Wow. Just wow:
AMSTERDAM — A Dutch journalist has been sacked for making up an interview with American singer-songwriter Scott Walker.
The article by journalist Paul Hegeman appeared a few weeks ago in Dutch television listings magazine VPRO.
That’s some next-level Jayson Blair-type shit. Dude isn’t exactly Thomas Pynchon!
Fuck yeah! What this blog needs is more crappy, blurry pictures! In fact, that’s what all blogs need, amirite? Er, yeah, I guess not. Anyway, Friday night, after an incredible catfish dinner (complemented by potato salad, mac n’ cheese, cole slaw and beer) with my friends in Titan at Pies and Thighs under the Williamsburg Bridge, I raced back across to catch this show – sort of an Amish Records showcase with guests – at the Mercury Lounge. Endless Boogie had the rare first-opener slot, and I was worried with all that great Southern-style cookin’, I might have to be late. But I got there right on time, and proceeded to rip into some more beers while the Boogie ripped into their set. And what a set it was: new stuff, front-loaded at the beginning, that sounded fresh, while the last song (always forgetting or making up the titles) was an oldie but goodie. Mike “Miighty Flashlight” Fellows was behind the soundboard, and that led to one of the better vocal performances by wildman Paul Major. Score.
Second up was Polvo/Idyll Swords/many-other-NC-bands-I’ve-never-heard-of veterans Black Taj, whose self-titled album on Amish contains many sublime moments. Maybe it was just the grease congealing, but live they carried much more of a Southern swagger than the record. Then again, maybe it was just the volume, too. Dave Brylawski, one of Black Taj’s guitarists and its only NYC resident, has been one of my favorite guitar players since seeing Polvo way back when (memorable show: when they played at Bard, it was under two gigantic papier mache’d joints – gotta love those college kids!) (also at the same show Stephen Malkmus was attending in disguise, so as not to be recognized by same college kids). Black Taj, while definitely being more prog than Polvo with changes and instrumental sections galore, still have some rockin’ numbers filled with that special sort of twisted melodicism that made the latter band so great. Except the curried lamb and tabouli has been replaced with fried catfish and slaw.
By the point Mike Wexler hit the stage, I was getting a bit lit. Which didn’t detract from the music at all, but I did find it a bit hard to concentrate on Wexler’s reedy vocal tones. Don’t get me wrong, I like that particular style, but I have to be in the right mood. Wexler’s band is whip-sharp, though, and the songs are pretty damn good. I had a better time watching him play in Austin last March, drinking nearly-free Pabsts under a tent with my buddy Cliff, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recommend his tunes.
Headliners Oakley Hall, back in town on a rest between tours with Calexico, M. Ward and the Constantines, are every bit of deserving of the great press and turnouts they’ve been getting. Consistently one of the best and most-hard working bands in New York, Friday night’s set was a psychedelic barn burner, complete with almost incomprehensible (to my drunken eyes, anyway) projections. Totally rad, almost makes me wish I’d been a bit more sober for it. Next time, then.
Iron Maiden singer and qualified pilot Bruce Dickinson airlifted 200 British citizens who had fled war torn Beirut, Lebanon, back to the United Kingdom yesterday. The 47-year-old flew a Boeing 757 to Cyprus where he picked up the evacuees and flew them back to London’s Gatwick Airport.
http://www.sploid.com/news/2006/07/rock_legend_air.php
FUCK SHARON!
Seriously, this made my day.
Check it out. Pretty Girls Make Graves are playing at McCarren Park Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York for FREE this Sunday. Free ICE CREAM is also provided, and Brooklyn Brewery beers are on tap. Should be a good time!
No, this is not about the indie faux-“world music” band, but from the city of 3-million-plus in Lebanon, currently getting the shit bombed out of it. Mazen Kerbaj, an improv trumpeter and illustrationist, has been updating his amazing blog – KERBLOG – since the beginning of the conflict last week (incidentally on the same day I got my promotion – way to make a guy feel bad). Additionally, he has recorded what I believe to be a genuine first: a “duet” of sorts with the airplanes and bombs of the Israeli Defence Forces. “Starry Night,” a six-minute excerpt of some two hours of, uh, jamming, is available at the following sources:
http://www.thewire.co.uk/web/mp3specials.php
http://www.l-m-c.org.uk/audio/mazen.html
http://www.dasmollschegesetz.de/beirut.htm
http://www.muniak.com/mazenkerbaj.html
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/mazen_kerbaj-starry_night.mp3
http://www.nonstuff.com/mazen_kerbaj-starry_night.mp3
The mp3 is an amazing document of something most of us – in the United States anyway – will hopefully never experience. The blog is full of passionately angry, yet funny and sympathetic writings and drawings. Both are well worth much of your time.
be there or be… somewhere else.
Clearly I’m biased as to how awesome Mission of Burma is, as not only do I work at Matador Records, but was recently promoted to product manager, and will probably work with Burma. But that disclaimed, I gotta say that their show yesterday at Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn was one of the best, most powerfully loud rock shows I’ve seen in some time. Warsaw, for those who don’t know it, is a venue located in the Polish National Home in Greenpoint, and is a short walk from my new apartment. After taking the day off work and completing the finishing touches on my move into my new place, it was a pleasure to leisurely stroll through Williamsburg and Greenpoint on the way to Warsaw. Once inside, a $5 plate of pierogies and $4 Okocim beer were consumed, both of which add up to Warsaw being one of the friendliest, most non-pretentious rock venues in the city.
While I skipped the openers, who were called Dead Vessel or something akin to that, I was psyched to see that Cambridge, Mass’s Major Stars were opening. Wayne and Kate, who also run the fine Twisted Village record store in that bucolic city, are the major stars behind Major Stars, and are as entertaining as hell. Loud, punishing rock riffs incorporating heavy psych as well as hardcore touches are what Wayne, Kate and third guitarist Tom (who perhaps may be the Jesper Eklow of Massachusetts) bring, and their rhythm section (Casey and Dave) keep pounding it all together. Their occasional singer Sandra Barrett was a bit off tonight, I thought. I guess maybe she couldn’t hear herself because she seemed to be over-singing a bit, but whatever. I had fun. Or something.
Burma’s two-set setup these days can sometimes seem a bit long (as it did to me when I saw them in February at Bowery Ballroom), but last night they zoomed through. Not once did I feel like checking my watch, even at the few songs I don’t know well (which ain’t much). Sound-wise, they were excellent, despite Warsaw’s high ceilings and usually tricky acoustics. And man, were they ever just excellent, entirely. Making jokes about Peter Prescott signing a pact with the devil isn’t far off; this guy has more energy than most twenty year-old drummers. I also like that their new songs showcase a somewhat prog (if that’s the right word for it) sensibility: not in the sense that they’re aping Yes or whatever, but that they now can write and play really punishing post-punk songs with lots of changes and textures. Not that they were ever “simple,” as a band, but you can really tell that with their new songs they’re really part of an overall rock continuum. And like a lot of the best bands from their original era, such as This Heat or Wire (or even John Lydon who was a big Beefheart fan), they’re not afraid to disavow the bullshit punk attitude that “complexity sucks, man.” The crowd, while not quite sell-out size, was very large and really into it, and that helped as well – it was hard to not get caught up in their enthusiasm. So much so that at some point I decided I should at least take a crappy picture with my cellphone, which is what you get up top. Yikes.
Oh man. Fuck. Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd, has passed at 60.
From the Associated Press:
Syd Barrett, the troubled genius who co-founded Pink Floyd but spent his last years in reclusive anonymity, has died, a spokeswoman for the band said Tuesday. He was 60.
The spokeswoman — who declined to give her name until the band made an official announcement — confirmed media reports that he had died. She said Barrett died several days ago, but she did not disclose the cause of death.
Barrett co-founded Pink Floyd with fellow Cambridge student Roger Waters in 1965 and wrote many of the band’s early songs.
He got the name of the band from two old blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Pink Floyd’s jazz-infused rock made them darlings of the London psychedelic scene. It was the first British group to do light shows in concert and its music and style was weird even for that era.
The 1967 album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” — largely written by Barrett — was a commercial and critical hit. The group, with additional band members Nick Mason and Richard Wright, came to be known as England’s premier acid rockers.
But the band did a turn for the worse when Barrett became mentally unstable from the pressures of drugs and fame and had to leave the band in 1968 — five years before Pink Floyd’s most popular album, “Dark Side of the Moon.”
Barrett spent much of the rest of his life living quietly in his hometown of Cambridge.
Guitarist David Gilmour, another Cambridge student, took Barrett’s place.
A small, private funeral would be held, the spokeswoman said.
One of the joys in life is when what appears to be a complete clusterfuck, a SNAFU of the highest order, actually turns out okay. It’s even more joyous when it turns out better than okay, even a good fucking time. That’s what happened last Saturday at the Home Blitz/Guitar Trips/Greyskull/Horsespirits Penetrate/Watersports show in the back room/restaurant area of some random bodega on Broadway deep in the heart of Bushwick. Organized by my man Russ Waterhouse of Watersports and Blues Control, this was originally was supposed to go down at Micheline’s, a Caribbean restaurant down the block. Needless to say, they double-booked and the combined weird noise/fashion show didn’t go down (though that would’ve been an interesting clusterfuck, too).
Watersports began the show with their characteristic lo-fi new age murk, and all I can say is I continue to be impressed with the way Russ and Lea play together, both in Watersports and their more “rock” project Blues Control. What they do is pretty much what I want to hear, all the time. The two new songs they played (and I assume that they’re playing on their current tour through the South, check the links for dates) were sweet meditative faux-nature awesomeness. As I’ve written elsewhere, you definitely need to hear it.
The next two bands, Horsespirits Penetrate and Greyskull, were more akin to that noise thing that ‘the kids’ do these days, except about 90% more entertaining and fun than most anything I’ve seen lately. Maybe it’s ’cause these guys are from Western Mass., which seems to be a hotbed for this stuff (Byron?). Or maybe it’s just ’cause they were good, committed to non-craft craftiness. I dunno.
The pleasant surprise of the evening was Guitar Trips, who I had no idea about whatsoever. Fantastic psychedelic guitar-drums duo jams providing lots of heavy drone. Kind of like when you rub your eyes and various lights keep rolling through your field of vision. Even with the abruptness of some of the transitions, this was a-rollin’ and chooglin’. I expect we’ll hear more from these dudes.
The headliner of the evening was New Jersey’s own Home Blitz, playing their second-ever show hot off the heels of their debut 7″. Nervousness abounded, and the 15-or-so takes on the first song probably didn’t help much, but I actually thought it was a rockin’ good time. Apparently some of the noisier dudes were rollin’ eyes, but I liked it. And fuck it, none of us would be here without Half Japanese, so I’m cool with that. All in all, considering none of this might’ve come off at all, that’s fine with me.
From the Monterey County Herald:
Allan Kaprow, an artist who in the 1950s pioneered an unrehearsed, nonverbal form of theater called a ”happening” that was intended to shatter the boundary between art and life, has died. He was 78.
Kaprow, who taught for years at the University of California-San Diego, died Wednesday at his home in Encinitas. He had been ill for some time and died of natural causes, said friend Tamara Bloomberg.
Kaprow’s happenings took place in real-life settings and involved unrelated or bizarre scenes acted out by willing participants. The audience was made up of people who happened to be there.
Born August 23, 1927, in Atlantic City, N.J., Kaprow called himself an ”un-artist.” He was primarily a painter and sculptor working with found objects.
