Roxy Music, when they were young

Earlier today, I was considering writing an ode to Little Jack Lawrence - possibly the coolest man alive, viz:



--when I decided that it's always better to use a ready-made.

The first Roxy Music album came out in 1972. It engendered extreme shock, as I recall. It was not a normal record, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to Deep Purple, T Rex or for that matter The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards or Chicory Tip. The single, Virginia Plain, had all the Roxy Music characteristics in a nice digestible, chart friendly format - but was not on the album. I know people think it was; that's because it's on the CD. But it wasn't on the vinyl, which was an unadulterated slab of alternate-universe rockabilly lounge singing, with rhythm piano and lead saxophone and a raw, intense and unrockist mature passion. The sleeve notes, by publicist...I feel the word extraordinaire coming on...help...publicist extraordinaire Simon Puxley were fake stream-of-consciousness blurtings, possibly because there was no widely-understood language to describe this music at that time.

piccadilly 1972: taking a turn off main-street, away from the cacophony and real life relics, & into outer spaces myriad faces and sweet deafening sounds of rock ’n’ roll. And inner space…the mind loses its bearings. What’s the date again? (it’s so dark in here) 1962 or twenty years on? Is this a recording session or a cocktail party? …on the rocks, please…where’s the icebox?... oh! now! that is… so cool… (there’d been rumours, of course, nothing certain, but the suggestion of truth). musicians lie rigid-&-fluid in a mannerist canvas of hard-edged black leather glintings, red satin slashes, smokey surrounding gloom… …listening to the music re-sounding, cutting the air like it was glass, rock 'n’ roll juggernauted into demonic electronic supersonic mo-mo-momentum – by a panoplic machine-pile, hi fi or sci fi who can tell? Wailing old time sax, velvet/viscous, vibrato/vicious or ensemble jamming ( & more)...synthesised to whirls and whorls of hard rock sound...mixed/fixed/sifted/lifted to dirving, high flying chunks and vortices of pure electoring wow-gyrating, parabolic, tantalising etc (Simon Puxley)

In fact, there was too much passion for me. I ran out and bought the record as soon as it came out but spent a long time growing into it. The vulnerability and melancholy can still get to me today, even with 38 years of armor grown solidly into place around. At the time, Black Sabbath's Paranoid was about as emotionally mature as I could get in my music. (I kid of course; a Led Zeppelin fan wouldn't have been caught dead listening to Black Sabbath. Tch.)

Two tracks in particular stand out on Roxy Music for me - 2HB and the sublime If There Is Something.



Ignore the first verse and the obligatory guitar break. After that, the music drops into Big Melancholy and Bryan Ferry's vocals get ragged and charged with emotion. That's the part I'm thinking of as the ode to LJ; and then come wind instrument solos that make the standard rock band's guitar solos sound as deep as a monkey playing a banjo. And at last the long yearning call and response to the fade. Mighty stuff.

Pop groups didn't do it before this album, and they don't do it now, either. You have to buy this one to hear it.

I've forgotten why I need an ode to Jack Lawrence.

Oh, I remember. In an interview with Clash Music, the interviewer asks about albums leaking on to the internet before the release date, and LJ says,

Jack Lawrence: I just don’t... I just can’t find an answer in my head, or talk to anyone and get an answer, but why do people want to ruin the surprise? What is the big deal? Why do they need to know? A surprise is good. It’s nice to be surprised. Just let us surprise you.

Hear hear. I waited until the day Horehound was released to listen (to my downloaded mp3 copy, because it'll take three days in the mail before the CD gets here). It was tough but I made it.

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TDW Updates

I've updated the post on the short Dead Weather film Treat Me Like Your Mother to include the credits, courtesy of The Inspiration Room.

Here's where to listen to The Dead Weather's picks on WOXY yesterday and today (streaming recorded audio). They mainly play themselves, but hey, that's showbiz.

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Prying into the mysteries

There's an Aesop's Fable telling the tale of an astronomer, who in the words of readbookonline, "used to walk out every night to gaze upon the stars.

It happened one night that, with his whole thoughts rapt up in the skies, he fell into a well. One who heard his cries ran up to him, and said: "While you are trying to pry into the mysteries of heaven, you overlook the common objects under your feet."

We should never look so high as to miss seeing the things that are around us."

Nowadays more and more of us have such preoccupations, though perhaps with less lofty ambitions than prying into the mysteries of heaven. Here is the story of Texting Teen Falls Into Open Manhole.

I've often mentioned on this blog how much I like the ability to hear things from outside my immediate environment (and I'm sure I've mentioned a few times how little I like to see that behavior in others. I'll come to terms with it sooner or later). This appears to be one of the significant downsides - reduced ability to figure out what *is* going on in your immediate environment.



Of course, if her cellphone had been properly equipped with GPS, proximity indicators and tagged hazard warnings left on Google Maps by other pedestrians, it wouldn't have happened.

So really the problem is the age old one - too little technology.

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Dead Weather video on Cinemax last night

The short Dead Weather movie Treat Me Like Your Mother debuted on Cinemax last night.

I liked it. I didn't expect to like it. I was a bit miffed at the whole concept. Also, I'd seen a spoiler for it (which turned out not to be true) that I thought had ruined it for me. But I liked it. Maybe because I have revenge fantasies too, and this is a great big one.

The Dead Weather - Treat Me Like Your Mother



Heh.

There's a copy here and one of the commenters, Ryan, hits the nail on the head, I think.

Their raw attitude towards each other, along with them singing the words, work together to tell you a story that you don’t even need to see. You get it. Shit went horribly wrong and they are pissed. And now they jumped into this fantasy where they literally shoot each other until one dies. And that cigarette break was literally that: a break. Some time for her to realize she probably will die, and us to take a breath. This is Jack’s characters dream, most likely, since he’s the one that walks away. That’s right, characters. Minimalist it may be, they acted, and without pretentiousness.

It may sound odd to say, but I liked the way they've taken care in firing in rhythm, rather than just on full auto, at least at first. A musical director normally fits the sound to the action; it must have been difficult to fit action to a pre-existing song.

I wonder if they left the brass in the field? If it weren't thousands of miles away it might be nice to go an pick some up as a souvenir.

According to The Inspiration Room, the credits are as follows:

Credits
Treat Me Like Your Mother was shot by director Jonathan Glazer via Academy Films, London, and Hello!, Los Angeles, with director of photography Max Malkin, executive producers Liz Kessler and Sheira Rees- Davies, managing directors Lizzie Gower and Line Postmyr, producer Rachel Curl, production designer Jeremy Hindle. The Dead Weather video marks the beginning of a reciprocal arrangement between Los Angeles-based HELLO! and London-based Academy Films.
Video commissioner was Dilly Gent.
Editor was Paul Watts at The Quarry, London, with assistant editor Anne Perri. Visual effects were developed at One of Us Ltd, Stranger and Smoke & Mirrors by producers Rachel Penfold (One of US); Belinda Grew (Smoke & Mirrors); Paul O’Beirne (Smoke & Mirrors); Leigh Warner (Smoke & Mirrors), colorist Mark Horrobin, and VFX line producer Chaya Feiner. Sound was mixed by Johnnie Burns at Wave Studios, London.
The Dead Weather is Alison Mosshart, Jack White, Jack Lawrence and Dean Fertita.
I'll bet Dilly Gent wasn't born with that name.

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Punk aesthetic and the Wall Street Journal

"Tangible" vinyl, subscription-only tchotchkes, building an on-line fan-base...The Jack White business model has reached the hallowed halls of the Wall Street Journal, which lead them to publish to such unintentionally hilarious sentences yesterday as “You can’t help but have a punk aesthetic, to rebel against technology and the way music is presented to people these days,” spoken by a man whose sales techniques are designed to force fans to sign up to Twitter if they want to catch "spontaneous" streaming video performances and take part in giveaways in on-line chat rooms on a website to which they pay to subscribe.

This is funny because White hates Twitter and says, "I don't want to give in to the digital age", among many similar quotes. One hopes Jack does not end up like the pigs in Animal Farm, "Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." No insult intended; I'm The Man in that paragraph. I'm the one who spends all my time on the internet.

The article, which includes an excellent video and interactive graphic is here on the wsj site.

There's also a short article on his business model at techdirt.

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To Hell With Forgiveness

The Dead Weather full length video premieres in the US on Cinemax on July 11th at 9:55pm and in the UK on Channel 4 on July 13th at 00:10.

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Make Money the Trent Reznor way

Trent Reznor has a post on how a musician can make money in this day and age. It's not dissimilar from Bob Lefsetz' pronouncements and I have to say he must have been sharing a brain with Jack White and/or the idea guy behind Third Man's The Vault - it's identical.

The basic idea is, give away the music free, because everyone can get it for free and you can't beat that price point, but on the strength of that (and on the back of the email addresses you've collected), sell people things that they can't get for free elsewhere. Handmade things. Unique things. Official t shirts. Better quality music files. Videos of interviews.

The same formula would work for writers, too. Everyone can cut and paste anything anyone has ever written. You'll never make a fortune trying to sell it. But you can make a name and work off that.

The only pessimistic part of the article is the beginning.

If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed ...your best
bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue
streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical
mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from
major labels. Good luck with that one.

Not such good news for the newbies, then.

Read TR's article here.

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Paid in Blood

Well, today I sold my blood. (Not all of it.) That grossed $180, which means about $120 after tax (yes, you're taxed on your blood). That's enough to pay for the first few months' subscription to The Vault. Hooray! Downside: I'm too tired to actually sign up at the moment. But I do have until the 21st to take iron tablets and recover.

While we're on the subject, new lobby card for The Dead Weather's film here. Called "Love You Always, " it's an example of what happens to the appearance of that font if the text is too short - increasing the size puts the text out of proportion with the film frame. Far less cool than the longer texts in smaller letters. Nice picture, though.

At the gym today, I was facing a sports TV. I usually avoid that one, but it was pretty crowded tonight. The news was mainly about someone called Chad Ochocinco, who had decided he would tweet during NFL games next season. With a name like Ochocinco, he's probably a virtual man anyway, like Lonelygirl15.

But if he's not, it's an interesting illustration of how far people will go to stay connected to teh interwebs. Nothing will keep people away. I remember in the eighties, when I was writing SF, I often (possibly always) wrote about protagonists with implants that allowed them to stay in contact with what became the web, and I wasn't the only one writing that by about a gazillion and a half. The critics called it body hate - they thought we must regret the flesh, want to denigrate the meat, be violated and penetrated by silicon, purified by inorganic, anti-life hardware.

I didn't, as it happens - I just wanted a cooler Walkman.

It's only twenty years later and even NFL football players seem to be getting with the program. I wonder if the critics would even bother to do that type of analysis any more? Probably not, as they're most likely too busy interacting with someone miles away through their Bluetooth headsets.

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Jack White on The Vault

I continue to wonder if I have enough money to pay for a subscription to The Vault. Apparently I missed Jack White hisself blogging about why I should consider it. Here's his post, from July 2nd. Nice picture!

It starts out, unpromisingly, "Dear Suckers" and goes through a very defensive patch, but clambers out of it about a third of the way through, swells into a plea to those who appreciate positivity, art, beauty, inspiration and experience, adds a stirring admonishment to those of us who might suffer fear, and climaxes with a shout out to 'the fans' without whom 'we' wouldn't be able to make more records.

I'm skeptical of the idea that I am guaranteed my money back if I don't like it, by selling the 'tangible' items I've received on eBay. It occurs to me that everyone who was prepared to pay a fortune on eBay will have joined the Vault. Since the upfront money paid to the Vault is used to press as much vinyl as there are Vault members, the market's de facto saturated.

The only people left to buy on eBay are going to be the stupid who didn't foresee this happening. Oh, and future fans, but who wants to sell expensive vinyl to a new fan? Usually older fans like to give new fans shows for free. That's what fans do. (And why I am very grateful to other fans, who have turned me on to some wonderful stuff over the last few years.)

But it's not really the value of the 'tangible' items that bothers me. It's the streaming. For it to work, you have to join Twitter and respond to the times given in the tweet, get in front of a computer and watch a stream. Streaming's a form of DRM, and the very worst kind. You're strictly limited in the device you can watch it on, but more importantly, like no other media anywhere, you are limited to watching it in real time. It's like going back to the 1960s!

Now, I stayed up all night to watch the moon landing in 1969, but am I going to pull a sickie at work to watch a Dead Weather interview or attend a chat with someone famous?

Oh, you know the answer's yes.

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I'm on the road to nowhwere

It was off to the gym again tonight, to run on the endless road to nowhere for thirty minutes. These running machines are in a row, with the outside world behind you, so that you're running away from it, and before you , like wasps' nests, hangs a set of TVs. They aren't supposed to have sound, but the patrons have defeated the little metal plates covering the volume knobs, so as you run towards them, you are faced with sound from different channels at different volumes from various sources.

Today, the TV facing me was playing the Spike channel - the men's channel - silently, while a TV around the corner and invisible to me was showing Fox "news". This means that as I ran, I was watching UFC fighting while toad's cloaca Sean Hannity worked up a froth of stupid and pointless anger over some trifling thing that most adults can deal with silently and with due respect. It was an odd montage, then, noses exploding in gouts of flying blood while Hannity called for all kinds of mayhem to be perpetrated on various fellow Americans.

I used to be able to listen to Fox "news" and manage to find some kernel of actual fact every now and again. Now the level of violence and antagonism - not to mention idiocy - is so high that it's not worth the damage to my blood pressure. This is why you bring mp3 players to the gym, of course, and this is why highly compressed music, music that's very loud all the time, with minimal dynamic range, is essential in that environment. [1]

With Hannity disappeared, the UFC spectacle is very different. I don't know what the rules are but the gloved, bare-footed fighters seem at liberty to box, kick box, wrestle and strangle their opponents. Usually one boxes while the other backs away and occasionally kicks. Eventually one falls over, and the pair wrestle on the mat. One will get a hold on the other who will continue to kick and punch, so it's a case of one trying to strangle the other before he breaks the first's nose. There's plenty of blood but it's a curiously violence-free sport; Spike cuts from the punching to the participants chatting mildly (after their bruises have healed) about what they did wrong in the bout. Occasionally the ex-combatants hug each other. There are continuous interruptions of this type, and coupled with regular applications of the filmic effect where a few seconds of normal speed motion is followed by a split second of undercranking, the serious business of one man knocking someone's brain against his skull until he lets go of the other man shrinks to a small part of the experience. Possibly because it's the man's channel, or more likely because it's an American experience and living here for a long time is not sufficient to completely internalize the rituals, I didn't really follow it. I know where I've seen a similar thing before - in bondage porn, after the session is finished, the couple is often shown sitting together, smiling and hugging. Look, it's just a game! We're friends!

But if the take home message of UFC is that Americans don't like conflict with their violence, then what do I make of Sean Hannity? Apart from the fact that he's an elderly badger's fanny, of course?

***
[1] That and the fact that sudden loud sounds after a quiet passage really hurt my ears. My stapedial reflex isn't fast enough to damp down my hearing sensitivity.

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John Pidgeon on Ronnie Lane

Back in March I reviewed The Passing Show, a DVD of the story of Ronnie Lane, the main songwriter of The Small Faces and subsequently The Faces. This morning, Rock's Back Pages posted an article by writer/critic John Pidgeon on Ronnie Lane.

Written with sensitivity and insight, Pidgeon covers a very personal history of the man and his music. It's a lovely tribute to one of Britain's minor, but important, songwriters and a testament to a man with a great deal of courage and strength.

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Michael Moorcock and London

Mike Moorcock, Allan Moore and Iain Sinclair held a talk in front of an audience in London on June 29th. The talk was, of course, about London. David Mosely's tape is available for viewing here - Part 1 and Part 2.

It's an interesting talk ranging from psychogeography (two of them don't seem keen on the term but the replacement that was suggested, "deep topography" didn't seem to get many votes either), to rock and roll and exactly how tired a writer has to be to find words flowing from his/her subconscious to the page. (Very tired and on a deadline, preferably already missed.) They cover mythologizing, the history of comics, the appearance of war-torn London, living in Ladbroke Grove and, from Allan Moore, Northampton. JG Ballard is mentioned, as the personification of Shepperton. Allan Moore is ridiculously funny. Moorcock is erudite and impressive. Sinclair has a phenomenal knowledge of London and its history and is passionate in his descriptions. I liked hearing the writers talk about their influences and how they are inspired to write, and especially enjoyed Allan Moore's description of the way in which the act of writing about a place changes the place written about.

Thanks to JGB, the JG Ballard list on Yahoo for the heads up on the existence of the video.

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The Dead Weather Update

Hello, poppets. Miss Demeanour here. I've bought a gun to keep up with the Joneses, or in this case the White-Mossharts. Hey, that's a good name for a band. Do you like the rug? I killed it myself.

As predicted, the website for Treat Me Like Your Mother has been updated and there is a second trailer and lobby card there. What was not predicted is the old ones are still there. However, here they are in case they disappear. I may not keep up with this until the 11th, though.

Jack's phrase on the lobby card is pretty aggressive so I won't say anything mean about his film today. Nice Jack. (Strokes his leather jacket carefully.) Here's Alison's trailer.



I asked a friend of mine who is a gun-and-murderous-stride fan for her opinion and was told that, "He looked hot and businesslike. Hers was less interesting, you couldn't see her stalking and you can't see the gun." Personally, I think Alison's better at this than Jack. I mean, even better at this than Jack (oops). She really has the Mad Max factor. Hey, that's another good name for a band! The film is growing on me, like some form of white moss. (Goes looking for a picture of Mossy Foot, finds one and decides not to put it here after all.)

In other news, Third Man Records is offering us the opportunity to pay them $240 a year each for exclusives, videos, first go at tickets and a bunch of freebies each year. Or $84 for the basic tier, which is a little more manageable. The announcement is written with 'me' (the questioner) in a lovely silver font that approaches Dymo Tape in almost having a texture and 'Third Man' in a yellow sans serif that goes nicely with the black background. The Q&A has a charming wide-eyed "we're new at teh intertubes" innocence to it.

In answer to the obvious question, the yellow text tells us:



Now this might not trigger the federal "forward looking statements" clause but it looks a bit like a contract to me. Hope they have someone less concerned with guns and leather and more concerned with legal language writing the small print.

I could make $7 a month sending my boys out to raid recyclables from the neighbors' wheelie bins, so I might sign up myself.

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Memories of the Space Age

The Internet Review of Science Fiction (iRoSF) has an article from Gary Westfahl on JG Ballard and the space race. It's called The Man Who Didn't Need To Walk On The Moon.

This month is the fortieth anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, so I'm sure we'll see a number of articles on the subject. Covering JG Ballard is a little weird under the circumstances, as he regarded the space race as a dead loss - though he found it a very fertile ground for stories. Many of them concern crazy astronauts, dead astronauts, abandoned Cape Canaveral buildings, rusting rockets and a general air of total rejection of outer space, a sense of it being pushed in to the past to be safely compartmentalized and dealt with as history. When he began writing stories on the subject, that was an outrageous position to take. Fifty years on, it has almost come true. The astronauts have not gone nuts, though at least one - Lisa Marie Nowak - has not been exactly normal. There's a few rockets still wheezing half-assedly into Earth orbit, but the zip, pizzazz and vigor has gone. Generally, the space age seen from today seems to be more of a Taj Mahal than a great leap forward for civilization. More pretty than useful.

Westfahl seems to be approaching the work of Ballard as a fortune-teller or futurologist, though this could be the slant the editors asked him to take. I doubt if Ballard saw himself as the Faith Popcorn of the Space Age. But apart from that, it's a decent round up of Ballard's infatuation with strangling the space race at birth. He describes the corpses and monuments to the Space Age that litter Ballard's works like some Ozymandias of Apollo.

One interesting point was:

But Ballard did make one error: he assumed that humans would abandon space
travel because they were shattered by the revelations brought by ventures into
space; instead, humans have largely abandoned space travel because they are in a
state of denial about those revelations. That is, I would regard the following
phenomena as direct results of the Apollo lunar missions: a huge resurgence of
belief in the absurd pseudoscience of astrology, which maintains that the
positions of stars and planets are primarily important as reflections of, and
influences on, human behavior; [and] a growing refusal to accept the validity of
Darwin's theory of evolution by people who would rather trust in the wisdom of
an ancient religious text which explicitly argues that human beings live at the
bottom of a crystal hemisphere surrounded on all sides by water.

He concludes, although I don't really agree with him, that part of the pullback from space was a Ballardian realization on the part of humankind that Earth is sufficient to drive us crazy; we don't have to be astronauts to go mad. The alienation and insignificance we get on the surface of our own planet is quite enough for us.

Thanks to the JGB, the JG Ballard mailing list at Yahoogroups for pointing this article out to me.

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Traveling Riverside Blues

Discovering something is always a joy, and I can well remember when I discovered Traveling Riverside Blues by Led Zeppelin. I was a pre-teen, alone in my room when Radio One played a few songs it had recorded earlier with the band. (The others were Whole Lotta Love and Communication Breakdown.) The insistent, lyrical slide guitar figure hypnotized me as I listened to Robert Plant sing about something at least as alien as those I read about in my beloved science fiction books. He sang about a place where he can barrelhouse by the riverside, with his rider whose front teeth were lined with gold. "She's got a mortage on my body, got a lien on my soul," Robert sang in that high voice he had in those days, "She's my brownskin sugar plum." And then, of course, "Squeeze my lemon, 'til the juice runs down my leg. Squeeze it so hard I'll fall right out of bed. [Lower, spoken:] I wonder if you know what I'm talkin' about."

Well, I did know what he was talking about - being pre-teen is no guarantee of ignorance - but the place he met her was what took my fancy. Still does, even though now I know most of the songs he borrowed the lyrics from. Even though I have most of those songs on an mp3 player that means I can hear them instantly.

I couldn't hear them instantly in those days. Finding out that the set was to be broadcast was hard enough. Hearing it and recording it on a cassette tape was a minor trial. Once I had it, I could listen to it over and over again, and I did. I don't think I ever met another person who had a copy. For all I knew, I was the only person who had listened to the broadcast, let alone kept it to secretly enjoy. For about twenty years, from 1970 to 1990, it was unreleased. After that, everybody could hear it, of course.

It's still my favorite Led Zeppelin song, mostly because of the sublime riff and the way it moves and swells and seems to wriggle with piscine strength and joy - a thoroughly riparian motif befitting a song about barrelhousing on the riverside. It's up on YouTube, so have a listen to the most distinctive voice in rock counterpointing the strongest guitar player.

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