10 posts tagged “music”
Here is the scan of the first flyer I've designed and drawn for a Madison event. The gig is a benefit show being played by my pal Bill's band, Bonobo Secret Handshake. The beneficiery is the Madison Arcatao Sister City Project, and the occasion is the celebration of the recent elections victory of the FMLN in El Salvador!
The original was hand drawn. Bill caught a typo and made some digital adjustments, which I will correct by hand later (he still has the original!). And he added the WORT logo at the bottom. Next time, I'll hand draw that, too.
Another short report for everyone.
Yes, the police state in nice Minnesota was on full red alert...beating down a whole lot of nineteen year-old kids, trashing people's houses in their preemptive raids and then condemning some of them, sweeping up not only journalists but in some cases a few people who didn't have any part in any of it whatsoever and just happened to be nearby. The only thing uglier than the fascist orgy of police actions and overreactions is the mainstream media silence. Scratch that. The felony conspiracy charges are pretty messed up.
But for people wondering about the scene there over the RNC days, you should know that there was as well a lot of unwelcome apart from the narrowly-defined protests. There were quiet events and super-local expressions of unwelcome all over. One of the bigger non-street-protest events was a very positive feeling ten-dollar Labor Day concert put on by the SEIU with a great roster of political acts (Billy Bragg, Tom Morello, Mos Def), and it was held at the same time as the week's largest organized antiwar march (which I think is the demo at which Amy Goodman was wrongfully arrested). I appreciated the fact that those of us in town for those days had choices. I opted for the concert, and it was really terrific being with a huge gathering of like-minded people at a worker-oriented event with NO police.
The concert was held on Harriet Island, across a river from the RNC site. Given the extreme crowd control on the downtown streets, having the artists lead crowd yells addressed to the Excel Center a half mile away was probably just as effective as the protests right outside. It terms of making a constituency visible to itself, which is almost the only thing that can be positively accomplished in big street demonstrations these days, the concert was a success. Billy Bragg told a great story about going to a big open air concert as a young guy and seeing the Clash, finally understanding–seeing the proof, if you will–that he wasn't alone, and instantly deciding that singing for the fighting people was what he wanted to do. Having the hip hop fans and rock hipsters mixed in a crowd of SEIU members and families was also good to see.
And with Palin-panic setting in, I did appreciate seeing quite a few young people at the concert sporting ripped Obama gear.
Mike Wolf's Song of Returning show was another 'alternative to the alternative,' a quiet space in the other city (Mpls) which brought another dimension to the politics surrounding the manufactured urgency of the RNC. Paul Durand's beautiful map of native places was there, militant outsider artist Andrew Moore contributed a couple of wild collages, Chris Hammes showed a photo doc image of sweet guerilla art agitation in a factory-farm. Aaron Hughes, who in body was all over the week's protest itinerary, contributed a haunting display of drawings and Iraq-tour memory material.
Mike Wolf, Courtney Moran, and I did go to one, well, what would you call it? Open street theater? Play protest? Satirical celebration? The event was billed as 'Celebrate Big Oil,' and the occasion was a posh Tuesday evening reception for Republicans being thrown by the American Petroleum Institute. In a group of about thirty, we tossed play money, chanted funny chants, and toasted the success and long life of the Big Oil fat cats as they walked the gauntlet: due to road construction and closed sidewalks, they could only get to the reception entrance by walking through the cheering throng of their 'fans.' The Repubs seemed baffled, but a few played along, which had us cheering even harder. There were a few cops, but they were entertained into non-aggression, and advised us to make sure all the play money was picked up in the end. Which it was.
When idiotic record store people slap an adhesive label right on the record, blocking the hole!
This past weekend I biked over to La Fete de Marquette, an east side Madison neighborhood party. Actually, I was there for two evenings. The first, Saturday, was impressive for it's turnout of the older set. I mean, the average age of the 3000 or so people in attendance was probably 45. If you subtracted the small children from that calculation, the figure would probably rise to over 50. No kidding, the gray-beard cohort was strong. Which is not especially notable, except that Dengue Fever, a group popular on college radio at the moment and riding a hip inter-cultural wave of indie cred, was the band I was there to see. I guess I didn't realize they have a following among 55 year-olds. Where were all the young people? And by that I mean under 35.
The next day's show had a much more equitable age distribution. This time the twenty and thirty-somethings were out. The graybeards were there again. And very few small children that I could see. Although the show time was earlier than the day previous, and it was a Sunday, this was the party. Dumpstaphunk was on. Smoking, drinking, and lots of dancing. I was wondering to myself whether I was really seeing such a different event from the one held only 23 hours earlier in the same place, which was a much more sedate affair. My perceptions were confirmed when, during the last super-jam, funked-out song, Ivan Neville called for 'ten Madison girls' to join them onstage. He said 'ten' as if it were a huge challenge. What he got was probably thirty, including a couple of dudes, one of whom had a gray crewcut, and was wearing a chest tight tank top and a skirt. There was a black teenage girl talking on a cellphone while dancing on stage. There was an all-American corn-fed soccer-mom-to-be dancing while holding her baby soccer-playing-kid-to-be. There was a woman who looked like the picture of West Bloomfield: dark Jewish hair, sophisticated clothing, serious bling. And then, to complete the stage scene, there was a small space left open by the band and the temporary entourage for a white boy who was probably about nine years-old and who looked a little like Charlie Brown, to break dance. I was like, okay, this is pretty good; if Madison can deliver this kind of entertaining weirdness once or twice a year, I can deal with that. After the number came to a thundering close, bassist Tony Hall said the stage had been bouncing!
Another observation from the event is, on the level of culture wars and social space, how important it is to have groups of lesbians present and visible. Groups of lesbian friends hanging out, dancing, digging the music, etc, can help equalize the gender dynamic. Outdoor rock/dance parties are often uncomfortable spaces for women. Men can really dominate, often through the sheer density of majority presence. My feeling is that women imposing small sub-spaces of woman-centeredness (women socializing with women, dancing with women, being in groups of women) make the larger space more comfortable for all women. Lesbians create this kind of subspace very naturally. This was definitely happening on the large space of the dance floor at the Fete.
What did I do for the Fourth of July, 2008? Independence Day for a nation and an empire on the brink? Of a full control-state, with a legal protections apparatus in shambles. Of depression (psychological and economic) and widespread financial ruin (corporate and personal). Of defeat in war, and defeat in business, defeat even in the Olympics. So, how to spend a grim holiday in a landscape of dread? For starters, leaving the artificial, state tax-payer floated paradise of Madison, Wisconsin.
My buddy Bill had the answer: Phil and Friends at Summerfest! Bill is an unreconstructed Deadhead who actually admits to enjoying the deepest and most pointless noodling of the Grateful Dead’s Space improvisations. Dead bassist Phil Lesh’s troupe continues performing the Dead songbook with an ever-changing cast of band members. And Milwaukee’s yearly Summerfest may be the closest thing to a truly common public celebration there is in the U.S.–two weeks of music and outdoor lakefront partying for the masses, in what may be America’s hardest drinking town. The entertainment says it all. At Summerfest you might get country superstar hat act Tim McGraw headlining the Marcus Amphitheatre, Think Floyd (‘the ultimate Pink Floyd tribute band’) on the Harley-Davidson Stage, Brit-soul singer James Hunter on the Potawatomie Bingo and Casino Stage, acid jazz-lounge artists Thievery Corporation at the Miller Lite Oasis, Pat Benatar on the Classic Rock Stage, and Bootsy Collins at the Music Groove Garage. The next night might feature Mary J. Blige, Blondie, Blue Oyster Cult, and the Pixies. Plus scores of lesser acts, tons of unknown bands, and other performance like comedy acts and stunt teams. In other words, something for everyone, all for fifteen bucks general admission. Except for those of us who prefer the experimental, the avant garde, the esoteric. The cognescenti stay home. Just pure mainstream America. So where better to take the pulse on the Fourth?
The primary disconnect: based on what I heard, felt, and witnessed there, you’d never know this country is at war. The absence of political activity and expression in places of mass gathering, even at the passive t-shirt level, is astounding given the national crisis around the corner (or the corner we’ve already turned). The sense of political possiblity one gathers from scanning the logo-wearing throngs is, to put it mildly, limited. About the only political expression I registered came from the four or five ‘Deadheads for Obama’ t-shirts I saw in the crowd. Whee. But the party went on. Like any Dead show of years gone by, the air was super thick with second-lung cannabis smoke. At least there was still space, created by the mass of like-minded, to smoke. That is not a small thing, in a near police-state America.
On the way out of the Fest grounds a gaggle of young white guys chanted ‘USA! USA!’ for about twenty seconds before losing steam. Their half-hearted attempt at public chauvinism was made even more pathetic by the victory of the peace activists, who had successfully demanded that Summerfest shut down the US Army's recruiting video game. I felt much better knowing that what Summerfest politicking there was, was mostly anti-war and even concretely successful.
The bad thing about living in the Information Age is that I can never get to all the media waiting for me. Books go unread, podcasts are bookmarked but never listened to, the satellite TV DVR is full of nearly a hundred saved shows (everything from Top Chef to old Twilight Zones) and movies (Stolen Life, a documentary about Fred Hampton, Teahouse of the August Moon) that I hardly have the time to sample let alone exhaust. When we first moved to Madison, I pledged to increase my media consumption–I would finally have the time to watch all those movies I'd heard, read, even talked about, but never actually saw. We'd subscribe to the New York Times, get the three-disc Netflix service and the Gameday audio for all MLB contests. Add to this the decent offerings of the Madison Public Library and, needless to say, I'm swamped. I haven't upped my consumption much, but the backlog has certainly grown, perhaps logarithmically.
The other night I finally did get around to viewing a DVD that had been sitting on top of the TV for nearly two months. It was Tom Dowd: The Language of Music, and strangely enough the story of Tom Dowd resonated with my recent visits to Dreamtime. Like who knows how many millions of music fans, I first became curious about Dowd when I noticed that his name was on so many great records. What I didn't know was that Dowd was involved in the Manhattan Project as a young man, before he turned his attention to recording music. In the movie he mentions the secrecy, the surprise he experienced when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This immediately brought to mind my recent exposure to the story of Bern Porter, another Manhattan Project worker who later became an avant-garde poet and mail art innovator.
It was at Dreamtime that I was introduced to Porter's work, and Xexoxial Editions publishes a number of his books. According to mIEKAL aND, Porter and presumably other scientists and engineers were told by the government that their research was going into the development of forty-two peaceful, civilian uses for nuclear energy, in a campaign of detailed deception (these researchers were pretty smart; the lies had to be full). This is what he believed at the time of the bombs being dropped in Japan. He resigned almost immediately after the bombings, and moved headlong into experimental literary work. Dowd talked about the research and the deception, but didn't seem to have much of a problem with it. Perhaps that's to be expected; after all, he was only the age of an early undergraduate student at the time. But the experience nonetheless shaped him, and the documentary makes a point of identifying this formative time by including several clips of the Bikini Atoll test explosions. Dowd only left the research path when he was told after the war that all his research experience would count for nothing in college, and that he'd have to go through the regular coursework even though what he'd already done was more advanced. The comparison between Dowd and Porter left me wondering about other scientists-in-exile from their fields. I wonder especially about those from their generational cohort, and how many of them turned to art and cultural work instead, and how those military-industrial complex turncoats put their talents to creative alternative uses–which somehow contributed to the cultures of experimentation in living that places like Dreamtime continue.
Well, this just freaks me out: the opening bars from the Mayfield/soul classic 'Curtis/Live!' accompanying the welcome page pic-crawl on the Robert Graham website! Yes, that Robert Graham. You know, of the shirts. A fashion empire put together by the same guy who helped Ralph Lauren design his ultra-WASPy Chaps line. Thank goodness the music clip fades out before Curtis gets to the 'spade and whitey' lyric!
What do the Doors, Judy Collins, Queen, and Josh White have in common? They all recorded for the Elektra label. So did Phil Ochs, Love, and Carly Simon. A few days ago I finished Jac Holzman's entertaining memoir Follow the Music, so now I know who to blame (for Bread). Here's a site with what is supposed to be the complete Elektra discography. Say what you will about the taste, the range is impressive, especially once you factor in the Nonesuch records.
It is a decent story, if you can stand the self-congratulations, especially for anybody interested in how the scene and the business went from small, New York folk-oriented releases to bi-coastal, big time rock and pop acts. Analog gear heads would appreciate Holzman's nerdy passion for great recordings. All Doors fanatics (like my old friend Balz) should definitely have a read, for the tales of Morrison told from the perspective of his label president and the engineers Bruce Botnick and Paul Rothchild. There is also an amusing story about how after Music from Big Pink came out everybody wanted to go record in a big country house, somewhere. Elektra was talked into renting an old inn for a group of musicians, among them a teenage Jackson Browne, to do their thing in a 'natural' setting. The musicians plus hippie chicks plus hangers-on ended up with no recordings to show for their retreat, but smoked a kilo and a half of dope per week on the label's dime. I suppose that qualifies as one way of stickin' it to the Man. The minor characters keep the narrative interesting: Ahmet Ertegun, Cynthia Plastercaster, Dylan, etc. Delaney Bramlett comes off as a total jerk, but maybe he was just stickin' it to the Man (ie Jac), too.
The book is fluff, mainly a diversion, but it resonated for a moment more deeply when viewing Guy Ben-Ner's video Wild Boy at the Smart Museum. The piece is an adaptation of François Truffaut’s film L’enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) (1970), which itself is based on the true story of Victor, the famous feral child of Aveyron. The video is a domestication, literally--Ben-Ner remakes the story by casting his own kid in the part and shooting the whole thing in his small apartment kitchen and living area, in a toy land aesthetic. It is silent until the final minutes...and what should be the outro but a classic of that massified wildness so typical of Sixties pop culture: the Doors' Break on Through. Most true feral children don't live long lives. Neither do they who reject their civilized upbringing and go searching for the feral. Following Morrison's artistic arc once again in the book, I have to say, the song is the perfect choice.
One of the pleasures of living in Madison is being around a lot of different kinds of music, but not having to deal with the crowds and traffic of a much larger city. But it turns out I still don't have the time to take in all the shows that catch my attention. Last weekend I had a plan to see two shows. We had a foursome set for Steve Earle at the Barrymore, and then I intended to see M.O.T.O by myself afterward at the Crystal Corner, a place I still haven't been. But adventurous, full nights of shows are just so easily derailed these days. I think I came home and just went to work, on some grant proposal or drawing. Fortunately–and maybe this is part of the problem–the listening station at home is sounding better than ever, after having recently invested in new a Music Hall turntable. So much more signal comes through that sometimes it sounds like I got a whole new record collection. And to be fair to myself, Steve Earle played quite a long show.
Speaking of records, I believe I will be buying more LPs in Madison. Or else on travels, like how the recent trip to Columbus netted me a couple of Country Gentlemen records. (Not the classic line-up, but still, it's the Country Gentlemen!) What can I say? The new 10.25% sales tax in Chicago has created a newly price-sensitive consumer out of me.
And, finally, there is WORT, which, after ten months in this town, I have come to love. Especially the Leopard Print Lounge on Tuesday nights. Today on the Friday drive time show Blues Cruise–wait, I know what you are thinking: there are so many lame public and community radio blues shows. Yes, you are right.
Over the weekend I went to see the Flaming Lips at the SoCo Music Experience in Madison. I have to say, as a festival, it was pretty weak. I think the whole concept of the Flaming Lips as headliner was wrong. The Flaming Lips are not what you would call a drinking band. Ideally, you do not sit around sipping whiskey to the Flaming Lips, much less line up the shots. The Flaming Lips are the standard-bearers for the non-jam band psychedelic tradition, the psychedelic pop punk noise of a Syd Barrett or 13th Floor Elevators. The Lips and mushrooms go well together. Even the least trippy among us would have to grant the Lips some art rock status.
And it played out pathetically. There were hardcore fans in front, but most of the underwhelming crowd of three thousand or so were clearly casual fans or the merely curious. Probably a thousand were people who'd read somewhere that the Flaming Lips deliver the great rock spectacle of our time, and figured a free show was the way to experience it. The audience investment was clearly minimal. Polite clapping after most numbers, except for the more noise-heavy passages. After those, there was mostly puzzlement and a few murmurs.
The 'chemistry' of the audience was truly off. Wrong band for the wrong crowd, if a drinking party was the point. Not to say that the band-audience wasn't interesting on some level, or that the Flaming Lips didn't win themselves some new fans that night. But, it wasn't the psychedelic throwdown I've heard about, that is for sure. And how could it have been? The whole festival was a youth-targeted commercial for Southern Comfort.
That was the other disappointment. I remember Southern Comfort as a kind of luxury drink, something you'd drink for an occasion, whether that was going out for a steak or sitting outside with a friend on a summer evening. To market Southern Comfort as a kind of beach party fuel just seems wrong, and cheapens what is recalled by many as a fine product.
