Land

(Traditional)

There’s a dear little isle in the Western Ocean
An island of purity, holy and grand
Whose name fills its daughters and sons with emotion
When heard on the shores of a far distant land.
It’s Ireland, God bless her, the birthplace of heroes
The home of the patriot, warrior and sage
Of bards and of chieftains whose names live in story
May they live forever on history’s page.

For I love every blade of grass, green on your mountain,
Every leaf on your tree, every rock upon your strand
I love your green hills and your murmuring fountains
I love you, acushla, my own dear native land.

You once were a proud and a glorious nation
Your name and your fame were known all o’er the world
‘Til misfortune came o’er you and sad desolation
And the emerald banner in slavery lay unfurled.
They tortured your children, despoiled your green bowers
They tried to exterminate you long, long ago
But the Irish are somehow like wild, creeping flowers
The faster you pluck them, the quicker they grow.

Note: “acushla,” a short form of the anglicized “acushla machree,” is from “a chuisle mo chroí,” “the pulse of my heart.”

References:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever by Will Hermes

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:54:53 +0000

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Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the city’s infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era’s music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year’s Day 1973 to New Year’s Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the Lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGBs and The Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation. As they remade the music, the musicians at the center of the book invented themselves: Willie Colón and the Fania All-Stars renting Yankee Stadium to take salsa to the masses, New Jersey locals Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith claiming the jungleland of Manhattan as their own, Grandmaster Flash transforming the turntable into a musical instrument, David Byrne and Talking Heads proving that rock music “ain’t no foolin’ around.” Will Hermes was there—venturing from his native Queens to the small dark rooms where the revolution was taking place—and in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire he captures the creativity, drive, and full-out lust for life of the great New York musicians of those years, who knew that the music they were making would change the world.

About Will Hermes

Will Hermes is a senior critic for Rolling Stone and a longtime contributor to NPR’s “All Things Considered.” His work also appears in The New York Times, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. He was co-editor of SPIN: 20 Years of Alternative Music (2005).

Editorial Reviews

“A fascinating book that covers not only the new rock music of the day, but looks back at New York between 1973 and the end of 1977, a time when hip-hop was being birthed, salsa was finding its voice, the avant-garde scene was being heard, and the new loft jazz scene was being born.”
-Bob Boilen, NPR’s All Songs Considered

Although the 1970s appeared to be a musical wasteland (remember Debby Boone?), senior Rolling Stone critic Hermes reminds us forcefully and refreshingly in this breathtaking, panoramic portrait of five years (1973-1977) of that decade that music in New York City was alive, flourishing, and kicking out the jams.
–Publishers Weekly

“Hermes’s attitude, sharp ear and smart big-picture view turn what could have been a small book into something special. A hip, clever, informative look at an unjustifiably dismissed musical era that will have readers scouring iTunes for the perfect accompanying soundtrack.”
–Kirkus Review

When Dreamers Were Breaking the Music Apart

The New York Times Book Review – December 5, 2011 (Excerpt)

You have to admire Will Hermes’s “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” — the reference is to the first single by Talking Heads

Mr. Hermes, a senior critic at Rolling Stone and frequent contributor to The New York Times, has isolated a crucial, if sometimes awkward, period of transition in American music, hitherto dismissed as “a cultural dead zone,” and his painstakingly nuanced preface argues only that the figures he discusses “were breaking music apart and rebuilding it for a new era,” not that such an era had yet arrived.

His principal figures include the uptown D.J.’s Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash; the downtown club D.J.’s David Mancuso and Nicky Siano; the punk-rocking Ramones and New York Dolls; the so-called minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich; the salsa musicians Willie Colon and the Fania All Stars; and the post-Coltrane jazz players David Murray and Anthony Braxton. They were all “young iconoclasts on the edge of the mainstream,” whose “DIY moves,” Mr. Hermes writes, “would grow into movements that continue to shape music around the world.” Like Louis Armstrong or Hank Williams or Elvis Presley before them, they were engaged in “taking the lousy hands they’d been dealt and dreaming them into music of great consequence.”

— for refusing to oversell the importance of its subject. True, the subtitle calls the period from 1973 to 1977 “Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever,” but that’s actually a modest claim: what five years of the 20th century didn’t change music forever? The five years previous, for instance, saw “Bitches Brew,” “Abbey Road,” “Exile on Main Street,” the Velvet Underground and James Brown’s “Sex Machine.” The subsequent five produced “Off the Wall” and “Thriller”; hip-hop’s first hit, the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”; and the debuts of R.E.M., the Replacements and Hüsker Dü. [Read the full article...]

The CBGB Effect

The New York Times Book Review – December 9, 2011 (Excerpt)

The first record made by Talking Heads, a single released in February 1977, was called “Love → Building on Fire.” If you knew about Talking Heads then, you might have been the kind of person who thought the formula-like vector tucked into the title was inspired by the deadpan propositions that the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner was stenciling at that time on the walls of SoHo galleries — which, in turn, might have made you think that the song itself was some sort of self-conscious concept art, sonically and lyrically examining the idea of a soulful pop song even as the insistent beat and David Byrne’s strained shouts and warbles made the song a real one, exuberant, funny in its way, and infectious.

I heard it for the first time when I played it on the jukebox that winter at a place called the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, on Chambers Street in TriBeCa. It was the only way to hear that kind of single then — unless you went to one of a handful of downtown record stores, like Bleecker Bob’s. (The radio was playing a lot of the Eagles’ “Hotel California.”) I was waiting around at the bar for the live music to begin — a band like the Cramps, maybe, or someone who made music but not exactly, like Meredith Monk, or some experimental art-music composer like Arthur Russell (who would go on to do some fascinating things with disco), or one of the loft-jazz players like David Murray. The young women were mostly in Danskins and stovepipe slacks and Capezio jazz shoes, and the guys in secondhand sweaters and worn Levi’s and scuffed, canvas Sperrys like the ones the Ramones wore. Everybody below Houston Street, it seemed, was making some form of art, or trying to, or looking as if he or she did. And when you left the Ocean Club early in the morning, you would look up at block after block of old manufacturing buildings and see here and there a milk carton on a window ledge, because those lofts had no refrigerators (or stoves), but mostly you would notice that so many lights were still on — so many people up working to something untried and provocative. [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘Love Goes to Buildings on Fire’ by Will Hermes

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – December 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

Every city of any cultural import has its moments — so-called golden eras when seemingly unconnected factors and personalities combine to give rise to artistic movements.

By any measure, the musical life of New York City throughout the 1970s was one of these eras, a swath of time and real estate rich with innovators hellbent on pushing music forward. Those then composing and/or performing across genres and musical philosophies included Patti Smith, Steve Reich, Talking Heads, DJ Kool Herc, Philip Glass, the Ramones, Arthur Russell, Meredith Monk, David Mancuso, Anthony Braxton and Grandmaster Flash.

While the city was struggling to fend off bankruptcy, an influx of cheap heroin and a serial killer named Son of Sam, it also was flush with inexpensive housing, especially on the Lower East Side. It’s this combustible combination that’s the backdrop of Will Hermes’ musical history “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever,” which chronicles the period between 1973 and 1977 when musical worlds were melding and experimenting, when a few visionary figures spun magic. [Read the full article...]

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny by Nile Rodgers

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:36:36 +0000

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Today’s pop music—genre-crossing, gender-bending, racially mixed, visually stylish, and dominated by dance music with global appeal—is the world that Nile Rodgers created. In the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote and produced the songs that defined that era and everything that came after: “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” “We Are Family,” “Like a Virgin,” “Modern Love,” “I’m Coming Out,” “The Reflex,” “Rapper’s Delight.” Aside from his own band, Chic, he worked with everyone from Diana Ross and Madonna to David Bowie and Duran Duran (not to mention Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, Prince, Rod Stewart, Robert Plant, Depeche Mode, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, Bryan Ferry, INXS, and the B-52’s), transforming their music, selling millions of records, and redefining what a pop song could be.

But before he reinvented pop music, Nile Rodgers invented himself. He was born into a mixed-race, bicoastal family of dope-fiend bohemians who taught him everything he needed to know about love, loss, fashion, art, music, and the subversive power of underground culture. The stars of the scene were his glamorous teenage mom and heroin-addicted Jewish stepfather, but there were also monkeys, voodoo orishas, jazz cats, and serial killers in the mix. By the time he was sixteen, Nile was on his own, busking through the sixties, half-hippie and half–Black Panther. He jammed with Jimi Hendrix, rocked out at Max’s Kansas City, toured with Big Bird on Sesame Street’s road show, and played in the legendary Apollo Theater house band behind history’s greatest soul singers. And then one night, he discovered disco.

During pop’s most glamorous and decadent age, Nile Rodgers wrote the biggest records and lived behind the velvet rope—whether he was holding court in the bathroom stalls at Studio 54, club hopping with Madonna, or scarfing down White Castle burgers with Diana Ross. Le Freak is the fascinating inside story of pop and its tangled roots, narrated by the man who absorbed everything in his topsy-turvy life—the pain and euphoria and fear and love—and turned it into some of the most sparklingly ebullient pop music ever recorded. Nile Rodgers is a brilliant storyteller who gives readers the surprising behind-the-scenes tales of the songs we all know, and lovingly re-creates the lost outsider subcultures—from the backstreets of 1950s Greenwich Village to the hills of 1960s Southern California to the demimonde of New York’s 1970s and 1980s discos and clubs—that live on in his music and in the throbbing, thriving world of pop he helped to set in motion.

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About Nile Rodgers

Nile Rodgers is an American musician, composer, arranger, and guitarist, and is considered one of the most influential music producers in the history of popular music. His recordings have sold in excess of 100 million copies.

Editorial Reviews

“This book is an absolute knockout: exhilarating, warm, and courageous, deeply moving and deeply funny. Le Freak is as much about the greatness of life as it is about Nile Rodgers’s extraordinary musical journey. As Rodgers well knows, the best music is the stuff we feel, the stuff that speaks to us and won’t let go. Le Freak does all that and much more. This is truly one of the best books ever written about art, music, life, and the way we grow to be exactly who we are. Actually, one of the best books period.”
-Cameron Crowe

“Nile Rodgers taught me the meaning of CHIC at a very young age. His rollicking life story-from an outrageous childhood straight out of Pulp Fiction through his rise to create some of the biggest hits of our time-is an addictive read. All told in inimitable Nile-style with humanity and humor. The story behind the music is nothing compared to the story behind Nile Rodgers. The music industry finally has its own ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture!’”
-Darren Starr, Creator of “Sex and the City”

The Rock Days of Disco

The New York Times Book Review – December 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

Although Nile Rodgers makes the grade as a B-list celebrity, he isn’t as famous as the musical record warrants. A longtime co-leader of the so-called disco band Chic, he’s best known for the bass line his partner Bernard Edwards devised for the monster single “Good Times,” which later drove the seminal “Rapper’s Delight” and several lesser records. But many A-listers have capitalized on his talents and quite a few valued his friendship. And as this eventful and engaging autobiography emphasizes, that was how he and Edwards planned it. Chic cultivated anonymity. They saw their way to success as an “opening act.”

In fact, one of the surprise gifts of “Le Freak” is that a third of it covers Rodgers’s own opening act — a coming-of-age tale every bit as impressive as the musical insights and star-time chronicles that follow. Born to a hip 14-year-old beauty in 1952, Rodgers was raised among bohemians, criminals and drug addicts in Lower Manhattan, the Bronx and Los Angeles by his African-American mother, his white Jewish stepfather and both biological grandmothers. His sporadic relationship with his biological father, an addict first and a musician second who died before reaching 40, also made its mark.

Most of these people were highly intelligent, rather unstable, and good at getting by. Rodgers, an up-and-down student schooled more usefully by television and movies, could get by on several instruments before he taught himself guitar from clarinet études he had lying around. At 15 he brushed with such A‑listers as Frank Sinatra while helping a grandmother’s boyfriend clean private jets at Van Nuys Airport. By 1968 he was a street hippie whose professional base was Greenwich Village — a practiced panhandler who slept in crash pads and on the subway. For a while he was a Black Panther. For a while he took up residence in the “Park Avenue pied-à-terre” of the filmmaker-heiress Cinda Firestone. [Read the full article...]

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years by Greil Marcus

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:23:31 +0000

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A fan from the moment the Doors’ first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock & roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over.

Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour—every hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult of both Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later, it is a new story.

About Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus is the author of Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, When that Rough God Goes Riding, The Shape of Things to Come, Mystery Train, Dead Elvis, In the Fascist Bathroom, Double Trouble, Like a Rolling Stone, and The Old Weird America; a twentieth anniversary edition of his book Lipstick Traces was published in 2009. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published last year by Harvard University Press. Since 2000 he has taught at Princeton, Berkeley, Minnesota, and the New School in New York; his column “Real Life Rock Top 10” appears regularly in The Believer. He has lectured at U Cal, Berkeley, The Whitney Museum of Art, and Princeton University. He lives in Berkeley.

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Editorial Reviews

San Antonio Express-News, August 28, 2011
“With an astounding breadth of knowledge, Marcus unmasks The Doors in his latest missive from the cultural trenches.”

Publishers Weekly, September 5, 2011
“Music critic Marcus offers a relentlessly beautiful and insightful evaluation of the music of the Doors … but also a complete rethinking of the Doors’ work as an entire story that captures the 1960s as ‘a place, even as it is created, people know they can never really inhabit, and never escape’…. He contrasts a fascinating range of official and bootleg live recordings of such hit singles as “Touch Me” to show that by 1970 ‘a war between the band and its audience was underway, a war whose weapon were contempt on both sides.’ This is an impressive tribute.”

Reader Review

With a cover of Joel Brodsky’s Elektra publicity photo of The Doors dressed in unexpectedly warm colors of the sun, Greil Marcus’ “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years” is an unexpected look at selected songs of The Doors and pop culture.

Marcus’ book is a fans’ book, he says that it started at the Avalon Ballroom with his wife and seeing The Doors and on their way out, took a handbill of the show and after a lifetime they still have them. Marcus, best known for music criticism and pop culture, is a Doors fan, but an objective one, he is well versed in all aspects of music and the artists but also the language of music and focuses his lens on The Doors.

Marcus’ “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years” is about twenty critical essays on Doors songs, his prose weaves in and out of the songs to where his thoughts take him, either in relation to the lyrics themselves or some aspect of pop culture. The chapter on “Twentieth Century Fox” is a take off point for an extended essay on 50′s-60′s pop culture and how The Doors fit in. In the essay on “L.A. Woman” he makes the case that it could be used as a soundtrack for Thomas Pynchon’s recent novel, “Inherent Vice,” and the song is a pop art map of the city. Marcus isn’t an easy ride through The Doors, you’ll find yourself agreeing with some of his conclusions, such as on “Take it as it Comes” “seemed to start in the middle of some greater song.” Or even disagreeing with his conclusions, such as Morrison’s tribute to Otis Redding, “poor Otis dead and gone/left me here to sing his song”, “…was beyond arrogant, it was beyond obnoxious, it was even beyond racism…” which always seemed a heartfelt tribute to Redding to me.

As you read you’ll find yourself wanting to listen to the songs to see for yourself whether Marcus’ critiques are apt or not.

Jim writes The Doors Examiner. – Jim Cherry, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Listening Again to Rock’s Wild Child and Finding Grandeur and Dread

The New York Times Book Review – November 15, 2011 (Excerpt)

The best piece of advice I’ve heard someone give an aspiring rock critic is this: For God’s sake, don’t try to write like Greil Marcus.

It was meant as a compliment. Mr. Marcus’s style — brainy but fevered, as if the fate of Western society hung on a chord progression — is nearly impossible to mimic without sounding portentous and flatulent. This voice is so hard to pull off that 15 percent of the time even Mr. Marcus can’t do it. He takes a pratfall in the attempt.

But, oh my, that other 85 percent. Reading Mr. Marcus at his best — on Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Sly Stone, the Band, Sleater-Kinney, Dock Boggs or Randy Newman, to name just a few of his obsessions over the years — is like watching a surfer glide shakily down the wall of an 80-foot wave, disappear under a curl for a deathly eternity, then soar out the other end. You practically feel like applauding. He makes you run to your iPod with an ungodly itch in your cranium. You want to hear what he hears. It’s as if he were daring you to get as much out of the music as he does.

Mr. Marcus’s acute and ardent new book, “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years,” is his 13th and among his best. I say this as someone who has never cared deeply or even shallowly about the Doors, a band that to my ears (I was 6 in 1971, the year Jim Morrison died in Paris) has always been classic-rock sonic wallpaper. “The End” sounded ruinous and sublime in “Apocalypse Now.” But please don’t make me listen to “Hello, I Love You” or “Touch Me”again. I’m pretty sure Jose Feliciano will be singing “Light My Fire” in hell. [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘The Doors’ by Greil Marcus

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – November 22, 2011 (Excerpt)

At first glance, the Doors seem to be an unusual object of study for Greil Marcus, the music critic and cultural historian who likes to draw connections between punk music and world history (“Lipstick Traces”) or Elvis Presley and the American myth (“Mystery Train”). The Los Angeles band is, after all, an act that these days mainly gets airplay for a few scattered hits such as “Light My Fire” and “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” They wouldn’t seem substantial enough for Marcus’ intense gaze. And besides, didn’t Oliver Stone already spend too much time engaging us in a discussion about the Doors’ legacy?

But as he often does, Marcus dives deep, in this case into rare tracks, seminal performances and offhand interviews. The band of Morrison, Manzarek, Densmore and Krieger — referenced by last name only, like old high school friends (they are of course the late frontman Jim Morrison as well as keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger) — is in fact worthy of the author’s scrutiny. As he makes clear, this is a band “at war with its audience,” and thus merits a paradox-riddled Marcus-ian exploration. [Read the full article...]

Listening to the Doors

The New York Times Book Review – December 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

Within an electrifying few years during the 1960s, rock ’n’ roll was transformed from a brash diversion of antsy teenagers into a serious genre that threatened to rival the traditional fine arts. Instrumental in this swift development was a Los Angeles band, the Doors, whose charismatic but tormented and self-destructive lead singer, Jim Morrison, attained cultlike status after his mysterious death at age 27 in Paris in 1971, only four years after the release of their first album.

Whether rock ever completely fulfilled its early promise is arguable. What seems incontrovertible, however, is that rock’s fabulous commercial success could be ruinous to young bands, which were pushed by record companies into the artificial environment of punishing tours in cavernous arenas designed for sports. The gifted Doors were among the first victims of this still near-universal corporate strategy.

No one seems better positioned to write about the Doors than Greil Marcus. A native and longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, he witnessed the convulsions of the 1960s firsthand. As a music journalist and historian, he has mostly remained outside academe, a rarity among American public intellectuals. His 12 previous books include “Mystery Train” (1975), a pioneering appreciation of the then-derided Elvis Presley; “Lipstick Traces” (1989), a genealogy of punk rock that became canonical for postmodernist academics here and abroad; and several studies of Bob Dylan. Marcus has served as editor or co-editor of five projects, including “A New Literary History of America” (to which I contributed the article on Tennessee Williams). [Read the full article...]

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music by Judy Collins

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:56:35 +0000

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A vivid, highly evocative memoir of one of the reigning icons of folk music, highlighting the decade of the ’60s, when hits like “Both Sides Now” catapulted her to international fame.

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes is the deeply personal, honest, and revealing memoir of folk legend and relentlessly creative spirit Judy Collins. In it, she talks about her alcoholism, her lasting love affair with Stephen Stills, her friendships with Joan Baez, Richard and Mimi Fariña, David Crosby, and Leonard Cohen and, above all, the music that helped define a decade and a generation’s sound track.

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes invites the reader into the parties that peppered Laurel Canyon and into the recording studio so we see how cuts evolved take after take, while it sets an array of amazing musical talent against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent decades of twentieth-century America.

Beautifully written, richly textured, and sharply insightful, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes is an unforgettable chronicle of the folk renaissance in America.

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About Judy Collins

JUDY COLLINS has recorded more than forty albums over her illustrious career. With several top-ten hits, Grammy nominations, and gold- and platinum-selling albums to her credit, she has also written several books and has her own music label, Wildflower Records.

Editorial Reviews

“…a fascinating and even harrowing musical and personal reflection.” –Kirkus

“Collin’s improbable and utterly charming tale of assuming iconic status as a popular music star from the early 1960’s onward also proves a tremendously valuable chronicle of the early folk music scene…[A] forthright, radiant work.” –Publisher’s Weekly

Reader Review

First, there are those riveting blue eyes on the cover, surely as famous as those of Paul Newman. The photograph is by Francesco Scavullo and similar to one that appeared on the album “Judith.” Then the title SWEET JUDY BLUE EYES, a play on the words of the song Stephen Stills wrote for her, draws you in; and you are by that time taking the book to the counter to purchase. For the next several hours you are reminded of all the things you have always loved about this great performer, her superb talent, her sense of style, her grace, her commitment to civil rights, peace and diversity. But there are surprises. Judy Collins is totally candid about her struggle for many years with alcoholism and other very personal aspects of her life including several affairs– she names names– before she met Louis Nelson, her partner now of over thirty-three years, and got sober.

What is so refreshing about this book is that Ms. Collins, even when she is being so brutally honest about her own shortcomings, is always gentle with most of the many people she has known in her long career spanning over fifty years. On Joan Baez, that other great female folk singer and her contemporary: “I never felt that competitiveness was helpful or warranted. . . But if she was Ceres. . . I was Diana. . . And the forest is a big, thriving place, chock-full of gods and goddesses.” While she does not understand what happened to her friendship with Joni Mitchell, who of course wrote “Both Sides Now,” one of Ms. Collins’ biggest hits, she nevertheless, “can say thank you. She [Mitchell] gave me a beautiful song, and sometimes that is all one can expect–or, should I say, more than anyone has any right to expect.” Bob Dylan, after his early success, “Sometimes. . . seemed to take up all the air in the room,” but he is “of course, a genius.” Leonard Cohen, whose music Collins first sang in the U. S., is a person she is grateful she did not fall in love with the way she fell in love with his songs. “I adored Leonard, but thankfully it wasn’t the kind of passion that got me into trouble. Instead, his songs would let me fly.”

Ms. Collins is not so kind to her several therapists– nor should she be– many of whom gave her bad advice while being well paid. Her long-time therapist Ralph Klein, for instance, told her that when they got to the bottom of her emotion problems, that her drinking would become “manageable.” He even suggested it might stop. “I realize today he had not one single clue about alcoholism. I did not drink because of my problems. I had problems because I drank.”

Ms. Collins’ descriptions of her bigger-than-life father, for whom she wrote the beautiful song “My Father,” will break your heart. Totally blind since the age of five but fiercely independent– he never needed the assistance of a dog or cane– Chuck Collins was also an alcoholic but both loving and lovable when sober. She says of their relationship: “I think I have been trying all my life to get my father to see me.” Ms. Collins, however, got her passion for liberal politics and her belief that music can change the world from her father, certainly a rare gift for any child to receive.

It is always a delight to witness Judy Collins’ way with words. Her mother Marjorie had big eyes “in which I used to say I saw pieces of fruitcake.” Josh White she describes this way: “He seemed to carry the sun around with him, and if you were anywhere near him you felt that warmth.” Eric Weisberg “has a smile that is usually slow in coming but is worth waiting for.”

Finally, in addition to the four and twenty other reasons to love Judy Collins, add one more when you learn that she keeps the ashes of her seven “beloved” cats on the window sill of her New York apartment. – H. F. Corbin, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Legendary Gaze Burns Through Time and Trouble

The New York Times Book Review – November 13, 2011 (Excerpt)

Albert Grossman, who had put together Peter, Paul and Mary as a folk-singing trio, once suggested to Judy Collins that she become part of a trio too. She would sing with two other women, Judy Henske and Jo Mapes. “We can call you the Brown-Eyed Girls,” he said.

The problem with that idea is apparent both on the cover and in the title of Ms. Collins’s lilting new memoir of a great musical career, five decades old and still going strong: she has the most transfixing, otherworldly blue high-beams ever seen above an acoustic guitar. She has eyes so blue that her onetime lover Stephen Stills once put them in a song title. Some combination of her eyes and voice once prompted Richard Fariña, the poet, songwriter and hell raiser who was her great friend, to write about her with the words “If amethysts could sing. …” Anybody who has ever heard Ms. Collins — and it’s hard to imagine anyone who has not — knows exactly what he meant.

As she writes in “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes” (a play on Mr. Stills’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” which became a hit for Crosby, Stills and Nash), Ms. Collins decided against wearing brown contact lenses and singing with two partners. She had a strong sense of her own identity, even during the troubled and tumultuous times that her book describes. [Read the full article...]

Judy Collins: Sweet Soprano

The New York Times Book Review – December 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

“Gentle voice amid the strife” is how Life magazine described the folk singer Judy Collins on the cover of its May 2, 1969, issue. The label accompanied a photo of a young woman whose distant, blue-eyed gaze hinted at strife of her own. Just months before, Collins had scored a top-10 hit with Joni Mitchell’s pained lament “Both Sides Now.” The record broke through in an age of Vietnam protesters and social revolutionaries, out to save the world but often floundering personally; of young Americans caught between the conformity of their parents’ generation and the pressure to rebel. Collins spoke to the lost soul in all of them when she sang, in Mitchell’s words, “I really don’t know life at all.”

A few joyful songs appeared in her repertory, notably “Amazing Grace,” the 18th-century hymn that she took to the charts in 1970. But one didn’t listen to Collins to feel good. Hurt was etched into her voice: a soprano with an earthy sweetness, floating forlornly like a stray balloon. Onstage, she ventured with her guitar to places that few folk singers went. She voiced the cries of French revolutionary peasants in a medley from “Marat/Sade,” a 1965 Broadway production; she walked the gangplank to suicide in Leonard Cohen’s “Dress Rehearsal Rag.” Later Collins recorded “Send in the Clowns,” an actress’s archly formal swan song from Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” and made it the unlikeliest of disco-era hits. At the piano she delivered her original songs, full of lush storybook imagery and longing for the unreachable. “Albatross” asked, “Will there never be a prince who rides along the sea and the mountains / Scattering the sand and the foam into amethyst fountains?” [Read the full article...]

Pandora Favorites: The Music Of Rosie Thomas

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 13:22:31 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

I love Pandora! For those who don’t know (you’ll be surprised how many there are), Pandora (http://www.pandora.com) is basically Internet-based radio, playing only the music you like by allowing you to create your own program.

Here is not only the music I like; I also discover “new” artists that I’ve never heard of and I LOVE them. When I list “new” names like Evanescence, Missy Higgins, Plumb, Regina Spektor (I’m currently listening to “Soviet Kitsch”), Rosie Thomas, and many more great artists, I can imagine people rolling their eyes.

“What rock are you living under?” they might ask. Well, my excuse is valid: Our local radio station plays only standard music they can actually afford, and that includes “Say what you need to say, say what you need to say, say what you need to say…” Yes, it’s the extraordinary prose of John Mayer, and that’s the maximum level of sophisticated music you get from our local radio station. See also my post Pandora Kills The Radio Star… And I Like It!

Well, talking about Rose Thomas, one of my favorite artists I discovered through Pandora (and never heard on our local radio station):

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Rosie Thomas is an American singer-songwriter, originally from Michigan. It was through mutual friends that she met Trey Many and began playing shows with Velour 100. They recorded one EP together and played a few short tours, where she met Damien Jurado and Pedro the Lion. She then moved to Seattle to briefly attend Cornish College before deciding to focus on a solo recording career.

Thomas also performs as a stand-up comedian under the name Sheila Saputo.

Her appearance on the song “Parking Lot”, from Damien Jurado’s album Ghost of David, brought her to the attention of famed record label Sub Pop who signed her in 2000.

Her debut album When We Were Small was released on January 22, 2001. The album featured Eric Fisher (who Thomas met at Cornish College in Seattle) on guitar and keyboards and Andy Myers on drums. Fisher and Myers returned for 2003′s follow-up Only with Laughter Can You Win.

She released her third album, If Songs Could Be Held, in 2005.

In March 2006, Thomas was invited by Toronto indie rock label Paper Bag Records to exclusively contribute to their See You on the Moon! compilation with her song “Faith’s Silver Elephant”.

In April 2006, Pitchfork erroneously announced that Thomas and American musician Sufjan Stevens were having a baby together, but were forced to print a retraction. Denison Witmer and Thomas later admitted it was an April Fools’ prank.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Her album, These Friends of Mine, was released on December 12, 2006 through her own record label Sing-A-Long Records.

She released a holiday album called A Very Rosie Christmas in November 2008 through her own record label. Thomas also acted in the 2009 film Calvin Marshall and was the subject of the 2009 documentary All the Way from Michigan Not Mars.

Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism by Chuck Eddy

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 12:52:51 +0000

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Chuck Eddy is one of the most entertaining, idiosyncratic, influential, and prolific music critics of the past three decades. His byline has appeared everywhere from the Village Voice and Rolling Stone to Creem, Spin, and Vibe. Eddy is a consistently incisive journalist, unafraid to explore and defend genres that other critics look down on or ignore. His interviews with subjects ranging from the Beastie Boys, the Pet Shop Boys, Robert Plant, and Teena Marie to the Flaming Lips, AC/DC, and Eminem’s grandmother are unforgettable. His review of a 1985 Aerosmith album reportedly inspired the producer Rick Rubin to pair the rockers with Run DMC. In the eighties, Eddy was one of the first critics to widely cover indie rock, and he has since brought his signature hyper-caffeinated, hyper-hyphenated style to bear on heavy metal, hip-hop, country—you name it. Rock and Roll Always Forgets features the best, most provocative reviews, interviews, columns, and essays written by this singular critic. Essential reading for music scholars and fans, it may well be the definitive time-capsule comment on pop music at the turn of the twenty-first century.

About Chuck Eddy

Chuck Eddy is an independent music journalist living in Austin, Texas. Formerly the music editor at the Village Voice and a senior editor at Billboard, he is the author of The Accidental Evolution of Rock ’n’ Roll: A Misguided Tour through Popular Music and Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe. Chuck Klosterman is a freelance journalist and the author of numerous books, including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto and Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota.

Editorial Reviews

“When Chuck hears a pop song, it’s like he is the first person who has ever heard it; he’s certainly aware of what the rest of the world already wants to believe, but those pre-existing perceptions are never convincing to him. . . . More than any other critic, Chuck Eddy showed how the experience of listening to music was both intellectually limitless and acutely personal. There was no ‘correct’ way to hear a song, and there were no fixed parameters on how that song could be described in print, and if that song made you reconsider abortion or the Oakland Raiders or your father’s suicide, then that intellectual relationship mattered because your engagement was real.”—Chuck Klosterman, from the foreword

“You can predict what Eddy will think of something, and you’ll often be wrong, but what he actually thinks will always make more sense, will fit Eddy’s written persona better, than what you had in mind. Eddy’s taste has a deep coherence that’s close to unique among rock critics. . . . [F]or an Eddy fan, it’s a kick getting to read about his favorite music in-depth in these pages, especially when he’s in its first flush of Chuck-love. Will to Power, the Lordz of Brooklyn, Banda Bahia, and White Wizzard are all here, because who else was going to write about them?” – Josh Langhoff, Los Angeles Review of Books

“This wide-ranging collection of essays (from the Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, etc.) captures Eddy’s cantankerous, spirited, enthusiastic, and forceful takes on music from rap to country and musicians from Michael Jackson to Brad Paisley. . . . Eddy’s far-reaching insights into rock music push the boundaries of the rock criticism, showing why he remains one of our most important music critics.” - Publishers Weekly

Book review: ‘Rock and Roll Always Forgets’

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – November 3, 2011 (Excerpt)

Few longtime pop music critics have been as fearlessly unhip in both their likes and dislikes, have been so willing to accept oft-ignored music on its own terms and have been as rock ‘n’ roll as Chuck Eddy, writer, former Village Voice music editor, self-described curmudgeon, ex-Army captain and hair-metal expert.

Eddy’s work is compiled in “Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism,” a career overview whose very title is contrarian: The writer’s got a problem with the premise of Bob Seger’s hit song “Rock and Roll Never Forgets.” He offers evidence with the lost artists, one-hit wonders, egocentric blowhards and various inspired eccentrics that he’s championed since writing early-1980s pieces on a budding genre called “rhymed funk,” soon dubbed rap music.

The writer, who grew up outside of Detroit, rose within a discipline whose first generation — most notably Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis and the Creem magazine posse of Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs and Jaan Uhelszki — was gradually being out-screamed by younger critics reared on ’70s punk and metal. Rolling Stone’s hegemony was starting to give way to fanzine culture and serious consideration of music to the left of Boz Scaggs, Eric Clapton and the rest of the rock patriarchy that Jann Wenner’s budding empire had constructed. [Read the full article...]

Pandora Favorites: The Music Of Plumb

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:40:45 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

Here is not only the music I like; I also discover “new” artists that I’ve never heard of and I LOVE them. When I list “new” names like Evanescence, Missy Higgins, Plumb, Regina Spektor (I’m currently listening to “Soviet Kitsch”), and many more great artists, I can imagine people rolling their eyes.

Well, talking about Plumb, one of my favorite artists I discovered through Pandora (and never heard on our local radio station)… Who would have thunk I’d listen to Christian Alternative Rock…

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Tiffany Arbuckle Lee (born March 9, 1975, in Indianapolis, Indiana) is a Contemporary Christian singer-songwriter who uses the stage name Plumb. She has performed several different genres of music, including alternative rock and Christian alternative rock and a few of her remixes have appeared on dance charts.

In 1997, Plumb released her self-titled debut album Plumb. In 1999, she released her second studio album “candycoatedwaterdrops”, which won the 2000 Dove Award for “Modern RockAlbum of the Year”. Two tracks from it were hits for other artists; “Stranded” was a hit for Jennifer Paige, and “Damaged” was a big dance hit in 2003 in the United Kingdom for Plummet.

Plumb was marketed as a band during the first three album releases on Essential Records. The band was named after the Suzanne Vega song “My Favorite Plum”.

Plumb wanted to leave the music industry after the 2000 album. Lee received a note from a girl a few hours before what she thought to be her final concert. The letter was about the Plumb song “Damaged” that Tiffany had written and recorded about a girl coping with being molested as a child. The note said “‘Whatever you do, I just want you to never forget that you have changed someone’s life.” The note inspired Tiffany to remain in the music industry. In order to leave Essential Records, Plumb had to fulfill her contract obligations, and this led to The Best of Plumb record in 2000 despite the fact she had only released two albums previously. She signed to Curb Records as a solo artist in 2003, releasing the album Beautiful Lumps of Coal. The lead single from Plumb’s 2003 Beautiful Lumps of Coal, called “Real”, peaked at No. 41 in the UK Singles Chart.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Her album Chaotic Resolve entered the Billboard Top 200 album chart at No. 177 on March 9, 2006. Better reached No. 1 on the U.S. Christian airplay chart. The Bronleewe & Bose remix of her follow-up, “Cut”, hit No. 1 on XM’s dance hits channel BPM, and No. 5 on Billboard’s Dance Charts Hot Dance Airplay.

Her third solo album Blink was released on October 9, 2007. “In My Arms”, the first single off the album, was remixed by Kaskade, Scotty K, Bronleewe & Bose, Gomi, and Bimbo Jones and hit the number one spot on the Billboard Dance Charts.

On May 19, 2009 she announced that she was recording a new album titled Beautiful History due out in the fall.^[6] The first single off of Beautiful History, “Hang On” reached number one in US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play in 2009 and additionally became the first single of 2010 to reach the top spot in Billboard’s Hot Dance Airplay chart.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Plumb’s music has been heard on major film soundtracks (Bruce Almighty, Just Married, View from the Top, Brokedown Palace, Drive Me Crazy, The Perfect Man, Mom at Sixteen, etc.) and TV series (Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, ER,Roswell, One Tree Hill, The Vampire Diaries, etc.). She has also written songs for artists such as Michelle Branch, Kimberley Locke, and Mandy Moore. Amy Lee (no relation) of Evanescence mentioned that Plumb was one of her inspirations.

Pandora Favorites: The Music Of Evanescence

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:16:05 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

Here is not only the music I like; I also discover “new” artists that I’ve never heard of and I LOVE them. When I list “new” names like Evanescence, Missy Higgins, Plumb, Regina Spektor (I’m currently listening to “Soviet Kitsch”), and many more great artists, I can imagine people rolling their eyes.

Well, talking about Evanescence, one of my favorite bands I discovered through Pandora (and never heard on our local radio station):

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Evanescence is an American rock band founded in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1995 by singer/pianist Amy Lee and guitarist Ben Moody. After recording private albums, the band released their first full-length album, Fallen, on Wind-up Records in 2003. Fallen sold more than 17 million copies worldwide and helped the band win two Grammy Awards. A year later, Evanescence released their first live album, Anywhere but Home, which sold more than one million copies worldwide. In 2006, the band released their second studio album, The Open Door, which sold more than six million copies.

The line-up of the group has changed several times: David Hodges leaving in 2002, co-founder Moody left in 2003 (mid-tour), bassist Will Boyd in 2006, followed by guitarist John LeComptand drummer Rocky Gray in 2007. The last two changes led to a hiatus, with temporary band members contributing to tour performances. Billboard ranked Evanescence #71 on the Best Artists of the Decade chart.

Announced in June 2009, the newest line-up of the band eventually returned with Evanescence, their self-titled third studio album, and it was released on October 11, 2011. It debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart with 127,000 copies in sales. According to Examiner.com, the album also debuted at #1 on four other different Billboard charts; the Rock Albums, Digital Albums, Alternative Albums, and the Hard Rock Albums charts. The first single, “What You Want”, was released on August 9, 2011. The second single, “My Heart Is Broken”, will be sent to radio stations beginning October 31, 2011. The band is currently on tour in promotion for their new record along with The Pretty Reckless and Fair to Midland.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Critics vary in terming Evanescence a rock or metal band, but most identify them as some form of gothic band: Publications such as The New York Times, Rough Guides, Rolling Stone and Blender have identified Evanescence as a gothic metal act, while other sources such as NME,MusicMight, IGN and Popmatters have termed them gothic rock. They have been compared to a variety of bands from differing genres, such as nu metal ensembles like P.O.D. and Linkin Park, gothic metal groups like Lacuna Coil, and symphonic metal acts like Nightwish and Within Temptation. David Browne of Blender offers an elaborate description of the band’s music as “goth Christian nü-metal with a twist of melancholic Enya.” Adrien Begrand of Popmatters describes Evanescence as utilising “nu-metal riffage”. Adrian Jackson of My Dying Bride stated that he feels Evanescence is doing something similar to his own gothic metal group, only in a more commercial direction. Other genres and influences used to describe the band’s sound include alternative metal, alternative rock, hard rock, electronica and chamber pop. The band’s official website classed their musical genre simply as ‘rock’.

Evanescence was originally promoted in Christian stores. Later, the band made it clear they did not want to be considered part of the Christian rock genre, like fellow Wind-up Records artists Creed. Terry Hemmings, CEO of Christian music distributor Provident, expressed puzzlement at the band’s about-face, saying “They clearly understood the album would be sold in these [Christian music] channels.” After many Christian stores began to remove the band’s music from their shelves, Wind-up Records chairman Alan Meltzer then issued a press release in April 2003 requesting formally that they do this. In 2006, Amy Lee told Billboard that she had opposed being identified as a “Christian band” from the beginning.

Musical Blast From The Past: “Take On Me” by A-Ha

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:05:59 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

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Living in 1980s Germany, and loving contemporary pop music, I saw the release of a great number of songs that have not lost their popularity up to this day. One of these songs is Take On Me by A-Ha, which was also a great hit here in the United States (A-Ha is from Norway).

First, let me shock most Americans who grew up during the 1980s (that includes my wife, but she already knows):

A-Ha was NOT a One-Hit Wonder!

A-ha were a Norwegian pop band formed in Oslo in 1982. The band was founded by Morten Harket (vocals), Magne Furuholmen (keyboard), and Pål Waaktaar (guitars). The group initially rose to fame during the mid 1980s after being discovered by musician and producer John Ratcliff and had continued global success in the 1990′s and 2000′s.

Also, the title song of the James Bond Movie, “The Living Daylights”, was co-written with Paul Waaktaar-Savoy of A-ha and recorded by them.

The band have sold over 36 million albums and 35 million singles worldwide. In less than a year, during 2010, the band earned an estimated 500 million Norwegian Kroner on touring tickets, merchandising and release of a greatest hits album, making them one of the 40-50 largest grossing bands in the world.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

A-ha achieved their biggest success with their debut album, Hunting High and Low, in 1985. That album peaked at number 1 in their native Norway, number 2 in the UK and number 15 on the U.S. Billboard album chart, yielded two international number-one singles, “Take on Me” and “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.”, and earned the band a Grammy Award nomination as Best New Artist. In the UK, Hunting High and Low continued its chart success into the following year, becoming one of the best-selling albums of 1986. In 1994, after their fifth studio album, Memorial Beach which failed to achieve the commercial success of their previous albums, the band went on a hiatus.

Following a performance at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 1998, the band returned to the studio and recorded their sixth album, 2000′s Minor Earth Major Sky, which was another number-one in Norway and resulted in a new tour. A seventh studio album, Lifelines, was released in 2002, and an eighth album, Analogue, in 2005, was certified Silver in the UK — their most successful album there since 1990′s East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Their ninth album, Foot of the Mountain, was first released on 19 June 2009 and returned the band to the UK Top 5 for the first time since 1988, being certified Silver there and Platinum in Germany. The album peaked at number 2 in Norway (their first not to reach number 1 in their home territory). On 15 October 2009, the band announced they would split after a worldwide tour in 2010, the Ending On A High Note tour. Thousands of fans from at least 40 different countries on six continents congregated to see A-ha for the last time.

Stay On These Roads

And here comes my favorite A-Ha song, Stay On These Roads. I have both videos, Take On Me and Stay On These Roads on my iPhone, and my wife loves it. Yet another reason for astonishment that a band like A-Ha never really made it big in the United States.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Musical Blast From The Past: “Eloise” by Barry Ryan

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:30:17 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

Growing up as a teenager in Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and loving contemporary pop music, I saw the release of a great number of songs that have not lost their appeal up to this day. One of these songs is Eloise by Barry Ryan.

I was unable to find any information on how the song did here in the United States, but my guess is, it didn’t do well at all, even though it was a HUGE hit in Europe at the time. Everybody I asked just shook their head. Who? Barry Ryan! Never heard of him. Well, they are also under the impression that a hugely successful band like A-Ha – Think “Take On Me” – was a one-hit wonder, and thereafter disappeared into nothingness (Time for another article to dissolve the myth).

“Eloise” is a pop song first released in 1968. It was sung by Barry Ryan, and written by his twin brother Paul Ryan. Running for a little over five minutes, it featured strong orchestration, strong vocals, and a brief slow interlude. In that it is similar to the same year’s hit ”MacArthur Park” – See also my post Dumbledore Left The Cake Out In The Rain.

“Eloise” sold 3 million copies worldwide, and reached number 2 in the UK Single Chart as published by Record Retailer, but hit number 1 in the NME and Melody Maker charts. It topped the chart in seventeen countries.

Barry Ryan (born Barry Sapherson, 24 October 1948, Leeds, Yorkshire) was an English pop singer. He is currently a photographer.

The son of pop singer Marion Ryan, Ryan and his twin brother Paul began to perform at the age of 16. In 1965 they signed a recording contract with Decca and, under the name of “Paul & Barry Ryan”, brought out singles such as “Don’t Bring Me Your Heartaches” (1965), “Have Pity on the Boy” (1966) and “Missy Missy” (1966). His stepfather was the American agent and music promoter Harold Davison.

When it turned out that Ryan’s brother was unable to cope any longer with the stress connected with show business, the brothers decided that Paul would write the songs which Ryan would interpret as a solo artist. Their greatest success as a composer-singer duo, now for MGM Records, was “Eloise” (1968), melodramatic and heavily orchestrated. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. Later singles included “Love Is Love” (also 1968), “The Hunt” (1969), “Magical Spiel” (1970) and “Kitsch” (1970).

“Love Is Love”, written by Paul Ryan and released in the United Kingdom during February 1969, was not a great success in his own country. However combining sales from Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, “Love is Love” sold a million copies by August 1969, the second million-seller for Ryan.

Ryan was also popular in Germany. Promoted by Bravo, the German youth magazine, he also recorded a number of songs in German, for example “Die Zeit macht nur vor dem Teufel Halt” (“Time Only Stops for The Devil”).

Ryan stopped performing in the early 1970s. There were rumours that he had had an accident in the recording studio. Supposedly he suffered serious burn wounds in the face and could no longer appear in public. However, he made a comeback in the late 1990s when a two CD set with his and his brother’s old songs was released. Ryan was also part of the ‘Solid Silver 60s Tour’ of the UK in 2003, singing “Eloise” backed by The Dakotas.

Well, talking about Barry Ryan’s great popularity in Germany; it brought us the following video, which is an excerpt from the German TV Show “Beat Club” (Yes, Beat Club, because English was “in”, and nobody would have watched it if the title was Schlagverein…).

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Pandora Favorites: The Music Of “A Fine Frenzy”

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:43:32 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

Here is not only the music I like; I also discover “new” artists that I’ve never heard of and I LOVE them. When I list “new” names like Evanescence, Missy Higgins, Plumb, Regina Spektor (I’m currently listening to “Soviet Kitsch”), A Fine Frenzy, and many more great artists, I can imagine people rolling their eyes.

Well, talking about A Fine Frenzy, one of my favorite artists I discovered through Pandora (and never heard on our local radio station):

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Alison Sudol (born 23 December 1984), known professionally as A Fine Frenzy (formerly Alison Monro, is a US alternative singer and songwriter and pianist. Her debut album, One Cell in the Sea, was released on July 17, 2007, and peaked at number 91 on the Billboard 200 chart. She has been in the charts in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, and France, among other countries. Her music has been featured on television shows, and on the soundtrack of the film Sleepwalking.

Born in Seattle, Washington to two dramatic arts teachers, Sudol and her mother moved to Los Angeles after her parents divorced when she was five years old. She didn’t see her father - John Sudol - often while she was growing up. She grew up listening to a wide range of music, including Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, and swing.

She graduated from high school at the age of 16, and considered herself “nerdy and quiet”. Sudol did not “drink or smoke or do anything like that”. She stated in an interview “I was so nervous about going into college like that and super young. I figured I would take two years and try to find out what I was doing with music. And when I was 18, I was just so deep into it that I didn’t want to stop”. At age 18, Sudol started her first band, Monro.

Sudol had a passion for literature, and immersed herself in the works of C. S. Lewis, E. B. White, Lewis Carroll, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Dickens. Her artist name, “A Fine Frenzy”, is taken from a verse in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1: “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven”). After teaching herself to play the piano, she began putting her creative energy into writing songs.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The short demo she sent out received attention from EMI’s Jason Flom, who signed her after visiting her house and “listening to her play.”

In March 2007, Sudol appeared at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, opening for The Stooges. Shortly after, her debut album, One Cell in the Sea, was released to generally positive reviews. The first single, “Almost Lover”, peaked at number 25 on Billboard’s Hot Adult Contemporary Trackschart. In mid-2007, she secured another opening spot, this time for Rufus Wainwright on his tour. In March and April 2008, Sudol headlined her own tour in the US and Canada, and in April she toured France, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. In September 2008, she was the star act on the opening night of the ‘New Pop Festival’ organized by the German broadcaster SWR3. She returned to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on a headline tour in November 2008 and played in the ‘Super Bock em Stock’ festival in Portugal in December 2008.

Her song “You Picked Me” was featured on iTunes as the “Free Single of the Week” for August 14, 2007, and VH1 featured her as one of their “You Oughta Know” artists. Additionally, in October 2008, “You Picked Me” was chosen as network theme by SIC, a Portuguese television network.

One Cell in the Sea has sold 300,000 copies. In 2008 it was released in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Poland. In each of those countries, the album peaked within the top 30, with the first single, “Almost Lover,” reaching number eight in Germany, number ten on the Swiss Charts and number five in Austria.

Sudol’s second album, Bomb in a Birdcage, was released September 8, 2009. The first single, “Blow Away”, was released on July 17, 2009, followed by two more singles, “Happier” and “Electric Twist”.

Sudol announced on her official Twitter that she’s excited to start work on her third record, but a date and title have not been confirmed, though slated for a 2012 release. – Source: Wikipedia.org

Pandora Favorites: The Music Of Missy Higgins

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:31:06 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

Here is not only the music I like; I also discover “new” artists that I’ve never heard of and I LOVE them. When I list “new” names like Evanescence, Missy Higgins, Plumb, Regina Spektor (I’m currently listening to “Soviet Kitsch”), and many more great artists, I can imagine people rolling their eyes.

Well, talking about Missy Higgins, one of my favorite artists I discovered through Pandora (and never heard on our local radio station):

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Melissa “Missy” Morrison Higgins (born 19 August 1983) is an Australian pop singer-songwriter, musician and actor. Her No. 1 albums in Australia are The Sound of White (2004) and On a Clear Night (2007), and her Top Ten singles are “Scar”, “The Special Two”, “Steer” and “Where I Stood”. From a musical family in Melbourne, she played piano by age six and sang at twelve. While boarding at Geelong Grammar School, she wrote a song for an assignment which was then entered into the national Unearthed radio competition for unsigned artists. Higgins won and signed recording contracts with Eleven and Warner Bros. After taking time off, backpacking in Europe, she recorded her first album The Sound of White, which was released in 2004. The album, and its first single, “Scar” both went to No. 1 on the relevant Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Charts. Its second single, “The Special Two”, went to No. 2. Higgins was nominated for fiveARIA Music Awards that year and won ‘Best Pop Release’ for “Scar”. In 2005 she was nominated for seven more awards and won five. She won her seventh ARIA in 2007.

In 2006, Higgins wrote new material for her second album, and following a US tour she recorded On a Clear Night, which gave her another No. 1 single with “Steer”. Higgins has conducted several well received Australian tours and performed at high-profile charity events WaveAid (2005) and Live Earth (2007). She has toured internationally and lived and worked in the United States for ten months in 2008. Her song “Where I Stood” has been used in television shows including Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill and So You Think You Can Dance. Her third album is due to be released in 2012.

Alongside her music career, Higgins pursues interests in animal rights and the environment, endeavouring to make her tours carbon neutral. She is also the patron of One in Five, an Australian mental health charity. In 2007, following years of press speculation about her sexual orientation, she came out as bisexual, saying that she prefers interviewers to focus on her music. In 2010 she made her acting debut in feature Bran Nue Dae, and performed on the related soundtrack.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Higgins grew up in the 1980s and 1990s listening to artists that her older siblings liked—Nicola played Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, while David favoured Queen and Kiss. Departing for boarding school at age 13, she was exposed to alternative artists like Nirvana and Courtney Love and started teaching herself guitar and writing her own music. She also began singing with David’s jazz group on weekends. As an adult she prefers Nina Simone and Ray Charles to “poppy dance music”. She has cited Patty Griffin, Ron Sexsmith, Rufus Wainwright, Paul Kelly and Sarah McLachlan as influences. Material from her yet-to-be-released third album is influenced by ambient music fromLow, Jon Hopkins, Icelandic band Sigur Rós and Estonian classical composer Arvo Pärt.

Higgins’ song writing grew out of a desire to express her emotions when she was at school and her lyrics describe her feelings about her own life and relationships. The piano was the first instrument she learned to play, and she continues to use it as well as digital pianos including a Roland RD-300SX, RD-700 and KR-15. She also uses guitars extensively in her music particularly when touring, due to their portable nature and favours the Australian brand, Maton. On occasion she plays xylophone and melodica during performances. - Source: Wikipedia.org

Pandora Favorites: The Music Of Regina Spektor

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:03:37 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

Here is not only the music I like; I also discover “new” artists that I’ve never heard of and I LOVE them. When I list “new” names like Evanescence, Missy Higgins, Plumb, Regina Spektor (I’m currently listening to “Soviet Kitsch”), and many more great artists, I can imagine people rolling their eyes.

Well, talking about Regina Spektor, one of my favorite artists I discovered through Pandora (and never heard on our local radio station):

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Regina Ilyinichna Spektor (born February 18, 1980) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered in New York City’s East Village.

Spektor was born in Moscow, USSR in 1980 to a musical Russian Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, is a photographer and amateur violinist. Her mother, Bella Spektor, was a music professor in a Russian college of music and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York. She has a brother Barry (Bear), who was featured in track 7, “* * *”, or “Whisper”, of her 2004 album, Soviet Kitsch.

She learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles,Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine and a half, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Regina had to leave her piano behind. The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination that Jews faced. Spektor is completely fluent in Russian and reads Hebrew, and has since paid tribute to her Russian heritage, quoting the poem February by the famous Russian poet Boris Pasternak in her song Après Moi, and stating “I’m very connected to the language and the culture.”

Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, the family was admitted to the United States as refugees with the assistance of HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) and settled in The Bronx, where Spektor graduated from the SAR Academy, a Jewish day middle school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She then attended high school for two years at the Frisch School, a yeshiva inParamus, New Jersey, but transferred to a public school, Fair Lawn High School, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where she finished the last two years of her high school education.

Spektor has said that she has created a great number of songs, but that she rarely writes any of them down. She has also stated that she never aspired to write songs herself, but songs seem to just flow to her. Spektor’s songs are not usually autobiographical, but rather are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination. Her songs show influences from folk, punk, rock, Jewish, Russian, hip hop, jazz, and classical music. Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Spektor has a broad vocal range and uses the full extent of it. She also explores a variety of different and somewhat unorthodox vocal techniques, such as verses composed entirely of buzzing noises made with the lips and beatbox-style flourishes in the middle of ballads, and also makes use of such unusual musical techniques as using a drum stick to tap rhythms on the body of the piano or chair. Part of her style also results from the exaggeration of certain aspects of vocalization, most notably the glottal stop, which is prominent in the single “Fidelity”. She also uses a strong New York accent on some words, which she has said is due to her love of New York and its culture.

Her lyrics are equally eclectic, often taking the form of abstract narratives or first-person character studies, similar to short stories or vignettes put to song. Spektor usually sings in English, though she sometimes includes a few words or verses of Latin, Russian, French, and other languages in her songs. She also plays with pronunciations, which she said on a NPR interview to be a remnant of her early years when she listened to pop in English without understanding the lyrics. Some of Spektor’s lyrics include literary allusions, such as to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in “Poor Little Rich Boy”,The Little Prince in “Baobabs”, Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood in “Paris”, Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare in “Pound of Flesh”, Shakespeare’s Hamlet in “The Virgin Queen”, Boris Pasternak in “Après Moi”, Samson and Delilah in “Samson”, and Oedipus the King in “Oedipus”, Billie Holiday in “Lady” and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome in “2.99 cent blues”. She alludes to The Beatles and Paul McCartney in the song “Edit”. She also used a line from Joni Mitchell’s California in her song “The Devil Came to Bethlehem”. Recurring themes and topics in Spektor’s lyrics include love, death, religion (particularly Biblical and Jewish references), city life (particularly New York references), and certain key phrases have been known to recur in different songs by Spektor, such as references to gravediggers, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the name “Mary Ann”. Spektor’s use of satire is evident in “Wasteside,” which refers to The Twelve Chairs, the classic satirical novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov, and describes the town in which people are born, get their hair cut, and then are sent to the cemetery.

In Spektor’s early albums, many of her tracks had a very dry vocal production, with very little reverb or delay added. However, Spektor’s more recent albums, particularly Begin to Hope, have put more emphasis into song production and have relied more on traditional pop and rock instruments. Spektor says the records that most impact her are those of “bands whose music is really involved”, specifically naming The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Radiohead, Tom Waits, and Frédéric Chopin as primary influences.

In her songs, “Eet”, “Us” and “Après Moi” the titular sounds are used as the focal point throughout. (In “Dance Anthem of the 80′s”, the sound “eet” is also used often, on words such as “meat”, “street”, and “eat”). – Source: Wikipedia.org

Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks by Ronin Ro

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:58:16 +0000

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

A fascinating, authoritative biography of one of the most commercial, controversial, and influential musicians of all time

In his three decades-long of recording, Prince has had nearly thirty albums hit the Billboard Top 100. He is the only artist since the Beatles to have a number one song, movie, and single at the same time. Prince’s trajectory—from a teenage unknown in Minneapolis to an idol and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer—has won him millions of adoring fans.

Prince is the first book to give full treatment to this 30-year career of epic proportions. Acclaimed music journalist Ronin Ro traces Prince’s rise from anonymity in the late 70s, to his catapult to stardom in the 80s, to his reemergence in the 21st century as both an artistic icon and a starmaker. Ro chronicles the music, showing how Prince and his albums helped define and inspire a generation. Along the way, Prince confronted labels, fostered other young talents, and took ownership of his music, making a profound mark on the entertainment industry and pop culture.

In this authoritative biography, Ro digs deep to reveal the man behind some of the most important music of our time.

About Ronin Ro

RONIN RO has written for USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, MTV, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He has written eight books about the entertainment industry.

Editorial Review

“Did 10 years of researching the enigmatic Prince pay off? You bet.

For much of the 1980s, Prince was arguably the most important pop musician on the planet. He wasn’t an originator, however, but a sponge who could take bits and pieces from different genres and manage to create something uniquely his own. The fact that he could sing well, play expertly on several instruments and wear the hell out of skin-tight leotards didn’t hurt either. Considering his sales figures, influence and huge, albeit admittedly inconsistent discography, it’s surprising that nobody has delivered a noteworthy Prince bio…until now. Veteran journalist Ro (Dr. Dre: The Biography, 2007, etc.) spent a decade researching this book—which shouldn’t surprise Prince’s fans, as the man is notoriously private—and it was worth it, as he was able to get vital information, opinions and anecdotes from Prince’s close and not-so-close associates, everybody from sidemen to record-label execs. (Unsurprisingly, the man himself did not grant Ro access.) By utilizing verbatim dialogue, the book often reads like a novel; granted, some readers may doubt the veracity of every piece of dialogue, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless. The author has an obvious affection for Prince’s work, but he maintains enough objectivity to be credible.

An energetic, detailed balance of reportage and criticism about an icon of his era.”—Kirkus Reviews

Reader Review

his is yet another largely non-exclusive look at Prince that doesn’t stand out of the pack. Spending more time on the fat years of Prince and far too little time on the lean, this book reveals almost nothing that a fan of Prince – the most likely candidate to even pick up this book in this day and age – doesn’t already know or have access to. There is virtually nothing distinguishing this book from the last five books about Prince that came out in the last ten years. Information is largely culled from the same sources as every other book, the anecdotes are largely old hat at this point, and there isn’t the promised revelation of Prince’s influence on much more than himself and his audience.

The biggest disappointment is that the opportunity to make a book that stood out is lost by committing the same crime that almost every other book about Prince makes: it acts like the last 15 years didn’t happen. It spends 290 of its 356 pages of actual text on the albums leading up to 1996 (12 total, not counting soundtracks) and a practically scant 66 pages on the TEN albums that followed. It covers the early, more successful (and, not coincidental I am sure, thoroughly picked over) period of his career almost song by song, but then almost dismisses the last fifteen years of his career by comparison.

At this point I’d rather just read a book about all of the other acts Prince has launched, or a treatise that genuinely attempted to parse out his influence on culture and art during his tenure. if there’s anything left to say about Prince, no one but Prince is likely to write the book compelling enough to warrant purchasing (and we all know how likely that is to happen). I’d say this is fine for people who are looking for an entry into Prince’s world, but that’s the same thing you can say about every other book about Prince. – Scott Woods, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Prince bio underscores need for Prince autobio

The Washington Post Book Review – November 4, 2011 (Excerpt)

Will anyone ever crack the purple force field that surrounds Prince?

This new biography of pop music’s most brilliant mysterioso doesn’t even try. The author is Ronin Ro, a music journalist who made his name in 1999 with “Have Gun Will Travel,” a book that dove into the nitty-grit of ’90s gangsta rap culture. “Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks,” on the other hand, seems to have been written in the peaceful solitude of the public library. Instead of the penetrating reportage his subtitle promises, Ro offers a snoozy chronology of the guarded singer’s complicated career, culled largely from old newspaper and magazine reports, too many of them unattributed.

The story Ro tells begins on June 7, 1958, with the birth of Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis and quickly moves on to the details of his career without turning up new information on his life. As the prodigy blooms into a pop star, his albums move up and down the sales charts. The critics react. He squabbles with his label, Warner Bros. It’s all garnished with tiresome details from sources who live light-years outside Prince’s social orbit. If you’ve ever wondered what Tower Records Chairman Russ Solomon thought of Prince striking a deal with Best Buy to sell his 1998 album, “Crystal Ball,” as a four-disc set, rejoice.

At 356 pages, “Prince” reads like a metastasized Wikipedia entry, only without all the attribution. And once the book settles into its lifeless rhythm — which is to say, immediately — the idiosyncrasies really jump out. At one point, Ro reminds us that Stevie Wonder is blind, but later expects us to know that Prince’s jouncy tune “Cindy C.” is about supermodel Cindy Crawford without actually mentioning her by name. [Read the full article...]

Irish Songbook: Clannad – Irish Musical Group From County Donegal

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:28:33 +0000

Clannad at Meteor Awards

Clannad are an Irish musical group, from Gaoth Dobhair, County Donegal. Their music has been variously described as bordering on folk and folk rock, Irish, Celtic and New Age, often incorporating elements of an even broader spectrum of smooth jazz and Gregorian chant. They are known for performing in various languages, including English, Latin, Scottish Gaelic, Mohican and most of all in their native tongue, Irish. They have won several notable awards throughout their career, including a Grammy, a BAFTA, an Ivor Novello and a Billboard Music Award.

Clannad comprises siblings Moya Brennan (Irish: Máire Ní Bhraonáin), Ciarán Brennan (Irish: Ciarán Ó Braonáin), Pól Brennan (Irish: Pól Ó Braonáin, who left in 1990 and rejoined in 2011) and their twin uncles Noel Duggan (Irish: Noel Ó Dúgáin) and Pádraig Duggan (Irish: Pádraig Ó Dúgáin). Sibling Enya (Irish: Eithne Ní Bhraonáin) left the group in 1981 to pursue a solo career.

Clannad first made their mark in the folk and traditional scene in the 1970s in Ireland and mainland Europe. They subsequently went on to bridge the gap between traditional Celtic music and pop music in the 1980s and 1990s with albums such as Macalla and Anam. During their career they toured the world extensively and gained fans in every major territory. Lead singer Moya Brennan and her sisterEnya have also enjoyed significant success as solo artists. The band won a Grammy Award in 1999 for Best New Age Album, and their record sales exceed the 15 million mark. They are also widely regarded as the band which, for the first time, put Irish traditional music and the Irish language on the world stage and paved the way for many other Irish artists.

Ten years after “taking a break“, the five original members of Clannad reunited on stage at the Celtic Connections Festival in February 2007 in Glasgow, Scotland. Moya, Ciarán, Noel and Pádraig embarked on their first UK tour in over 10 years in March 2008, starting in Gateshead. In 2009, the band’s Pádraig Duggan announced that the band were recording a new album.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Musical upbringing

Siblings Ciarán, Pól, and Máire Uí Bhraonáin (Brennan) and their two twin uncles Noel and Pádraig Ó Dúgáin (Duggan) grew up in Gaoth Dobhair, a rural village in County Donegal, in the northwest corner of Ireland. The village is in the Gaeltacht and they were an Irish-speaking and Roman Catholic family. The Brennans’ mother, Baba, was a music teacher, and their father, Leo, was a former member of a cabaret band. Leo was travelling extensively in the early family years. Later, they bought a pub with a stage called Leo’s Tavern (Tábhairne Leo). The children would occasionally do cover versions ofBeatles, Beach Boys and Joni Mitchell songs at home and in their family pub.

The children were performing late at night in the pub (the story was recounted by Máire, TG4, 17 March 2007, Clann as Dobhar & Clannad Beo) when the local police sergeant walked in. They feared a summons, but instead the policemen had a form to enter a local music competition. They didn’t have a name at the time, but had to find one for the competition. Someone suggested Clann As Dobhar (Irish for “the family from Dore”), which was provisionally blended into Clannad in 1973.

The young Brennans’ and Duggans’ passion for the traditional music of Ireland soon expanded beyond their native Gweedore. They would later visit such outlying communities as Tory Island off Donegal’s coast. Armed with some 500 Gaelic songs, they would later begin to arrange these songs for a full band.

Traditional years

The first album was recorded in 1973, simply called Clannad, and it showed a band aware of contemporary Irish music of the day. There were hints of modern influences, most notablyPentangle’s, in songs such as “The Pretty Maid” and “Morning Dew”, but it was the Irish songs, particular an early arrangement of “Níl Sé Ina Lá”, a drinking song they found on one of their Tory Island expeditions, that really showed the band’s ability to form contemporary, jazz-influenced versions of traditional material. This album was also released under the name The Pretty Maid. One of the tracks, “An Pháirc”, was performed by Clannad in the 1973 Irish heat of the Eurovision Song Contest. The second album followed in 1975 on Gael-Linn records and was titled Clannad 2. Produced by Planxty and Bothy Band founderDónal Lunny, it showed a tremendously more mature band that was quite committed to singing mainly in Irish. Their arrangements were still experimental for the times, but their increasing skill in the use of traditional acoustic instruments kept the music well within the boundaries of folk music. Clannad 2 featured some ground-breaking traditional music, including Máire’s harp playing on the O’Carolan song “Eleanor Plunkett” and ensemble work on songs like “Rince Briotánach” and “Teidhir Abhaile Riú”, an Irish matchmaking song.Clannad entered a local folk festival in Letterkenny, County Donegal, and won first prize, a record contract with the Irish arm of Phillips, when they were still in college and school. They did not make the record until 1973 because the record company did not like the idea of them doing half the album in Irish, as it was not heard of to sing Irish in mainstream music.

The following year they produced Dúlamán. The title track was a song about two dúlamán, or seaweed merchants, one of whom is trying to win the hand of the other’s beautiful daughter. It has been a favourite of Clannad’s live shows for a very long time and is still performed in a rock version which captures the flavour of the original recorded acoustic version.

The band in 1976 still consisted of Máire on lead vocals and harp, Ciarán on double bass, electric piano and vocals, Pól on flutes, guitars and bongos, Noel on guitar, vocals and Pádraig on mandolin, guitar and vocals. They still kept the Gaelic spelling of their surnames of Ó Braonáin for the brothers, Ní Bhraonáin for Máire and Ó Dúgáin for Pádraig and Noel. During their first tour of Europe in 1976 a standing ovation after an eight-minute version of “Níl Sé Ina Lá” convinced them to become full time professionals. The band’s next album was Crann Úll (Irish for apple tree) released in 1978 on Tara Records. It featured a stronger emphasis on Máire’s harp-playing. “Ar a Ghabháil ‘n a ‘Chuain Domh” featured a particularly full band arrangement reflective of their live jams at the time. “Lá Cuimhthíoch Fán dTuath” (“A Strange Day in the Countryside”) showed the first hints of the more atmospheric side of the band’s arrangements. On “Gathering Mushrooms” they included their sister Eithne Ní Bhraonáin (now known as Enya) on supporting vocals.

Clannad in Concert was released in 1979, featuring excerpts from their 1978 Swiss tour and a now world-famous version of “Down by the Sally Gardens” and a 10-minute version of “Níl Sé Ina Lá”. It served as a base for various solos by the individual members. The year 1979 also saw a 36-concert North American tour — the most extensive ever undertaken by an Irish group to date. In 1981 with the album Fuaim (pronounced foom, meaning sound), recorded in Dublin’s famed Windmill Studios, Clannad began to experiment with a more lush and electric sound. Enya became, for a short time, a full member of the band, adding keyboards and harmony vocals as well as lead vocals on two songs, “An tÚll” and “Buaireadh an Phósta”. This album marked Clannad’s first experiments with synthesiser. It also had guest Neil Buckley on clarinet and saxophones plus a percussionist and electric piano. The following year Enya left to pursue her solo career and the band was about to record the album which would forever change their career as well as their sound, Magical Ring which appeared in 1982.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Musical Style

When Clannad first started out in the early 1970s their music and sound stemmed solely from their traditional background. Despite this they managed to popularise such old songs as “Dúlamán”, “Teidhir Abhaile Riú” and “Coinleach Glas An Fhómhair”, and these songs have remained popular numbers at their concerts. On the departure from their folk and traditional background in 1982, they created a new sound that would define the meaning of New Age and Celtic music forever. When “Theme from Harry’s Game” and “Newgrange” were first heard, radio stations all over the world became fascinated by the earthly and spiritual sound that they had never encountered before. One critic said “the tunes were seeped in the old ways, but the production and the arrangement was fresh and inventive”. This transition in Clannad’s career is often seen as the birth of Celtic music, and to this day they are regarded as the pioneers of that genre. They are also noted for their melodiousharmonies, which have been at the heart of their music since their first album. Legend (1984) was based on English folklore. With later albums, Clannad delved further into the realms of electronica and even pop. Due to this, many of their singles entered pop charts all over the world, and widened their fan base once again. Despite their success with this genre of music, the group managed to maintain a link with their Gaelic roots throughout their career, giving traditional Irish songs such as “Tráthnóna Beag Aréir” and “Buachaill Ón Éirne” the Clannad treatment.

Even though the rock-infused Sirius and the pop-inclined Macalla have become huge successes for Clannad, it was their breakthrough style that they created themselves that has left the greatest legacy. One of the places where Clannad’s influence can be seen is in the film Titanic, where James Horner admitted to basing the soundtrack on Clannad’s style. The soundtrack was so like Clannad’s work that it has been incorrectly credited to them for many years. Clannad’s ‘Celtic mysticism’ is a recurring theme in the film Intermission. The “otherworldly” and “ethereal” Clannad sound comes from the ancient hills and glens that surround Gweedore, according to lead singer Moya Brennan. Also, when asked to describe the group’s style, Ciarán said, “There’s a feeling in all our music an ambience that stems directly from where we were brought up and to have to define our sound I always say that if they were to visit Gweedore they wouldn’t need to ask.” Traces of Clannad’s legacy can be heard in the music of many artists, including Enya, Altan, Capercaillie, The Corrs, Loreena McKennitt, Anúna, Riverdance, Órla Fallon and U2.

Source: Wikipedia.org

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:17:31 +0000

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You will receive one of the two covers. We cannot guarantee which one.

Remember the first time you saw Michael Jackson dance with zombies in “Thriller”? Diamond Dave karate kick with Van Halen in “Jump”? Tawny Kitaen turning cartwheels on a Jaguar to Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”? The Beastie Boys spray beer in “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)”? Axl Rose step off the bus in “Welcome to the Jungle”?

Remember When All You Wanted Was Your MTV?

It was a pretty radical idea-a channel for teenagers, showing nothing but music videos. It was such a radical idea that almost no one thought it would actually succeed, much less become a force in the worlds of music, television, film, fashion, sports, and even politics. But it did work. MTV became more than anyone had ever imagined.

I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV’s programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with The Real World in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business.

Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.

About the Authors

Craig Marks was the top editor for two influential music magazines, SPIN and Blender. He is the editor in chief of Popdust.

Rob Tannenbaum has been the music editor at Blender, a columnist at GQ, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Details, New York Magazine, Playboy, Spin, and The Washington Post.

Editorial Reviews

“MTV changed America and this book will change how you think about MTV. It’s a fascinating look deep inside how MTV became what it was from the mouths of those who made it. Everyone who loved or hated MTV will love this story filled with fights, drugs, sex and music.”
-Toure, author of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

“Before Google and before Apple, MTV was the one post-60s American enterprise that really transformed the culture. And now we have this definitive, riveting, revealing, amazingly well-reported insiders’ account of how an improbable group of visionaries made it up as they went along. You want I Want My MTV.”
-Kurt Andersen, author of Heyday and Reset, and host of public radio’s “Studio 360″

“I Want My MTV is such a big, wild joyride of book, made to be read with glee and nostalgia and marvel. It’s also a thoughtful and astonishingly well-researched historical document, of course, but mostly it’s just a total gas. It’s all in here, folks! Girls in cages! TV executives on blow! Dudes in eyeliner! Chicks with guitars! Pyrotechnics, consumerism, fame, destruction and shamelessness! Anyone who came of age during the glory days of MTV will be-page by page-steadily transported right back to your boyfriend’s parent’s wood-paneled den, to savor once more the life-changing lessons of decadence and magic we learned from cable TV.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed

“I Want My MTV is the definitively funny-yet loving-chronicle of music video’s golden age: the hopes, the dreams, the drugs, the hair, the legacy of Tawny Kitaen. And for gossip, it’s packed tighter than one of Heart’s spandex bustiers.”
-Rob Sheffield, author of the national bestseller Love is a Mix Tape and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

When Video Killed Radio Stars

The New York Times Book Review – October 24, 2011 (Excerpt)

Like almost everyone who was a teenager in the early 1980s, when the Music Television network first went live on cable, I wanted my MTV. I’d glue myself to the channel for hours, losing body mass, muscle control and self-esteem, the way my son gives himself over to video games today. MTV demanded that you linger in front of it for entire afternoons, because it tucked its few good videos amid so many horrible ones. You had to learn Zen couch potato patience.

Before MTV, scanning for new music on television was mostly a thankless task, even if you stayed up late, and stayed home, on weekends. There was “Saturday Night Live,” then as now hit or miss musically. There were the greasy, bell-bottomed bands on “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert,” many past their prime. MTV delivered not just new music, constantly on tap, but also a jumpy new visual aesthetic. Directors began editing footage the way Edward Scissorhands trimmed hedges.

It’s been said that the music you listen to when you first begin steaming up car windows is the music you want to hear for the rest of your life. This explains why I and so many people I know still cock our heads wistfully at songs by — and especially acoustic cover versions of songs by — iffy bands like Men at Work, Tears for Fears andThompson Twins. It’s a generational cross we bear, and we’ve come to terms with it.

All of this is a prelude to saying that I’m smack in the center of the target demographic for “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” by the music journalists Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. The book is an oral history, like Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s “Edie: An American Biography,” and a volume this one more closely resembles, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s excellent “Live From New York,” about “Saturday Night Live.” [Read the full article...]

The Golden Age of MTV — And Yes, There Was One

NPR Book Review – November 6, 2011 (Excerpt)

“Ladies and gentlemen, rock ‘n’ roll.”

MTV went on the air with those words, a minute after midnight on Aug. 1, 1981. The first video was, of course, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” by the Buggles.

Few people saw the fledgling network; it was carried by cable operators in Kansas City, but not New York or Los Angeles. But within a couple of years, MTV had grown into a behemoth of the music industry.

Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum have compiled a new oral history of the network, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution.

Tannenbaum tells weekends on All Things Considered host Laura Sullivan that when MTV was launched, music videos were almost unknown.

“In fact, if you had said to someone in 1981, ‘Do you want to watch a music video?’ the person would have said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ because the phrase didn’t actually exist.”

MTV struggled during its first few years. Conservative cable operators often refused to carry the channel. [Read the full article...]

Music CD: Someone To Watch Over Me by Susan Boyle

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:36:32 +0000

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Susan Boyle’s third album, ‘Someone To Watch Over Me,’ sees Susan and world acclaimed producer Steve Mac reunited to present a sensational and contemporary album that will span the generations. Featuring breathtaking renditions of ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘Both Sides Now’, Susan fearlessly takes on iconic songs ‘Enjoy The Silence’ and ‘Mad World’ giving them a new identity. Original material includes ‘This Will Be The Year’ by Emeli Sande and Naughty Boy with Josh Kear and ‘Return’ by Steve Mac and Wayne Hector.

The album heralds a new era of music for Susan Boyle. New material and classics combined with a variation of tempos from the ethereal to the dramatic, the music is stripped back and showcases the voice the world fell in love with.

Susan’s song choices were inspired by the life stories and inner most thoughts from people who wrote letters to her from around the globe.
“There are certain songs that I liked that resonated with the letters that people had written and sent to me.” Susan said, “I knew that s what my record needed to be about. They wrote about grief, love, happy and sad times, it was all deeply moving and the songs mirror the emotion and life experience.”

Comprised of her signature big numbers as well as the unexpected this album will cement her credibility in the music world.

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Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music – The Definitive Life by Tim Riley

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 11:06:14 +0000

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In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame.

Riley portrays Lennon’s rise from Hamburg’s red light district to Britain’s Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naiveté of “Love Me Do” to the soaring ambivalence of “Don’t Let Me Down”; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon’s friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock ‘n’ roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone.

In Lennon, Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it.

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About Tim Riley

NPR critic Tim Riley has authored four previous books about popular music, including the influential Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary. He reviews pop and classical music for WBUR-FM’s Here and Now, and has written for The Washington Post, Slate, Salon, The Huffington Post, and many other publications. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of Millennium Pop, an early Web journal devoted to serious commentary about popular culture. Trained as a classical pianist at Oberlin and Eastman, he lectures widely on censorship and the arts, rock history, the British Invasion, and rock criticism. Online, Riley edits the music metaportal the rileyrockindex.com, and blogs at artsjournal.com/riley. He is a professor of journalism at Emerson College in Boston and lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.

Reader Reviews

Robert Whitaker, the photographer who created the so-called “butchers cover” for the Beatles album “Yesterday and Today” in 1966, recently died. Capitol Records recalled the album when distributors complained it was in bad taste. As Whitaker’s obituary in the New York Times explained, the Beatles posed “wearing white butchers’ coats, festooned with chunks of raw meat and dismembered dolls.”

This story about the intersection of art (or art-school pretension) and the Beatles’ music illustrates something Tim Riley emphasizes in this biography of John Lennon–how the Beatles, especially Lennon, were influenced by non-musical artistic influences.

Riley shows how important Stuart Sutcliffe, the slightly older mentor Lennon met in art school, was to him. Sutcliffe actually was one of the Beatles when they played in Hamburg, but you could make the case that Sutcliffe’s artist-photographer girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, had a more long-lasting effect on the group. She gave them a “French” haircut with bangs. Enter the mop-tops. Riley quotes Simon Firth saying, ” ‘Lennon moved from wearing a rock hairstyle to shock the art school world to wearing an art school hairstyle to shock the rock world.’ ”

More important than haircuts, in her photographs of the group, Kirchherr first caught the seemingly incompatible mixture of humor and seriousness.

Possibly one of the things that kept the Beatles from lasting longer, or at least with less conflict, is that as a group they never chose between the two. Especially for Lennon and McCartney, the Beatles never figured out whether the whole thing swirling around them was a lark or serious business.

On the other hand, maybe it was the unresolved tension between art and pop, reality and fantasy, that made them so influential.

I can’t agree with Riley that the Beatles “rescued rock ‘n’ roll from the likes of Chubby Checker.” There were others waiting in the wings to lead the British Invasion if the Beatles had never existed, and North Americans like Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Carole King, and Janis Joplin who would have appeared. (Carole King leapfrogged the Beatles–she was part of the generation that inspired them with Brill Building R&B, and then in the seventies she was recognized as one of the leading composers of her era, certainly Paul McCartney’s equal.

Most great artists (with exceptions like Picasso) seem to do their best work when they’re young and starting out. It was true of Bob Dylan, Elvis before he went into the army, and maybe the Beatles around the time they posed as butchers. When they stopped touring and started working individually on songs that happened to be put on albums together, they weren’t a band any more. But the reasons weren’t simply artistic.

It’s pretty clear that one of John Lennon’s biggest problems was that he was an alcoholic and addict. (Even Keith Richards in his new autobiography Life comments on how loaded Lennon was.) Did Lennon really urinate on nuns from a rooftop in Hamburg? Apparently Lennon did scream at his father, blaming him for abandoning Lennon as a child. While Lennon did have reason to blame his father for putting him through emotional torment, his father’s young son by his present wife, a young step-brother who just thought he was going to meet his famous relative, was sitting there being traumatized by Lennon’s own behavior. Lennon started a serious fight with his friend Stuart Sutcliffe that some people thought contributed to Sutcliffe’s sudden death. Lennon shamed his gay manager Brian Epstein in front of other people.

This book is about ideas as much as it is about drunken rock star stories, or soap-opera feuds between John Lennon and his pop Nemesis, Paul McCartney. I was surprised that I was as fascinated reading it as I was Keith Richards’s autobiography.

If John Lennon had lived long enough to write his own story, I might have liked him better by the end, too. - Found Highways, Amazon.Com Customer Review

John Lennon’s Primal Screams

The New York Times Book Review – October 7, 2011 (Excerpt)

“I hated Lennon,” one of the old madcaps says, defiantly, in Jonathon Green’s oral history “Days in the Life: Voices From the English Underground, 1961-1971.” “Oh yes. Lennon’s no hero of mine. I cannot separate people and what they do from what they are. Lennon was unmitigatedly evil as far as I was concerned.” Doesn’t that sound terrible, like a kind of spiritual deformity — hating John Lennon? Tangled deep in the nervous system of every earthling over the age of 40, I would argue, is some fiber or filament of peak Beatlemania, some flicker of the old wild adoration. We want, we need — still — to love these men. And yet Lennon in certain aspects was really quite hateable. Cruel at times, chaotic, dissociated: on his bad days little more, so it seems, than a gigantic human flaw through which the shifting light of genius displayed itself.

Challenging for biographers? Disorienting? Just a bit. Albert Goldman, whose demonically readable book “The Lives of John Lennon” still haunts the field of Lennonography, thought he had found in Lennon a textbook case of multiple personality disorder. Tim Riley, in his enormous new “Lennon,” is soberer but no less dazzled as he tracks his subject’s “bipolar muse.” Here is Lennon in the fullness of his diffracted personality, across the spectrum of his phases and faces. Leather John, mugging sailors in Hamburg — “A Lennon punch felled him to his knees” — is superseded by Beatle John, mugging for the world’s press. (The reader will forgive the heavy wordplay: Riley reminds us that Lennon himself was an unstoppable punster and purveyor of Spike Milligan-inspired “word fizzle.”) Beatle John contains both “Ed Sullivan” John, yodeling harmonies and bending his knees in awkward demi-pliés, and “Revolver” John, acidhead, sleepyhead, drug dormouse, singing in that cold little cocoon voice (Riley calls it “time-frozen”) about floating downstream and not wanting to be woken up. Then there’s “Imagine” John, the drooping sage. And finally, of course, John the martyr. . . . Can such variety cohere, we ask, inside a single being? It did, barely, just once, is the answer, and his name was John Winston Lennon. [Read the full article...]

“Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music — The Definitive Life” by Tim Riley

The Washington Post Book Review – October 28, 2011 (Excerpt)

“Long before he posed naked with Yoko Ono,” writes Tim Riley, midway through “Lennon,” John Lennon “posed naked with the Beatles, in antique Victorian band uniform and moustache.”

An intriguing proposition, advanced as Riley expounds on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” but also too clever by half (naked — in full dress!) and swiftly abandoned. For the author’s next sentence digresses, likening the vocal on “A Day in the Life,” the epic finale of “Pepper,” to that on “Cold Turkey,” a single released 29 months after “Pepper” and not addressed by Riley for another 107 pages. And that naked pose with Yoko, on the cover of “Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins”? That comes 18 months, and 65 pages, later.

This eschewal of narrative for argumentation is unpardonable in a book billed as biography, the genre that promises a life story, but it’s not surprising, given Riley’s pedigree. A quarter-century ago, this talented and ambitious music critic was one of the midwives at the birth of Serious Beatles Studies with his “Tell Me Why,”the first rigorous song-by-song analysis of the Fab canon. Like “Lennon,” that earlier work brims with literary sophistication, analytical daring and unabashed, obsessive love for the Beatles and Lennon songbooks. And in both books, every sentence makes you think — deeply and profitably — about the act you’ve known for all these years. But no reader can mistake either for a story well told. The (gimme some) truth is that “Lennon,” at 661 pages of text, presents not a definitive biography but a parade of polemics, by turns persuasive and dubious — and, as a reading experience, a tough slog. [Read the full article...]

John Lennon’s books on the anniversary of his death

The Los Angeles Times – December 8, 2011 (Excerpt)

John Lennon died 31 years ago today after he was shot at the Dakota in New York by Mark David Chapman. As a member of the Beatles and a solo artist, Lennon was one of the 20th century’s most important musicians. His influence spread beyond music to culture, religious inquiry, politics and art.

He also wrote books. “In His Own Write” and “A Spaniard in the Works” were small, witty collections of poetry, verse and Lennon’s own illustrations, written early in his career. When they were reissued in a single edition last year, David Ulin wrote:

Well before he met Yoko Ono, John Lennon had a habit of going his own way. As early as 1964 — at the height of Beatlemania — he published “In His Own Write,” a collection of off-kilter poems and stories with line drawings; he followed it the next year with “A Spaniard in the Works.” Both books are satirical, full of whimsy, but also marked by that distinctive Lennon edge. “Sir Alice Doubtless-Whom,” he writes in “We must not forget … the General Erection” (a biting piece inspired by Harold Wilson’s election as prime minister), “was — quote — ‘bitherly dithapointed’ but managed to keep smirking on his 500,000 acre estate in Scotland with a bit of fishing and that.”… [Read the full article...]

Music CD: The Whole Love (Limited Deluxe Edition) by Wilco

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:34:00 +0000

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Produced by Jeff Tweedy with Patrick Sansone and Tom Schick
Recorded at The Loft in Chicago, IL
Engineered and Mixed by Tom Schick with Patrick Sansone and Jeff Tweedy
Assistant to the Engineer: Mark Greenberg
Studio Manager: Jason Tobias
Mastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering, Portland, ME
String Arrangement on Black Moon: Patrick Sansone

All songs written by Jeff Tweedy (Words Ampersand Music, BMI)
Stellar bridge assistance on Whole Love, Dawned On Me and Born Alone by Patrick Sansone

The Whole Love is the eighth album by American alternative rock group Wilco, released on September 27, 2011. It is their first album on their own label dBpm. Attendees at Wilco’s 2011 Solid Sound Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art from June 24 to 26 could purchase the first single from the album, “I Might”. The entire album was streamed live on Wilco’s official website for 24 hours between September 3 and 4, 2011, and later streamed on National Public Radio.

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Review

Wilco is one of those bands you can never sleep on.

Nearly a decade removed from their most esteemed album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, circumstances have changed for the Chicago-based rockers. There was a time in which Wilco couldn’t do anything without causing everyone to stand up and take notice.

My senior year in high school was the year A Ghost Is Born came out, and everyone was talking about that record. It was everywhere. You couldn’t escape the buzz from that album if you bought real estate under a giant boulder.

But if you were one of those, like me, who soon tired of the Wilco hype, you eventually got your wish. It wouldn’t be fair to say the hype died, but I don’t remember the previous two albums generating the same level of hysteria we saw with Ghost.

But now it is 2011 and I’ve got to eat my words. I finally decided to give Wilco an in-depth listen, and I see what the big deal is. If there’s a new wave of hype over the latest Wilco record, don’t expect to see me run for cover. Because if there’s any justice, The Whole Love should start a revolution of its own.

The Whole Love seems to strike a medium between the two extremes the band painted in the 2000s. It’s certainly more level headed than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, but is more adventurous than their last effort, Wilco (the album). The opener, “Art of Almost,” builds up slowly, leaving you wondering what exactly this album has in store for you. But when the extended guitar solo kicks in, you know you’re in for a truly unique ride.

As a listener who appreciates variety, The Real Love is an easy sell. This album has it all, from sprawling epics to clashing rockers and well crafted pop nuggets.

“I Might” sees the band combining pop and rock styles like second nature. You are treated to strong hooks that are punctuated by guitar pyrotechnics going off left and right. When Jeff Tweedy’s voice kicks in during the chorus, I can’t help but notice he sounds a bit like John Lennon.

And speaking of Beatles influence, another treat comes on “Sunloathe.” It’s dreary at first, but picks up as it goes along. The second half reminds me of the Abbey Road medley, particularly in regard to the harmonies and drum fills.

One fact Wilco fans should be well aware of is that there’s nothing quite like the effect of a dynamic frontman. There are few tracks that better accentuate that than “Standing O,” a rollicking rocker on which Tweedy confidently asserts himself — “Maybe you’ve noticed I’m not afraid of everything that I’ve done / Maybe you’ve noticed I’m not the same as almost anyone.”

And if you like Wilco’s lyricism, “Dawned On Me,” will also be high on your favorites list. I enjoy the aggressive attitude and the way the words wrap around each verse. Look at the second verse:

“I’ve been lost
I’ve been found
I’ve been taken by the sound”

It’s simple, but dramatic when delivered the way Tweedy does it. This is the song most deeply ingrained in my head right now.

“Black Moon” and “Rising Red Lung” are mellow, quiet, and thought provoking. They’re the two songs on The Whole Love that best reflect on Wilco’s alt-country roots, and they’re the two songs that best represent my state of mind when I’m ready to chill out.

“Capitol City” has a jovial, bouncy, show tune-y feel to it. “Open Mind” is an emotional ballad, with lyrics that tug at your heart strings. Then you have “Born Alone,” one of my personal favorites. At first glance it’s your typical pop/rock gem, but near the end it gets reflective and really rocks out.

The Whole Love comes to a close with “One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” a devastatingly vivid 12 minute chronicle on the deterioration of a relationship between father and son. Pay close attention to the lyrics and it’ll produce a lump in your throat.

What makes Wilco great is the sincerity of everything they produce, coupled with the unique musical ideas that seem to turn up on each of their records. The Whole Love is the perfect album if you’re looking for something refreshing, or for anyone who’s a fan of great songwriting. – Brian E., Amazon.Com Customer Review

Music CD: Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Play The Blues

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:21:35 +0000

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New York City’s premier jazz venue got the blues last April when Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton performed together in Rose Theater at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center for two sold-out shows dedicated to vintage blues. The extraordinary collaboration, billed as Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Play the Blues, paired these musical virtuosos with members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra as they brought to life a repertoire of songs selected by Clapton and arranged by Marsalis.

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Review

Some artists reach a point in their careers where you feel they have nothing left to prove. Wynton Marsalis has earned every accolade in the jazz world-nine Grammys in Jazz and classical music, and the first Jazz musician to win a Pulitzer prize for music (“Blood on the Field”}. Eric Clapton, of course, has been one of the top guitar gods for nearly five decades. Both of these accomplished musicians could coast at this point- something they have been criticized for in recent years. For this performance, live at Lincoln Center in April 2011, they made a bit of musical history.

When Marsalis and Clapton decided on this project, they went after the sound of an early jump-blues band with a New Orleans vibe. This enabled the duo to give themselves latitude in instrumentation. The band is based on King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (where Louis Armstrong first gained fame), but with the addition of guitar and keyboards. This culminated in a sound respecting Trad Jazz while acknowledging the music of today.

The disc’s opener, “Ice Cream” shows the group having a ball. Several members, including Marsalis sing the chorus in a fun fashion backing Clapton’s lead vocal. In true Dixieland fashion, solos seamlessly follow each other. Victor Goines plays a lovely clarinet solo in “Joe Turner’s Blues”, followed by a very nimble Clapton. Hearing him in a Jazz setting is a real treat. The great Don Vappie plays some of the best banjo this side of Bela Fleck.

After “Kidman Blues”, Clapton engages the audience rather humbly, telling how intimidated he was by so many schooled Jazz musicians. Clearly, he is the star of this show, and his playing is a perfect fit with the Marsalis band.

Reading the set list: do we need another “Layla”? This track is probably the biggest surprise on a disc filled with them. Clapton didn’t plan on adding “Layla” to the show, but bass player Carlos Henriquez was insistent. Marsalis, Clapton and Goines all play engaging solos, and Clapton’s voice just gets better with age. Along with pianist Dan Nimmer, long time Clapton collaborator Chris Stainton adds keyboards throughout the concert.

Taj Mahal is a surprise guest vocalist on the gospel standard “Just a Closer Walk With Thee”. He also guests on “Corrine, Corrina”- a bonus track not included on the CD. Here he gets to show his considerable skills on the 5-string banjo, followed by Clapton, Marsalis and second trumpeter Marcus Printup. Stainton is featured on electric piano (this guy does not age).

Jazz at Lincoln Center is one of the most successful music projects to be recorded in recent years. Kudos to producers Marsalis, Clapton and Ashley Schiff Ramos for a great recording and to director Martyn Atkins for a fine DVD. – r.j. zurek, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Music CD: Let Them Talk by Hugh Laurie

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:07:48 +0000

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Hugh Laurie will release his debut album ‘Let Them Talk’ on Warner Bros. Records. A glorious celebration of New Orleans blues, ‘Let Them Talk’ unites Laurie’s musical talent with a very personal selection of standards and lost blues classics performed with his band of renowned musicians and some very special guest stars. Produced by Joe Henry and recorded at sessions in Los Angeles and New Orleans, ‘Let Them Talk’ sees Laurie on vocals and piano heading a team of musicians whose previous collective credits include work with artists as varied as Greg Allman, Solomon Burke, Robert Plant, kd lang, T-Bone Burnett, Alison Krause and John Legend. Together, they interpret and revive songs originally recorded by NOLA blues legends such as Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, Ray Charles and Memphis Slim. ‘Let Them Talk’ also features collaborations with the Soul Queen of New Orleans Irma Thomas and Sir Tom Jones on the little known ‘Baby, please Make A Change’. Thomas also leads the vocals on ‘John Henry’, while Laurie’s lifelong hero Dr. John provides a momentous collaboration on ‘After You’ve Gone’. Another legend, the producer, musician and songwriter Allen Toussaint, contributes horn arrangements throughout.

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Review

I was able to purchase this in a store before it was made available on Amazon. I have to admit that my expectations weren’t high although I am a huge fan of Hugh Laurie. So I was surprised by the strong points of this one…and there ARE indeed some very solid aspects to this CD.

But first…the largest objection… Laurie’s voice. Admittedly, it won’t be to everyone’s taste but I found it to have an emotional depth that surprised me. As Laurie himself notes in the liner notes, “why listen to an actor’s music?” He doesn’t pretend to be anything other than “a white, middle-class Englishman” one who is “openly trespassing on the music and myth of the American south.” So there you have it. He clearly loves the music and is trying to share his pleasure with listeners. I think he succeeds.

But what about the music? As soon as I heard the intro to “St James Infirmary” I was hooked. The intro is deep and resonant, nicely arranged and conducted by Allen Toussaint. Whether you like Laurie’s voice or not, the horn arrangements by Allen Toussaint on this CD (St James Infirmary, Tipitina and Buddy Bolden’s Blues) are breath-taking.

Then there are special guests such as Irma Thomas, Dr. John, Brian “Breeze” Cayolle, and Sir Tom Jones. If for no other reason, their vocals, Toussaint’s involvement, and Cayolle’s sax playing make this one worth buying.

But I think Laurie himself is also worth purchasing the CD. He deserves credit for making a bold move and throwing himself wholeheartedly into this compilation. While other reviewers have complained about his voice, I don’t find it distracting. There is so much more to the CD than just “an actor’s music.” Give it a try and see for yourself. – K. Corn, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Music CD: Own The Night by Lady Antebellum

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:40:56 +0000

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Reigning CMA and ACM Vocal Group of the Year Lady Antebellum will release their third Capitol Nashville studio album Own The Night. The album’s lead single “Just A Kiss” has quickly become the fastest-rising single of the trio’s career, climbing into the Top 10 on Billboard’s Country Singles chart in just six weeks.

“We took more time to write and record this record than we’ve ever done before,” says Charles Kelley. “I remember looking at Hillary and Dave at the GRAMMYs this year, on the wildest night of our lives, and saying `this is amazing…we’ll never get to experience a moment like this again, but now we have to go home and get to work.’”

“One of our favorite songs on the new record is called `We Owned The Night,’ which is about a special once-in-a-lifetime moment, and we thought that naming the album around that same sentiment was really appropriate,” says Hillary Scott.

Own The Night follows the band’s GRAMMY winning sophomore album Need You Now. Since its release in January 2010, the album has sold over five million copies across the globe, spawned three multi-week #1 hits, taken home five GRAMMY Awards and scored over a dozen other award show trophies. With the success of “Just A Kiss” already producing massive momentum for Lady Antebellum’s highly anticipated release, the trio is sure to own the night.

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Review

“Own the Night” is the third studio album by Lady Antebellum and picks up right where they left off with last year’s “Need You Now.” They have an impressive track record which includes being awarded Top New Group by the Academy of Country Music and New Artist of the Year by the Country Music Association in 2008. They were then nominated for a total of 4 Grammy Awards in 2009 and 2010, winning one of them for Best Country Performance for the song “I Run To You.” In 2010 they won Top Vocal Group and Song of the Year (“Need You Now”) at the ACM Awards and took home 5 Grammy Awards in 2011.

The first track, “We Owned The Night” is the perfect start to the album: An upbeat tune that has lots of energy and will make you jump out of your chair and start to dance. The lyrics are nothing short of poetic and inspired by dreams of a once in a lifetime moment of passion. Singer Hillary Scott says the album was named after these sentiments. The mandolin that Dave Haywood plays adds an amazing texture that enhances the song with charisma and a hint of bluegrass influence. “Just a Kiss” was the first single and made its debut last spring on American Idol. It debuted at number 7 on Billboard’s top 100, the highest debut by a country artist in over 52 years. “Dancing Away With My Heart” was co-written with Josh Kear, the same person who helped write “Need You Now.” The song is everything a country tune should be: deep, meaningful lyrics, excellent musicianship, and passionate singing and playing. The song is so familiar I was humming away with it the first time I listened. Another highlight is “As You Turn Away,” a song with a catchy hook and incredible vocal melodies and harmonies. If you liked Lady Antebellum’s two previous albums, or if you’re a fan of country music, you’ll love this. Highly recommended!! – Polar Bear, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Music CD: Duets II by Tony Bennett

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:32:19 +0000

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DUETS II is the follow-up to Tony Bennett’s multi-platinum CD, DUETS, which was released in conjunction with Tony’s 80th birthday in 2006. DUETS won three Grammy Awards and was the singer’s best selling album to date.

Now the legendary performer celebrates a milestone 85th birthday with the release of DUETS II. The singer has completed recording with Lady Gaga and Aretha Franklin, adding to a celebrated list of artists previously announced including Amy Winehouse, Michael Buble, Norah Jones, John Mayer, Queen Latifah, Carrie Underwood and many others. Lady Gaga joined Tony for a rendition of the Richard Rodgers song, “The Lady Is A Tramp” and Bennett and Franklin collaborated on the Alan and Marilyn Bergman classic, “How Do You Keep The Music Playing.”

Phil Ramone produced the original DUETS as well as DUETS II.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Review

Is it any surprise that Tony Bennett presides over this collection of songs like a loving parent, nurturing each of them to ensure beauty results? No, of course not.

Indelibly present and in fine, oaken voice, his turn of phrase is expressive as ever. In fact, Bennett’s warmth and charisma are still so strong they sometimes obscure the presence of his duet partners who simply do not have hearts as big as his to offer listeners.

“Duets II” is much like the initial 2006 duets collection in that it is a glossy, sugary-sweet excursion into smoothed-over pop vocal performances with Mr. Bennett’s skills guiding the way, singing life into all the nooks and crannies whether or not he and his given duet partner are a suitable pairing. His personality and status as America’s foremost singer of songs must guide the way.

Of note is his work with the late Amy Winehouse on “Body and Soul,” a heartbreaking, apt tune for the chanteuse’s final recording. Both are in their element, and the result is fraught with unrequited longing and slow-burning desperation. It is a fortunate teaming of two great talents bathed in instant pathos in its reminder of how fleeting art, like life, can be. Winehouse’s voice was a fine instrument indeed, and “Body and Soul” showcases it.

Duet partners who earn their keep on this collection include k.d. lang, Willie Nelson, Norah Jones, Natalie Cole, Andrea Bocelli, Faith Hill, Lady Gaga, Queen Latifah, Josh Groban and Alejandro Sanz, whose passion fills the timeless “Yesterday I Heard the Rain.”

Hill, in particular, sounds so enchanting alongside Bennett on “The Way You Look Tonight” that a full album collaboration between the pair would be a welcome prospect. “Speak Low” with Ms. Jones is absolute perfection – a simmering, wistful track that remains a Bennett concert staple and is ideally suited to Ms. Jones’ brand of hush-hush, late-night intimacy.

lang and Bennett duet on the evergreen, lovely “Blue Velvet” with exactness and care – apt considering their longstanding friendship – while Lady Gaga oozes energy and pep on the sprightly “The Lady is a Tramp,” a three-minute slice of giddy fun which underscores her theatrical personality as well as her bold, caffeinated vocal ability. Bennett is clearly delighted to be recording with her, and their chemistry is refreshing. Clever, praiseworthy choices of material help Groban and Latifah sound just as welcome with Bennett at their side.

Unfortunately, “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” with Aretha Franklin is a squandered opportunity. Sung with profoundly moving emotional transparency by Bennett, both on record and in concert, it is not suited for Franklin’s melismatic turn of phrase in which the lyrics often take a back seat to drama and flourish.

Elsewhere, Sheryl Crow is unengaging on “The Girl I Love,” just as she was singing Cole Porter in “De-Lovely” back in 2004 – her voice is much more suited to her own contemporary material. John Mayer has little presence next to Bennett on their selection, and Michael Buble sings on “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” with his trademark bland, self-interested swagger that runs a very thin emotional gamut. The upside is that it underscores the value of Bennett’s versatility and self-effacing nature.

Charles DeForest’s “When Do the Bells Ring for Me,” one of Bennett’s finest recordings, is presented here as a spellbinding duet with Mariah Carey that ends the disc strongly. The pair should have recorded long ago. Although the song itself is not in Carey’s key, both vocalists accommodate one another graciously, and magic results.

“Duets II” certainly has the feeling of “product” – after all, Sony has invested great time and money into it, with only the highest promotional blitz and many of today’s biggest, sparkliest stars alongside Bennett. Despite this it still has the warmth and feel of a genuine Bennett album due to his love, obviously still in the highest abundance, for the best songs ever written.

Certain retailers carry exclusive versions with bonus tracks, so do your homework. – Rudy Palma, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

‘Duets II’: Tony Bennett’s First Number One Album

The Huffington Post – September 24, 2011 (Excerpt)

After 60 years and over 70 albums, Tony Bennett finally has a number one album.

The 15-time Grammy winner, who celebrated his 85th birthday at a major party last Sunday, is set to take the top slot on the Billboard 200 chart with the release of his album, “Duets II.” The record pairs Bennett with a series of young singers — including “Body and Soul,” the famous duet with the late Amy Winehouse — and is estimated to sell 170,000 copies in its first week out. The album also includes his duet with Lady Gaga on “The Lady Is A Tramp.”

It is the first time Bennett has ever had a number one album; his first “Duets” album, released in 2006, hit #3 on the chart. The crooner, most famous for his signature song, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” has sold over 50 million records, and has placed three singles at the number one slot in the Billboard chart. [Read the full article...]