Archive for the 'Music' Category

Dear Qantas,

I know you’re proud. You’re proud for good reason. You represent a unique part of the world, you’ve got that funky acronym for a name, and even Raymond knows about your pristine safety record.

Charlie: Ray, all airlines have crashed at one time or another, that doesn’t mean that they are not safe.

Raymond: QANTAS. QANTAS never crashed.

Charlie: QANTAS?

Raymond: Never crashed.

Charlie: Oh that’s gonna do me a lot of good because QANTAS doesn’t fly to Los Angeles out of Cincinnati, you have to get to Melbourne! Melbourne, Australia in order to get the plane that flies to Los Angeles!

But I’ve seen your current advert on the eye of hell, and I just wanted to let you know that if you’re going to use an elevator version of “I Come From a Land Down Under” by the thankfully not immortal Men at Work as your jingle, some people are going to be compelled to try to mess up that record of yours.

From deep in the lair of the crab of ineffable wisdom, home of those Rather Good / 7 Seconds of Love folk, comes this rousing ode to brave Prince Harry.

My old bud Blue Gal, for some unknown reason, posted this video on her blog today:

In the summer of 1979, I had a job at “Pizza Pub #1,” right by the train station in Roslyn, NY. We had one very very regular customer who’d come in every day without fail. He’d order two slices and a coke, and put two songs — the same two songs every time — on the jukebox: I Will Survive and Roundabout.

After all those plays almost 30 years ago, plus all the times my older sister played the song (she used to go see Yes in the round at Madison Square Garden every year), plus having it slowed down for me here… I STILL CAN’T UNDERSTAND THE DAMNED LYRICS!

Call it morning driving supersonic in and out the bonnet?

Mamas come out of the sky and stand there?

Tent your summers we’ll be there and laughing too?

Wha??

One other thing: if you watch the video, take note of how bored Rick Wakeman looks. He’s got one word going through his head, over and over: faster!

Do you remember the Beatles?

I do, but just barely. I think I was about six years old when the band broke up, and I’d only known about them for a year or two at that point. At the time, I was a fan. My older sister had a couple of their records — I know that Meet the Beatles was one of them.

I may have lost my taste for their music by the time I was 11 or 12, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t accept the fact that they hold an important place in the history of popular music. My seventh-grade music teacher certainly never failed to point out something they (or their producer) did that no one else had ever done. And everyone knew not just the band, but the individual members:

• John Lennon was the sardonic, iconoclastic, political one.
• George Harrison was the spiritual one.
• Ringo Starr was… I don’t know. The one who wore a lot of rings.
• And then there was Paul McCartney, “the cute one.”

These aspects of their individual personalities can be seen in their lives and careers in the years after the band broke up. Lennon married a conceptual artist and became deeply involved in the peace movement. Harrison’s interest in Eastern religion can be heard on albums like All Things Must Pass, Living in the Material World and of course The Concert for Bangladesh. Ringo continued to be Ringo, I suppose.

McCartney remained cute. He formed the band Wings, and included his wife Linda in the group, not because she could sing or play an instrument (she couldn’t — great photographer, though). He just liked having her around. That’s cute. Wings did release Band on the Run, which many people viewed as a pretty well-done record, but for the most part during the 70s and into the 80s he put out some cute stuff, like “Silly Love Songs,” “Let ‘em in,” “Cook of the House” and “Coming Up.” He did the theme song to a James Bond film, featuring the memorable line “But in this ever-changing world in which we live in”. That’s either stupid or cute, and given the source, I guess it was generally deemed cute. He made that god-awful film with Tracey Ullman, and she put him into a video she made, in which he mugged it up as the cute one.

Well, now it’s 2007. McCartney turned 65 earlier this week. And what are we seeing on the eye of hell these days? McCartney hawking his new single in an advert for iTunes.

Everybody gonna dance tonight
Everybody gonna feel alright
Everybody gonna dance around tonight

Everybody gonna jump and shout
Everybody’s gonna sing it out
Everybody gonna dance around tonight

If he was ten years old and he performed that for his dada and mum, that would be cute. He isn’t ten years old. He’s 65. This is just sad. Does he really want to be remembered as the composer of “Hey Jude,” “Yesterday” and this?

Remember when Paul McCartney sold a piece (or maybe all) of his song catalogue to Michael Jackson and Beatles songs started showing up in commercials on the eye of hell? I’m not a fan, but I thought it was kind of sad. Of course now, you’ve got Dennis Hopper shilling for Ameriprise to the hippy sellouts with their hippy sellout music in the background. This is to be expected from that generation. They were born to sell out.

Apparently, I’m now old enough that the music of my youth is starting to show up in commercials. For example, this spot for the video game Major League Baseball 2K7:

What’s that song playing in the background? Why, it’s “Breed” by Nirvana. Courtney Love has taken on Larry Mestel as a “strategic partner,” which basically means she sold a percentage of the rights to the Nirvana catalogue for about $50 million. As she put it,

We’re going to remain very tasteful, and we’re going to [retain] the spirit of Nirvana and take Nirvana places it’s never been before.

Right, Courtney. Do you really think Kurt had a collection of men scratching themselves and spitting in mind when he wrote

I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
Care if it’s old.
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
Mind. I don’t have a mind.
Get away
Get away
Get away
Get away
Way, way from your home.
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
Afraid, of ghosts!

If you have…
Even if you need…
I don’t mean to stare.
We don’t have to breed.
We can plant a house,
Or We can build a tree
I don’t even care.
“We could have all three,”
She Said…

I don’t pay a lot of attention to baseball, but does it really involve quite that much angst?

Naughty, naughty, Courtney.

Tags: Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Music, Marketing, Baseball, Video Games

As we’re currently in the midst of the festival of Zappadan, I thought I’d slap together a few of my personal memories of Frank.

When I was in high school, I mostly just listened to electronic stuff like Kraftwerk, Walter/Wendy Carlos, Isao Tomita and Synergy, and pseudojazz, aka “fusion,” such as Weather Report, Return to Forever, Spyro-stinking-gyra and that wizard of the electric jazz violin, Jean-Luc Ponty. Kinda sad, I know, but at least it meant I didn’t have to go along when my friends would go on their annual pilgrimage to Nassau Coliseum to see (ulp) Styx.

However, there were a few exceptions to the no-rock rule for me: Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and yes, Frank Zappa

I had to be careful who I told about that, though. For the most part, if you told people in my high school that you liked Frank, you could expect them to start quoting some of Moon’s lines from Valley Girl — their favorite track from the only Zappa album they’d ever listened to, Sheik Yerbouti. Gag me with a spoon.

Every year I’d see a few kids with t-shirts indicating that they’d been to Zappa’s annual Halloweenie concert at the Palladium in New York (die heißeste stadt), but I’d heard scary stories about that place (before it turned into a giant disco) and I never went, stupid kid that I was.

I did finally get to see Zappa live my freshman year of college, which would have been in 1981 or 1982, at the hockey arena on the campus of Boston University. It was a pretty damn cool show, but I have to admit that the most memorable part of the evening came at the end. After a few encores, the lights came up and for some reason everyone ran out of the arena as if someone had just thrown a grenade into the room. The exit my friend and I took wasn’t exactly an exit. Once we were outside, we found ourselves stuck behind a rather high chain link fence, and we and about twenty other fans had to climb over the damn thing. Chaos can be fun, kids.

Check out the videos below. It’s Zappa on the old Steve Allen show in 1963, demonstrating ways to create music with a bicycle. In between dumb jokes, Allen actually attempts to relate this to free jazz and other experimental forms.

Part 1
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGPPBwDBJDs]

Part 2

OK, while I try to figure out something both valuable and pissy to say about product placements in churches (because I don’t think “grrrrrr” is quite sufficient, but that’s all I can think of at the moment), I’d like to say something short and sweet about Apple’s new spots for the iPod Shuffle — the one featuring the song Who’s Gonna Sing by the Prototypes: good song, good editing, absolutely great tag line. You’ve got a series of people clipping the player to their clothes, and the tag is “Put some music on.” That’s just damned good.

I bet you didn’t know about this.

In early 1961, Ella Fitzgerald, the First Lady of Song herself, was at a party being given by some record executives from RCA in Los Angeles. Fitzgerald was under contract with Verve Records at the time, and didn’t know many of the people at the party. After mingling for an hour or so, she was getting ready to leave when she heard someone playing the piano and singing in another room. She didn’t recognize the song, but she immediately loved it.

As the story goes, Ella followed her ears and met the young man at the piano. He taught her the song, called “Wonderful World” and they sang it together. He of course knew Ella — he was a big fan — and pretty soon they were entertaining the whole party with jazz standards and some current popular songs.

The party ended up lasting all night. The man at the piano turned out to be none other than Sam Cooke, and the song that had introduced him to Ella was one he’d composed and recorded.

As it happened, Herb Alpert was at the party, and in addition to being a good friend of Fitzgerald’s he was one of the co-writers of “Wonderful World.” It was Alpert’s idea that Sam and Ella put an act together.

Everyone at the party applauded the idea, and it was decided that they’d put together a collection of songs, some of his, some of hers, and some that they felt lent themselves to the combination of their talents, rehearse for a week or two, and, just for fun, do a show or two together.

They did a show at the Roxy in LA with very limited advertising under the name “Sam and Ella” and were such a hit that the club’s owner asked them to stay for a week. For the next week, they sold out every show and brought the house down every night.

The decision was made for the two to do a tour of the US together. The plan was for Ella to perform for 45 minutes, followed by Sam for another 45, and then the two would come on stage together and do duets for as long as they felt like it. The tour was booked into some 50 cities over a three-month period, and was to start with an invitation-only dinner show at New York’s Rainbow Room on April 29, 1961.

The night of the kickoff show arrived after a whirlwind press tour. The performance was to be recorded and broadcast live on numerous radio stations. The invited guests — including some of the most famous entertainers in the country — were seated at 8:00 and served Waldorf salad, followed by chicken marsala. By 9:15, the tables had been cleared, the lights dimmed, and out came Fitzgerald and her quartet.

At the end of her set, Ella left the stage and Sam Cooke appeared to do his set with the same backup musicians. The crowd seemed very appreciative, but some 30 minutes into the set a few of the people started to leave, and the number continued to increase to the point where, by the end of Cooke’s set, nearly half the audience was gone.

At this point, Fitzgerald came out on stage to join Cooke (who was worried that his music had somehow been bad enough to thin out the crowd), the band started “Wonderful World,” and the audience applauded in recognition, but without much enthusiasm.

Fifteen minutes into the duet set, the last of the audience was gone. Fitzgerald was completely shocked, and Cooke (a very sensitive man indeed) was in tears, apparently blaming himself for the whole debacle.

As it turned out, the audience hadn’t walked out because of any problem with either of the two stars. The chicken marsala was undercooked, and nearly everyone in the crowd had taken sick. The singers were told of this the next morning, and they were asked to hold off the rest of the tour and perform again in New York to get things off to a proper start. But the damage had been done. Cooke, who was also a bit superstitious, refused to perform, insisting that it was going to happen again even if they never served chicken at one of their shows again. The tour was canceled, and that was the end of Sam and Ella. They never performed together again, and Cooke was killed in a bizarre shooting some three years later.

I was coming out of a meeting earlier this evening and noticed that we’re pretty close to a full moon. That reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to tell you about.

We’ve all heard of the man in the moon, that pareidolia almost as famous as the Virgin Mary’s apparition on a wad of beef jerky heimliched from the throat of a NASCAR fan at Daytona (it’s always Florida). We all know the man in the moon isn’t real. If you believe in him, you probably believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny, and even Delaware.

What you may not realize is that there is a Woman in the Moon, or perhaps more accurately, a Chanteuse in the Moon. That’s right, the moon contains the face of famed French singer, Édith Piaf, she of Non, je ne regrette rien, La vie en rose and Ne me quitte pas.

How this happened, I can’t say. Is it fate? Did Piaf model her look after that face on the moon? Who knows? All I know is, it’s there and there’s no point in denying it. You see it, don’t you? Of course you do!