VPRO: Detroit Music Scene Documentary (White Stripes, Dirtbombs, more)

Excellent 2001 video documentary of the Detroit Scene from 2001. Features the White Stripes (of course) along with Mick Collins of The Dirtbombs and half a dozen other faces of the time.

Mick Collins has the best laugh in rock music. It makes you happy even though most of the time he's doing Deep Thinking. (So follow him on Twitter @BroknHeadphones !) Among the others featured is Arthur Dottweiler, who was the White Stripes manager at the time (in the same sense that Jack White and Meg White were brother and sister at the time). I love Arthur Dottweiler for some reason and he can manage me any time he likes. (The names Dottweiler/Dattwyler/Tutwiler are some of my favorite names too. Dr. Ray Dattwyler is a Lyme Disease researcher which means he's tangentially related to Peromyscus; Tutwiler is the city in Mississippi where W. C. Handy first encountered the Blues.)

Anyway, that's nothing to do with this documentary which is all about the time when Detroit was an organically happening place. Makes me wish I had a time machine and some spare air miles.


13 minutes 

Nobody likes a hipster...

Jimmy Page's On This Day feature for 21st June 1966 is a description of the first gig he played with the Yardbirds. (OTD is only up for one day, so by the time you see this it'll  probably be gone...but here's the URL.)

It sounds like that gig, where he played bass in the band for the first time, after Paul Samwell Smith scarpered, was uneventful. However, also on the site is a description of a Yardbirds show three days earler, the implication being that this is why Paul Samwell Smith left:

In the summer of 1966, Jeff Beck had invited me to a Yardbirds show at the May Ball at Queen's College, Oxford, where the band were to perform in a giant marquee. They were really playing well that night but the audience of penguin-suited university bods were mainly unreceptive and too busy being loud drunks. During the set, Keith Relf became disenchanted with the audience and morphed into what would later be termed a punk, with colourful language and insults to what was a drunken bunch of Hoorays. Keith was wobbling but he finished the set with suitable angst. I thought he was brilliant under the circumstances, but Paul Samwell Smith left the band that evening.

Good for Keith "one lung" Relf! I like the idea that he was "disenchanted" with the audience as opposed to furious.  He reminded me of someone.

 
Jack White in the White Stripes chiding the audience for not dancing during the
Greenhornes set.

Of course, Jack White's "disenchantment" with drunk audiences is legendary. The video below, taken at Don Hill's during a Dead Weather invite-only show of definitive hipsters, is NSFW.



On the one hand, I find the oft-aired claim that a band "feeds off the audience's energy" to be thoroughly creepy. Get your own energy, bands.

On the other hand, not paying attention to a band ought to be a criminal offence. I once saw Pop Will Eat Itself at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. If you want to be at the barrier at the Coach House, you have to eat dinner, because the tables line the front of the stage and the dance floor is behind.  So there I was trying to eat a Bleu Cheese Burger with Fries or some such crap while Clint Poppy was yelling at us, 'Stop wielding your forks and get dancing you eaty motherfuckers!" or words to that effect. Then he jumped off the stage and strode around on our tables, so we really, really did pay attention after that.

What did we do to make Jack White mad this time (baby)?

I haven't seen this news out there, in the Hi World! part of the world so here goes. Jack White has declared that none of his live recordings may be shared by fans.

On the 21^st May, one Jack White fan who was sharing live concerts via Mediafire received a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter. Not a DMCA Takedown notice, or a notice of violation of TOS, but a full-blown letter written by Jack White's lawyer Stacy Fass, and reading in part:

I represent Jack White. It has come to my attention that, in violation of multiple rights of my client's, as well as violation of the clearly posted rules of The Ryman Theater, you audio/visually recorded Jack White live performance on either or both May 15 and May 16, 2012, and have posted the same to the public.

It was addressed to a first name and username rather than a legal name, and used that odd phrase "posted to the public" but it was still very definitely a lawyer's letter, and the person involved took the files down immediately.

Let's take a step back.  Copying a piece of artwork, like a record, and selling it to the public is usually called piracy, and the folks who do it are chased down and prosecuted.  Taping a live recording, and making it available for free to other fans, although similar copyright regulations apply, is generally tolerated by bands.  These files are often called ROIO, recordings of independent origin, and the people who tape and upload are called bootleggers, in the old tradition, although most of them would call themselves simply tapers. Taping has been going on a long time – bands like the Grateful Dead have special areas in front of the stage where tapers can set up good equipment not be bothered by noisy fans during the recording.

Jack White has been cool with it too. Hundreds of recordings from the White Stripes days were circulating.  There was no discussion of whether Raconteurs or Dead Weather shows could or could not be taped, and so plenty of people taped or videoed those as well  –  and White said nothing. The current tour, though, has a posted no photographs, no taping policy in place. (I think – I've only seen no photography signs, but I'm told it was made clear Jack White did not want taping.)

So since there is a posted no taping, no photographs policy at the current live shows, was this C&D letter just a shot across the bows to show he really meant it?  Jack likes to be in control of every aspect of his image, and so to save us the bother and to provide the professional touch, he posts photographs of every concert taken by his house photographer to his website. Maybe, we thought, he's keeping the videos off the inadequate screen of YouTube-o-vision in preparation for a blistering live release later on?

Good thought, but no. For a start there have been several audio and video webcasts of this concert series all webcast on YouTube with Computer Speaker Sound, so it can't be the quality that's bugging him. And secondly, a day after the first letter (that I know about) was received, the popular filesharing site Dime received a request to put Jack White on the Not Allowed Bands list (NAB), along with the previously untroubling bands, The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather.

The day after that, another fan of my acquaintance got a C&D letter to take Jack White recordings off Mediafire. (In amongst all of this, I got a DMCA Takedown to take a Jack White interview off Mediafire, but since it contained no music, I'm assuming this was coincidental. I deleted my Mediafire account anyway, just in case.) He means it.

The thing that's bothering the fans I know is White's silence in the matter.  Nothing has been said on the Vault, nothing on Third Man Records' blog, nothing on Jack White's website, and nothing on the fan message board where this first came up  – even though we know that various Third Man honchos trawl the messageboard whenever they feel like seeing what real-life people are doing.

What bugs folks

When the White Stripes broke up, White issued a statement that said in part:

"The White Stripes do not belong to Meg and Jack anymore. The White Stripes belong to you now and you can do with it whatever you want. The beauty of art and music is that it can last forever if people want it to. Thank you for sharing this experience. Your involvement will never be lost on us and we are truly grateful."

Quoting this tends to lead to derisive laughter from other parties and a sneery "Did you really think he meant he was putting his music in the public domain?" Well, no, but we thought he meant what he said, within the usual borders of artistic license – that fans have a part to play in the legacy of the White Stripes. Now, we are told, we apparently don't have a part to play – except to consume product – and Jack hasn't said why.

I'm sure someone will write and ask why I'm complaining that my entitlement has disappeared or why I felt this was ever okay to do. Good questions – but I'm not complaining, just wondering why there's a change in a laissez faire policy that's been in effect for more than ten years.   And I felt it was okay to share ROIO because I'm quite sure they never cost a sale.

On the contrary, folks who share files usually buy a lot of merchandise. I buy a rock bottom minimum of $240 a year from Third Man, since I'm a Vault member and that's what it costs. I buy official releases as they come out, t shirts, posters and the usual doodads. I have a Raconteurs stylophone! If that's not buying product, I don't know what is. And on the other hand, having access to the live files means we can interest new fans. I'm not big on the White Stripes myself, but I'm told those live shows are blistering, and a listen to those can turn waverers  into fans like a switch being thrown.

I'm equally sure that Brendan Benson, Little Jack Lawrence, Patrick Keeler and Dean Fertita were enjoying having these advertisements for their songwriting and playing and (in three of their cases) general rock and roll badassery being circulated by fans. No need to inveigle anyone to click on a photo of one weird tip here – people are actually seeking out these performances and listening to them and then going out and buying more – it's a marketer's dream. 

So what did we do to make you mad this time, baby?

***

Yes, ma'am

I been thinking...

about the White Stripes farewell announcement two days ago and what I thought about it, and I remembered a meme that had been going around in science fiction circles recently - motivationary misquotes to drive fanboys mad.

Anyway, it translates to rock and roll as well, so here's my entry.

At the risk of over-explaining a joke, I have to credit the original photographer, Pennie Smith, who captured this wonderful but now butchered shot. It was, of course, used on a famous album cover.

Goodbye to the White Stripes - formal announcement

I never actually knew you, but I didn't expect you to formally call it a day.

But you did. On the 33rd day of the year, too. Fare well.

PS does that last paragraph mean I can remix and/or bootleg anything I like? Looks like it does.

Found on the web

From Slate magazine, a review of the Green Hornet movie (which fails to mention that the soundtrack contains the White Stripes' Red Death At 6:14 and Blue Orchid, for some reason) by Dana Stevens:

But all Gondry's films (not to mention his many remarkable music videos) share a strong sense of visual whimsy and an interest in the spectacle of people at play. His protagonists are children trapped in adult bodies, sometimes literally (as when Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine finds himself a baby again, being bathed in the sink by his mother) and always figuratively.

So, 'literally' a child trapped in an adult's body is an adult trapped in a baby's body? This new meaning of literally even eclipses even the old meaning of literally which was, "I am about to say something and I really mean it".

I love Michel Gondry's music videos. Try Cibo Matto's Sugar Water if you're not familiar with Gondry. Unfortunately Warner Bros doesn't allow me to embed it here and you probably can't be bothered to click on it, so I guess it'll go unwatched. Here's the making of video. I can embed that.

(Edit: well, that's been removed.)

I can't say if I'll go and see the Green Hornet though. I'm just not that interested in naff superheros. Or maybe the naffness is the point. Ah, Netflix it.

Jack White invents new paradigm, promises hellfire

(As mentioned by Mike in comments.)

Third Man Records recently announced they'd be selling limited edition colored vinyls of some White Stripes records or other (I don't know the details and, actually, don't care). The day before they were due to go on sale at Third Man's only outlet, in Nashville, the record company put five of them up for sale on eBay. Bidding quickly got to the $500 or so level. The announcement of the auction was made on the paid fanclub website The Vault, and tweeted to fans who subscribe to the feed.

Jack White jumped into The Vault chatroom to defend his exciting new business model, and Antiquiet has done a wonderful job of cutting out all the usual chatroom crap and presenting his words in context here.

He begins with the less than cheery greeting "see you in hell", which was also the sign-off to the eBay listings. It's nice to see a pop star who can quote Han Solo. His argument was that placing them on eBay himself takes the wind out of the flippers' sails. (Many Nashville locals go to the opening day of these limited editions, pay $20 and 'flip' them - list them on eBay the same day.)

He muddied things up a little by talking about the eBay price "setting the price" for the ordinary sale of the record - though of course the eBay price of five rare albums is not the actual value of 300 rare albums bought by locals with zero travel and shipping costs to cover. Many people were left with the impression that the eBay price would be the retail price at the store the next day.

Oh well. It doesn't bother me and for the three grand or so Jack makes out of it, I doubt if it's feathering his nest so much. But it did invoke a major shitstorm from fans who felt otherwise - not so much in the chatroom, but on the comments thread on The Vault's listing of the auction. After all, they'd been roused by tweet to go to the (paid access) website and then found nothing but an announcement that five of 'our' (fans') limited edition records were being sold off to collectors - and told "see you in hell" for their troubles. Major angst ensued. After a while, someone joined the comments thread using Jack White's account and posted an amazing rant that one blog described as,

quickly devolv[ing] into the Four Loko-fueled ramblings of the drunk dude outside your bodega.

"You act like we bury [records] in tunnels in Vietnam for Gods sakes!" said Jack White.

"Uh, not really," said fans, putting on their headphones and discreetly crossing the street.

What all of the blogs who reported this seem to have missed is that the rant was from Jack's account but was signed "the staff at Third Man Records". And it doesn't sound like Jack either.

Here is the major part of it, because it's jolly entertaining.

Posted by trucks on 11.29.2010 at 04:22 PM Well I think it's official this is my last Vault experience. Really nothing on here worth paying for anymore. Think you get something special with a message, but it's really just a link to fan exploitation. fan exploitation? really? if you don't want it, DONT BUY IT. and if you do want it, don't act like you DON'T want it. get in line like anyone else, hunt for it like anyone else. you act like we bury them in tunnels in vietnam for god sakes, you can get one randomly in the mail if your lucky, in line at a store if you're lucky, in your hometown if you're lucky, etc. who is guaranteed a rare hard to find record? only vault members and their quarterly subscriptions. there's luck in every other version. Posted by surfingelectrod on 11.29.2010 at 05:07 PM Fuck you, Third Man. really? you think we deserve that? would you like us to just stop making limited edition records? you would go so far as to say fuck you to us? for what? we didn't do anything to you but give you what you want. you're a vault member obviously, for what reason? limited records you can't get elsewhere? would you kindly send us those records back so we can sell them to some other fan who didn't get to have them? don't want a split colored limited edition record? then guess what? don't buy one. don't want them to be expensive? then guess what? don't WANT them. it's you and others wanting them that dictates the price and the entire nature of the idea. make no mistake, we could make twenty thousand split color whatevers for you, and they'll be worth 20 bucks, and you'll pay 20 bucks for them, and you'll never talk about them, desire them, hunt to find them, etc. why should ebay flippers, who are not real fans, dictate the price, make all the profit (taken from the artist and the label) and take the records out of the hands of real fans. there's a guy who waits in a black suv down the block from third man who hires homeless people to go buy him tri colors when they are on sale. doesn't even get out of his car. should he be charged ten bucks or two hundred? don't be spoiled, don't insult people who are trying to give you what you want. last quarter every vault member got a black and blue live record. a record you're only supposed to get if you ACTUALLY GO to a live show at third man. are you pissed about that? we've done giveaways, contests, auctions, etc. a lot of different ways for vault members to get first crack at limited records when we don't have to. we do it because by being a member you're supposedly making a statement that you're a real fan who wants the music, and to be involved in collecting rare and interesting vinyl. from some of these comments i take it that a lot of you would like this to be all digital, available to anyone on amazon dot com, anytime. boring, lifeless, lazy, and redundant. don't get mad at third man for giving you exactly what you've asked for. and seriously stop all of the whining, because what you communicate to us is that all of the trouble we go to isn't worth it because nothing we do will make you happy. we'll try to do back rubs door to door when we get a chance. sincerely the staff at third man records [1]

Oh, poor widdle record company! Fans hurt its ickle feelings.

Actually I would like music to be available to anyone on Amazon... and it's never hurt any other pop singers. As for easily available music being "boring, lifeless, lazy and redundant", that's so true. Here's a clip of Jack White playing his favorite record. He's almost in tears as he listens to it, and I bet that's because it's the limited-to-15-copies triple-decker tri-color Japanese pressing with the blue, white and black plastic cover that folds into a clockwork-powered Tesla Coil and the Eskimo scrimshaw for "strength" hand-carved into the run-out groove by the artist himself.

Oh, wait, it's not. It's a black vinyl pressing of the popular release with the regular cover. Is Jack (or is the record - I can't tell whether the Third Man commenter meant to skewer the buyer or the product) boring, lifeless, lazy and redundant in this clip? If not, why not? Might Son House have been onto something here?

I especially liked "don't get mad at third man for giving you exactly what you've asked for" in the next sentence to "nothing we do will make you happy". Clearly logic isn't this person's strong point...if it's exactly what we asked for, we'd be happy, wouldn't we?

The postscript to all of this is even weirder - or it's spin control. According to a poster on one of the (free) fan message boards, as one person was lining up outside the record store the next day, Ben Swank of Third Man Records explained, "it was just an experiment gone wrong. They were hoping that people would not bid them very high and the price would be set low. Then a bunch of douchebags created fake accounts and bid the auctions up." He said that they would "just offer second chance offers to legitimate bidders."

Whatever he said while handing out hot chocolate to freezing fans then, he's unapologetic in the Grauniad this morning. "The industry is constantly changing. I can't believe it's taken 15 years for a label to start selling its own releases on eBay (even in limited numbers). We're going to continue doing it. We're also going to continue all the contests, giveaways, pop-up shops, random mail orders, subscription services and manufacturing of insane new vinyl products and any other ridiculous idea that strikes our fancy. Why? Because we're American. And American's do crazy shit for capitalism. See you in hell."

Getting a bit tired of "see you in hell" now. A little glint of anger from Han Solo was kind of sexy, but three times in three days from a record company is like having your knuckles sandpapered. And it's Americans, FFS. Plural.

[1] I'm claiming fair use. Swank knows where to find me if he wants it taken down.

My Fault for Being Famous

I've been thinking about posting these for a while. Two famous people talk about how crazy their fans are. Jack White takes the wounded it's-all-about-me route with a rousing singalong and Eminem produces a dramatic epic that's up with the greatest American storytelling of any genre.



The White Stripes - It's My Fault For Being Famous



Eminem (with Elton John) Stan

Time Out of Joint

Netflix delivered as is its wont, and that means we were able to spend about five hours watching "The Work of Director Michel Gondry", which is such a boring title for such a fascinating DVD that I'll title this post something else.

Gondry directed The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a movie I found a little tough to take because it had Jim Carrey in it, and also because it seemed a little derivative. Even though Carrey was on his best behavior and didn't go completely over the top even once, it had a dampening effect on my mood.

As for the concept – the gradual realization that the characters had been through something together at some time in the past, but couldn't, or wouldn't remember it – it struck me at the time as the usual Hollywood Dick technique. No, not being dicks, though many are, but the technique of jotting down plotlines from Philip K Dick – We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Time Out of Joint, Martian Time Slip, Ubik – and mixing them up with cute couples and modern paraphernalia to create a feeling of vaguely unhinged memory and non-linear time. After seeing this DVD, I realize there's nothing derivative about Gondry at all – he LIVES Martian Time Slip. He IS Palmer Eldritch. If Gondry has an antecedent, it may be Chris Marker (La Jetee, 1962) and to a much lesser extent, the photographically-constrained time and spaces of JG Ballard in such pieces as The Sixty Minute Zoom. He's making music videos that take on Science Fiction themes and trounce the writers at their own game.

All of the pieces on the DVD are shorts, and most are music videos. I've gushed here before about The White Stripes Hardest Button to Button, but in context, it appears that video's theme - duplication while the original persists - is a common one for Gondry, which he carries out with breathtaking skill and innovation. One of the best examples is a Kylie Minogue video, Come into My World, in which the camera follows her four times around a circuit, a new Kylie joining in each time, and each action in the background is either duplicated or extended until your jaw drops at the audacity.

Embedding for that video is disabled by stupid request. You have to click here to watch it. However, you can watch the Making Of video (from the Gondry DVD) below.



Cibo Matto's Sugar Water is given a split screen treatment. In a single take, the women go through one single story which turns around in the middle to go in reverse. (This means each has to act backwards for half the video). Apparently it took some extra takes to get this perfectly timed so that they are at the exact equivalent point in each other's timeline, but the overall result is stunning. If I hadn't already known Sugar Water, I wouldn't have heard a note of it, I was concentrating that hard on the timeline.

A Rolling Stones' video takes place in linear time, but with space distorted in an entirely novel way. Massive Attack's Protection appears to be shot by Spiderman with a Steadicam, climbing up and down the walls of an apartment block to peer into different windows – but even Spidey can't have shot the upside-down rooms, the impossible geometries and the cutaway elevator! In another video, what appears to be early 80s Quantel effects – that effect where the image turns into a plane (or many planes) and whirls around while the original image continues to play on the primary screen – turn out to be real, physical objects which dancers use in their choreography. And in the Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar, a continuous shot out of a train window seems to be a series of repetitive loops until you realize that the structures the train passes correspond to the music, all seamlessly integrated into one long take.



There are two long interviews with Gondry, and there are also several short early movies on the double-sided disk. In one, La Lettre, a young boy is using the length of a corridor as a darkroom to make an enlargement of the girl he loves. It's a 28 minute exposure, and a fair part of the film takes place with the characters moving in front of the projected negative image. ("Don't bother ducking – your shadow won't show up.") Apparently it's a real chapter from Michel's life and is about 5,000,000 times more interesting than most film-makers' early shorts.

Weirdly, the other Netflix movie we had for the weekend was Donnie Darko, which is, of course, about a young man shunted into a siding in time while the heavy traffic clears and then sent off again on his dark journey. Must be Time Slip week.

Under Great White Northern Lights

Now that It Might Get Loud is out of the way - for me, at least - it's time to look forward to the White Stripes film, Under Great White Northern Lights. It documents the White Stripes 2007 Canadian tour, which was planned to take in "the far reaches of the Canadian landscape. From the ocean to the permafrost. The best way for us to do that is ensure that we perform in every province and territory in the country, from the Yukon to Prince Edward Island." (Jack White)



It premiered at the Toronto Film Fest today, September 18th. The first review of it I've seen is thoroughly positive. Hitfix.com says:

The film is very rough and hand-held, but Malloy has a sharp eye, and more than that, he seems to be very good at capturing a moment without distorting or manipulating it, and the film sounds amazing. This is one of those things that I'm glad I saw theatrically, because at home, you won't really get the same visceral response that I got from this wonderful film in the theater.

Among other things.

Why don't I have a film fest? Everybody else has one. The Lyle Hopwood San Juan Capistrano Chili Cook-Off and Film Fest (LHSJCCCOFF) sounds as though it could be a go, although I think maybe the local tavern has a lock on the yearly chili cook-off. Hey, we could combine. That might mean I could get biker security for my film fest, and that always goes down well.