Monthly Archives: March 2018

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Harry Nilsson and John Lennon named this 1974 album Pussy Cats in reaction to the bad press the pair had received while carousing around Los Angeles with the Hollywood Vampires (Keith Moon, Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr et al.). Of course, their contrition just went so far; underneath the table on the front cover were the children’s letter blocks “D” and “S” flanking a rug, spelling D-RUG-S. And the music, in its own way, was as uncompromising as any either artist had ever made.

Both artists had left commercial considerations far behind; Nilsson was fresh (or not so fresh) from the disappointing reaction to A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, while Lennon, deep into his “Lost Weekend” split with Yoko Ono, had just (barely) survived the nightmarish Rock ‘n’ Roll sessions with Phil Spector. Predictably, the Pussy Cats sessions were a revolving party featuring such luminaries as Moon, Starr, and Willie (The Lion) Smith (!) as well as super sidemen Jesse Ed Davis, Danny Kortchmar, and Jim Keltner, playing an ostensibly light-hearted mix of oldies and originals.

But underlying the generally genial proceedings was a thinly-disguised layer of desperation and self-loathing, breaking through on the almost punk rock version of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and the revealing Nilsson originals “Don’t Forget Me” and “All My Life.”

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PHOTOS: BRENDAN O’HARA | The first thing that one comes to understand almost immediately is that Dorothy is a BAND. Sure they take their name from powerhouse vocalist and stunning frontwoman Dorothy Martin, however she and boys—guitarist Nick Maybury, guitarist Leroy Wulfmeier, bassist Eliot Lorango, and drummer Jason Ganberg—are one hell of a rock ‘n’ roll group. (We caught them live—we can attest.)

The second thing? The band loves them some record stores and vinyl. We’ve had a few, let’s say, lukewarm participants in the past join us for a rummage through the crates, but not this bunch. They arrived stoked and ready to roll.

In Washington on the “Freedom Tour” to support the band’s second full-length album 28 Days in the Valley—which arrives in a record store near you on Friday, March 16, 2018—the band carved out an hour for us at DC’s Som Records for a hang and some record shopping. Which promptly ran long.

So, time’s a waistin’—we’re record shopping with Dorothy at Washington, DC’s Som Records!

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Note: The author has reviewed this LP before. But Metal Machine Music is such a rich and constantly rewarding musical experience that it deserves to be reviewed not just once or even twice, but thousands of times. But that is not the reason I’m writing about it again. The truth is that listening to it and writing about it the first time around was such a traumatic experience I completely repressed it, and I didn’t remember my earlier review until I’d finished this one. Enjoy! 

So I was out partying one night with the identical Rumdinger twins Roy and Ray, who nobody could tell apart so if you ran into one of ’em you just called him Roy-Ray to be sure you got it right, and preparatory to getting high they pulled to the side of the Fish and Game Road outside of Littlestown, Pennsylvania and filled the bong with murky ditch water. Then they popped in a battered Redd Foxx 8-track that they’d obviously played to death because Redd sounded like a chittering racoon and you couldn’t (I swear) make out a word he was saying but–and this is the important part–not only did they insist upon playing this inadvertent example of advent garde art, but they guffawed at very precise moments like they COULD UNDERSTAND RACCOON! That or they had the whole album subliminally memorized and were laughing by sheer reflex.

I found it odd, of course, that Roy-Ray, who possessed two of the reddest necks I’ve ever known, would be Redd Foxx fans in the first place, but it’s a funny world and for all I know there are plenty of Klansmen out there who find old Redd a hoot. Hell, they probably play his albums at klaverns and literally piss their robes with laughter.

But I’m going off point. What I want to say is that Roy-Ray, who almost certainly had never heard of the Velvet Underground and wouldn’t have liked them if they had, most likely would have loved Lou Reed’s 1975 double LP Metal Machine Music (The Amine β Ring). They’d have cracked up at all the right parts too. Because anybody who could appreciate the sound of the human voice broken down into sheer unintelligible raccoon jabber would almost certainly have related to Lou’s intimidating and perverse hour-long foray into pure feedback.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Wayne Kramer, the founding guitarist and leader of Detroit’s proto-punk/hard rock band the MC5, will celebrate the landmark anniversary of its incendiary debut album Kick Out the Jams with the 35+ date “Kick Out the Jams: The 50th Anniversary Tour” and a memoir The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities (Da Capo Press). Kramer has put together his wish-list worthy band of fellow travelers, dubbed MC50 — Brother Wayne on guitar along with guitarist Kim Thayil (Soundgarden), drummer Brendan Canty (Fugazi), bassist Dug Pinnick (King’s X), and the afro’d secret weapon frontman, 6-foot-7-inch Marcus Durant (Zen Guerrilla).

The North American tour begins in early September, after several European summer festivals, and culminates with an October 27th concert back where it all began: in Detroit in 1968, where Kick Out the Jams — recently cited by Pitchfork as one of the 50 best albums of the 1960s — was recorded live in front of a raucous home town audience at the Grande Ballroom on Halloween night. The band will announce full dates in the coming weeks, but tickets for The Fillmore Detroit are on sale here now.

“The message of the MC5 has always been the sense of possibilities: a new music, a new politics, a new lifestyle,” Kramer says of revisiting the album. “Today, there is a corrupt regime in power, an endless war thousands of miles away, and uncontrollable violence wracking our country. It’s becoming less and less clear if we’re talking about 1968 or 2018. I’m now compelled to share this music I created with my brothers 50 years ago. My goal is that the audience leaves these concerts fueled by the positive and unifying power of rock music.”

On the memoir, he notes, “I’ve come to accept that we were a dangerous band and that I lived a dangerous life. The music we made at that time represented something that said — we are part of a tribe, we are part of a bigger movement — and apparently it still represents that.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | George Howard is not an author. He is much more than that, and his third and newest book, Everything In Its Right Place is a natural byproduct of George Howard’s ongoing work in Blockchain Technology and his blockchain column in Forbes magazine. George Howard is an Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music and Brown University and holds MBA and JD degrees. His most recent appointment makes Howard the CIO of Los Angeles music rights company, Riptide Music.

Howard’s career has been defined by a passionate drive to leverage technology in order to create dramatic value. He has consistently demonstrated a keen ability to not only discern the technologies that represent opportunity but to also implement them in a manner that maximizes impact and ROI. An artist by nature, a JD/MBA by training, and an entrepreneur, academic, and professor in practice, Mr. Howard has started, run, and advised some of the largest and most significant companies in the world. He is the co-founder of Music Audience Exchange, served as president of Rykodisc, and formerly managed superstar Carly Simon.

Upon recently being made CIO at Riptide music Howard offered, “At this stage in my career, I only get involved with companies that I think have a strong chance of break-out success, and I haven’t been this excited about a company in a long time.”

Via his consulting firm, GHS, Howard has advised a wide range of companies – from the Fortune 500 (Intel, CVS/pharmacy) to the Ivy League (Brown University); as well as non-profits (Easter Seals, Landmark); countless innovative startups; as well as renowned Grammy and Oscar-winning artists, such as Carly Simon and Mark Isham – on creating value around technological change.

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“There’s a record that totally changed my life.”

“This is Sigur Ros album named ( ) released in 2002. The only thing I do not remember is how I heard about this band from Iceland. At that time, they were well known but not like nowadays. It was on Christmas, and there, I remember everything. My brother and I went to the record store. By the way, what a pleasure it was to go to the store and search for hours for some new music. We bought the CD, and the artwork was quite mysterious. We got back home, sat in the living and started to play video games with the music in the background.

After the third track, we literally dropped the joysticks down and were completely upset. I can say I never felt such emotion listening to music. Their music was in complete connection with my feelings and what I wanted to listen to. Pure and ethereal. From this day, we decided to start our very first band called A Red Season Shade and post rock was everything to us.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Limited-Edition Record Store Crawl Vinyl Hits Shelves During Crawls – featuring Alice Cooper, The Notorious B.I.G., and Royal Blood

Audiophiles, record enthusiasts, and music lovers are invited to join Warner Music Group’s third annual series of official Record Store Crawls, happening over the next few months in various cities in the U.S. and—for the very first time—Europe. The first of this year’s Crawls will take place in both New York City and Berlin on Record Store Day, April 21st, while the remainder of the Crawls will take place from May through October.

This year, Record Store Crawl will release exclusive vinyl to coincide with the Crawls. Attendees will be among the first to have access to the limited-edition releases, which will hit shelves at indie retailers across the U.S. during each Crawl. Titles include works by Alice Cooper, The Notorious B.I.G., Royal Blood, Dio, INXS, SYML, and more.

Participants will be escorted by bus to some of each city’s best record stores, with performances from various artists along the way. Tickets can be purchased at recordstorecrawl.com.

Record Store Crawl participants will enjoy: A seat on the Record Store Crawl bus, An exclusive live performance, Food and beverages, A gift bag including a mystery vinyl LP and other limited-edition gifts, Access to Record Store Crawl exclusive vinyl titles, Discounts at participating records stores, Various other giveaways. (The full Record Store Crawl itinerary will be revealed the week of each crawl.)

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Save the Date: Making Vinyl is back again in Detroit!

Making Vinyl 2017 welcomed 300 professionals engaged in some aspect of vinyl record manufacturing and from all over the world, to the debut event conceived to celebrate the industry’s global rebirth. “This year will be bigger and better with industry leaders returning to Detroit for what is expected to be a much more colorful program introducing everything the industry has learned over the last year with two days of power-packed programming and networking.”

Connect with 300+ | Join the largest gathering of record professionals, from more than 18 different countries, as they showcase their expertise and newest products and services.

Making Vinyl Awards | Packaging plays a large role of why vinyl has made a substantial comeback over the past decade, and the Making Vinyl Awards will recognize the state of the art in album cover design and construction.

Conference & Workshops | Now enlarged to encompass more areas of the process from mastering, galvanic and pressing. Explore the areas of production being revolutionized by current technologies. Quality control indicators to build consumer confidence and sustain growth in vinyl. E-commerce and building sustainable bridges from label to retail.

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When it comes to Seventies power pop, you tend to be either a Raspberries person or a Big Star person. Me, I’ve always been a Raspberries guy, if only because they were about as subtle as a brick. Now Big Star, they had subtlety and class, but then again they were so subtle and classy hardly anybody heard of ‘em until they were long gone. Say what you will about the Raspberries–you could hear their songs on your car radio.

And as a male adolescent of the time I could actually relate to the Raspberries in a way that I probably wouldn’t have related to the heartbreaking nostalgia of “September Gurls” or “Thirteen” because I was too young to be nostalgic and all I wanted to do was go all the way, which was just about the only thing Eric Carmen sang about. He was the Dante Alighieri of Teenage Lust and as such gave voice to every shrieking hormone in my adolescent zit suit.

Musically, the Raspberries succeeded on a hybrid sound that was equal parts The Beatles, The Who, and The Beach Boys, with a wee pinch of The Faces thrown in for flavoring. Eric Carmen was a clever synthesist and even better thief with grand ambitions, and the epic sweep of his songs is a million miles away from the more nuanced power pop of Alex Chilton and Company. The Raspberries may have been from Cleveland but they were a peek into a rock future that would be dominated by the overblown sonic likes of Boston, and I’m talking about the band, not the town.

Eric, who suffered from delusions of grandeur for sure, aimed for the fences every time out, and he struck out a lot. But when he connected the result was power pop greatness, and his biggest homers can be found on Raspberries’ Best Featuring Eric Carmen (his hubris is right there in the LP’s title). He didn’t hit that many home runs, it’s true, but that’s one of the best things about this particular album. Some best-of compilations hit the skids cuz the people who put ‘em out pad ‘em with too much weak material, but that isn’t the case with this bare bones, 10-song 1976 best-of from a great band that was so much dust in the wind by the time it came out.

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Comprised of Peter Gulch, Tom Gulch, and Dave Lunt, Philadelphia’s electronic specialists The Nightcrawlers existed throughout the ’80s and released three albums. However, the new retrospective collection The Biophonic Boombox Recordings taps into the group’s considerable cassette catalog, which grew to over 35 entries. Deeply impacted by German kosmische and emboldened by their own city’s street-level support for edgy, avant-garde art, the results offer a celestial trip of unusual potency; the set is out now on 2LP, 2CD, and digital through Anthology Recordings.

In his notes for this set, D. Strauss (who also curated and produced the album) offers up substantial info and insights into the lifespan of this unsung outfit, in particular highlighting the impact of avant-garde classical (Lunt professing love for Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage), Brian Eno and the Krautrock-affiliated Berliner Schule (which included Cluster, Klaus Schulze, and Tangerine Dream), but one observation from Peter Gulch stuck out; that if the electronic material he and his future bandmates (and local associates) loved wasn’t forthcoming, they’d just make their own.

For musicians who came of age during the 1970s, this is a familiar scenario. Having been given a taste of life-sustaining but finite stuff, there was a need to fill the void, and the only remedy was to do it themselves, a circumstance interweaving quite nicely with how avant-garde art thrived in a city with a crumbling economy; it was a place Strauss describes as “weird, dangerous and beautiful.”

This background regularly gets attached to the punk of late ’70s-early ’80s New York City, but The Nightcrawlers lack a sense of surliness and desperation; instead, they are depicted as three well-adjusted guys, with Peter working as a chemist and his brother an Air Force vet who paid the bills as a postman. Although the younger Lunt was keen to tour, due to the settled lifestyles of his counterparts (along with the formidable task of hauling a massive amount of electronic equipment), that never happened.

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