(Roughly) Daily

Posts Tagged ‘rock’

“In comics, we’re all weird together”*…

 

Your correspondent is heading out into the middle of the Pacific for about 10 days, so (Roughly) Daily will be on hiatus.  Regular service should resume on or around April 14…

To keep readers occupied in the meantime, via the ever-illuminating Warren Ellis, “this extremely 1998 webcomics index page.”

* G. Willow Wilson

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As we dig for treasure (of which, there’s plenty), we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that CBS Records UK began distributing the eponymously-titled first album from The Clash.  (It was officially released four days later.)  Featuring such anthems as “White Riot,” “Police & Thieves,” and “London’s Burning,” it is widely regarded as one of the greatest punk recordings of all time, and ranks high on essentially every “best album” list.

Deeming the material “not radio friendly,” CBS in the US refused to release it until 1979 (on their Epic label, but even then dropped some of the more virulent songs).  Meantime, Americans bought over 100,000 imported copies of “The Clash”, making it the best-selling import album of all time in the U.S.

Cover of the UK release

source

 

Written by LW

April 4, 2018 at 1:01 am

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“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little”*…

 

When I published Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think in February 2012, I included about 80 charts in the back of the book showing very strong evidence that the world is getting better. Over the last five years, this trend has continued and accelerated.

This page includes charts and graphs that you can share with friends and family to change their mindset. We truly are living in the most exciting time to be alive…

In “answer” to yesterday’s excursion into dystopia, a collection of evidence from Peter Diamandis that things are on the upswing: “Evidence of Abundance.”

* Franklin D. Roosevelt

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As we look on the bright side, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Jimi Hendrix played Philharmonic Hall in New York.  The concert, “An Electronic Thanksgiving,” was originally planned for Carnegie Hall, but the managers there got cold feet, fearful of a rowdy audience.  Promoter Ron Delsener scrambled:

I had to convince Louise Homer, who was the Director of Philharmonic Hall,
that I had to ‘marry’ Rock and Roll to classical music (eclectic music). I then moved the event to Philharmonic Hall… I had to do everything to convince them. I had to hire The New York Brass Quintet and a harpsichord virtuoso (therefore, an eclectic evening). Both would play during the first half of the program. They would be joined by one or two of Jimi’s musicians on several selections.

I informed Michael Jeffery, as well as the attorney, Stevens Weiss, that Noel and/or Mitch must play during the first half of the program for several numbers with a classical group. Naturally, the show went on sale, sold out, and no one wanted to play the first half of the program with the classical musicians.

I begged Mitch Mitchell to please sit in and ‘fake it’ as best as he could, which he did much to the delight of the audience. To Mitch, it was a ‘goof,’ to me it was a lifesaver. To the ushers at Philharmonic Hall, it was a frightening experience because everyone stood in front of their seats for the entire show and clogged all the aisles leading to the stage. [source]

 

Written by LW

November 28, 2017 at 1:01 am

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“All that is solid melts into air”*…

 

The end of ‘The End of History’ arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter Pomerantsev described in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, in the Russia of the 2000s, distinguishing between truth and lies became passé. In this world of enlightened, postmodern people, ‘everything is PR’.

Reality television has rendered obsolete the boundary between the fictional and the real. Truth is a constraint that has been overcome; ‘post-truth’ has been declared ‘word of the year.’ In Washington, the White House shamelessly defends its ‘alternative facts.’ At the beginning, American journalists were taken off-guard: they had been trained to confirm individual pieces of information, not to confront a brazen untethering from empirical reality. The New Yorker captured the desperation with a satire about the fact-checker who passed out from exhaustion after the Republican debate. He had to be hospitalized; apparently no one replaced him…

Postmodernism was conceived largely by the Left as a safeguard against totalizing ideologies. Yet today, it has been appropriated on behalf of an encroaching neo-totalitarianism of the Right. Is French literary theory to blame? And can a philosophy of dissent developed in communist eastern Europe offer an antidote?…

(Some of) the ironic roots of the situation that we’re in: “A pre-history of post-truth, East and West.”

* Karl Marx

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As we consult the Wayback Machine, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955, at J & M Studio in New Orleans, that Richard Wayne Penniman– better known as Little Richard– recorded the song (that he co-wrote with Dorothy LaBostrie) that became his first hit: “Tutti Frutti.”

A wop bop alu bop, a wop bam boom!

 

Written by LW

September 14, 2017 at 1:01 am

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“Why would heavy metal ever go away?”*…

 

Metalheads all the world over can agree on one thing: its culture, just like its music, eschews pretense. Nowhere is this better reflected than in Dumisani Matiha, lead singer and rhythm guitarist of Metal Orizon, one of Botswana’s heaviest outfits.

On an unseasonably warm afternoon, the 41-year-old is taking time out of his day job as a farmer to explain what distinguishes this metal movement from other scenes spread out across the globe.

“We see ourselves as warriors and poets,” says Dumisani. “This is a calling. We use metal to speak to our social conditions as Africans: the struggles, the climate we operate in… It might be cheesy to you but, to us, metal is just another way of speaking about romance. To us, love is hardcore, yo!”…

Botswana is 70 per cent desert and most of its metalheads dress in old-school biker gear – made even heavier with studs, chains and all kinds of trinkets – topped off with leather cowboy hats. They are a throwback to a purer time, an era when no heavy metal fan would have dreamed of Metallica and Lou Reed making an album together, let alone calling it Lulu.

Musically speaking, the metal scene in Botswana is neither heavy nor metal. It’s a combination that sounds impossible when articulated: a mix of African hard riddims, mid-70s Manchester punk, cacophonous dub, psychedelic swamp music, free-wheelin’ progjazz and some sped-up Ohio funk thrown in for good measure…

Far beyond driven: “The hell bangers of Botswana’s underground metal scene.”

* Scott Ian (founding member and lyricist of Anthrax)

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As we celebrate the shred, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that the Beatles said “thank you, and goodnight” for the last time– at the end of their last public concert, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. (This is, of course, not counting the 1969 impromptu performance on the roof of Apple Records headquarters in London — the Beatles’ last public appearance together.)

source

Written by LW

August 29, 2017 at 1:01 am

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“Acting is all about big hair and funny props… All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it.”*…

 

They are sketched out, improvised, or placed in scenes by the fate of logic, existing to serve the performances or action around them. But while iconic movie props make us laugh, gasp, scream, and/or sit in absolute silence, they rarely start iconic; as a property master will tell you, the best on-screen objects go unnoticed, silently winning you over with truth.

Well, call us obsessives, but we couldn’t help but notice. At a time in history when details go painfully overlooked, we slid movie history under a microscope to honor the simple joy of a perfect prop. And knowing every design choice big or small has an origin story, a past that ensured the movie around it would stick around for the future, we tracked down the stories of how they were made, from the people who made them.

We defined “prop” like they do on the set of a major motion picture: any object that a character interacts with during the action of a scene. We tried to be strict about it; on this list you won’t find Jason’s mask (costume), the time-traveling DeLorean (vehicle), Genie’s lamp (animated “prop”), or Kermit the Frog (technically puppet, but not, in context) on this list. You will find props that teeter on the edge of rule-breaking and the inevitable exclusion of your personal favorite in-bounds pick (the red violin from The Red Violin was this close). Our investigation saw us come up short on our favorite filmmakers, finding regions with disproportionate amounts of great props — the US loves its stuff — and defining what “iconic” truly means (our verdict: a combination of purpose, ingenuity, and legacy)…

Take the tour (and argue with the rankings, as surely you will) at: “The 100 greatest props in movie history, and the stories behind them.”

* Harold Ramis

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As we dress the set, we might that it was on this date in 1983 that Prince played a 75-minute benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre at the recently re-branded First Avenue club in Minneapolis.  It was there that the budding pop star debuted many of the Purple Rain album tracks, and recorded the versions of “Purple Rain,” “I Would Die 4 U,” and “Baby I’m A Star” heard in the film and soundtrack.

Screen shot taken from video of Prince and the Revolution’s debut performance of Purple Rain, August 3, 1983

The night also included performances from the company, including a piece choreographed to Prince’s “DMSR.”

More on this extraordinary evening, including a set list, here.

 

Written by LW

August 3, 2017 at 1:01 am

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“What do you do when your kid can only count to four? Buy him a drum kit and call him gifted!”*…

 

It may be that familiarity breeds contempt, and if that’s so, we should all be very glad of the wealth of excellent documentaries correcting the monolithic commercial story of punk, which goes something like this: The Sex Pistols and The Clash explode into the world in 1977 purveying anarchy and revolution and designer BDSM gear, and the status quo freaks out, then discovers many savvy marketing opportunities and here we are at our local punk boutique before the punk arena show at Corporation Stadium.

That’s a boring story, mostly because all the most interesting parts, and weirdest, most violent, gross-out, angry, experimental, queer, black, radical, feminist, etc. parts get left out, along with nearly all the best bands. Even if we date punk from the early seventies in New York with Patti Smith and the Ramones, we’re missing key progenitors from the 60s, from Detroit, Germany, Tacoma, Washington…

From the “liner notes” to a extraordinary Spotify playlist, “The Evolution of Punk in Chronological Order.” More background (on Open Culture), along with a link to download the Spotify app lest one need to, at: “The History of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016.”

[TotH to Brad DeGraf]

* Frank Edwin Wright III (Tré Cool, Green Day)

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As we make three chords work, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that The KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival opened on Mt. Tam in Marin County, California, featuring Canned Heat, Dionne Warwick, Every Mother’s Son, P. F. Sloan, The Seeds, Blues Magoos, Country Joe and the Fish, Captain Beefheart, The Byrds (with Hugh Masekela on trumpet), Tim Hardin, The Grass Roots,  The 5th Dimension, Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors (in their first major appearance, contemporaneous with the rise of their first hit, “Light My Fire”), among many others.  At least 36,000 people attended the two-day concert and fair– the first of a series of San Francisco area cultural events known as “the Summer of Love.”  Admission to the festival was $2.00 and all proceeds were donated to the nearby Hunters Point Child Care Center in San Francisco.

While the (much more completely documented) Monterey International Pop Festival is widely remembered as the seminal event of that epochal summer, the KFRC Festival took place one week before Monterey and is considered to have been America’s – if not the world’s – first rock festival.

 source

 

Written by LW

June 10, 2017 at 1:01 am

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“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not”*…

 

From the moment Elvis Presley landed, we wanted every piece of him. This turned his old records into vinyl and shellac gold. While the value of discs by other popular mid-century artists such as Cliff Richard and Frank Sinatra dropped as time passed, Elvis’s didn’t. As an omnipresent figure, the prices of the King’s records rose to astronomical levels.

Unearthing an original “That’s All Right” record became a £4,000 lucky strike; a set of five original Sun singles at one time fetched £25,000. This made them a sort of pension for many collectors. They packed items away, hoping one day to exchange them for a caravan in the Dordogne. However, this has all begun to change…

As the King’s fans die of old age, and their collections hit the second-hand market, vintage Elvis records have never been cheaper: “Can’t help falling in price: why Elvis memorabilia is plummeting in value.”

* Stephen King

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As we feel our age, we might recall that it was on this date in 1957 that Chuck Berry recorded “Rock & Roll Music” at the Chess Studios in Chicago.  (Some websites report a recording date of either May 6 or May 21, but Steve Sullivan’s Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings affirms May 15 as the date of record.)

The tune reached number 6 on Billboard‘s R&B Singles chart and number 8 on its Hot 100.  But its impact continued to grow: it was covered by dozens of artists including Bill Haley & His Comets, the Beatles, the Beach Boys (who had a top ten hit with the song in 1976), Dickie Rock and the Miami Showband, REO Speedwagon, Mental As Anything, Humble Pie, Manic Street Preachers and Bryan Adams.  In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Berry’s version number 128 on its list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”; and the song is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.

 

Written by LW

May 15, 2017 at 1:01 am

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