A New Venture

And now for something completely different...



I've actually been contemplating putting together a philosophy tinged podcast which would kind of be like an audio version of James Burke's Connections, only infinitely more trivial.

Oh My, I'm Hi-Fi

As you may or may not know, I love music and am something of an accumulator. Back in the day I boasted over 600 vinyl albums, of which I still can lay hold of about 300 or so. I've lost count of the CD's I own, though it is somewhere north of 1500. There is nothing record breaking about those numbers, but it is fair to say I'm ankle deep in music at the best (or worst, depending upon your point of view) of times. 

However, like a lot of people, I drifted away from my stereo. My first set up I got as a Christmas present in 1982 and was comprised of a receiver (35w per channel), a turntable, a cassette deck, and two 3-way speakers. I played the ever living crap put of it. In 1987 I added a $99 Sharp CD player (the DX-600) with money earned from my first real job. 

Over time the cassette player died, was replaced by a newer model which also died, and was replaced by a CD burning deck which took over full time CD playing duties after the DX-600 finally spun its last. (The player drawer on the old Sharp broke down, but I got around that by drilling a hole in the top of the unit which allowed me to use a pen or pencil to pop open the drawer. That's just what you do when you are a broke-ass grad student.) Oh, at some point there was a 5-disc CD player that held sway briefly until I decided I really didn't like it very much and sold it. While all this was going on my original turntable finally succumbed sometime in the late 1990's. As I wasn't playing much vinyl I didn't attempt to replace it.

Next to go was the venerable MCS receiver which died in 2002 after twenty years of loyal service. Luckily I was able to inherit a different model MCS receiver (an MCS 3246 @ 45w per channel) that my parents had stopped using sometime in the early 1990's and was just collecting dust in their basement, so that was a bit of a wash. Shortly after this the CD burner unceremoniously died on me, leaving me to play my CDs on whatever DVD player I happened to be using. 

Eventually, I even had to retire the 3-way MCS speakers, which was a bit of a shame as they were actually pretty nice sounding, but years of wear and tear had taken a toll. Anyway, they didn't really work in the space I had once the wife and I bought our current town home in 2006. They now reside in a closet waiting for the day I have more room to work with and the money to invest in refurbishing them.

The net effect of these changes has been to slowly degrade my ability to even claim to have a dedicated stereo system. 

That is going to change. Actually, it already has begun to change. It really started with the speakers I chose to replace the large 3-ways back in 2011. I invested in a pair of Bose 201 Series V bookshelf speakers and they now reside on top of the armoire that presently houses our A/V equipment. In one sense the Bose really cannot reproduce the sound of the larger speakers, but they work great in my space. I'm sure I could have spent twice the amount for true audiophile level speakers, but I gotta believe the improvement wouldn't have been worth the extra cash to my ears.  

Yesterday, I added the newest member of my newly revitalized stereo system as the Onkyo C-7030 arrived. This is a single disc dedicated CD player and it is light years better than the various DVD players I'd been using for years now. It is also the first dedicated single disc player I've purchased since 1987. (I just say that to make myself feel old.)

Did I mention it looks awesome?

From here my path forward seems pretty clear. Sometime in the next year I will purchase a new turntable and a piece of furniture to house my entire honest-to-goodness stereo system. 

Of course, that won't be the end of it. The 80's vintage MCS receiver is fine for what it is, but I may decide to upgrade from the old hand-me-down. But that is all the future. For the present I'm enjoying the sounds again.

Adolph Green

Will Owsley R.I.P.

This sucks:

Will Owsley, the Middle Tennessee-based singer, songwriter, engineer and guitarist known professionally as Owsley, died April 30 of an apparent suicide.

Mr. Owsley was Amy Grant’s touring guitarist for 16 years, and his own music veered into edgier, power-pop terrains. He was nominated for a Grammy award for his engineering work on 1999 solo debut album Owsley, released through Giant Records....

Giant Records dissolved soon after Owsley’s release, and Mr. Owsley set about writing and recording independent follow-up The Hard Way. He constructed the album in his home studio, and it won positive reviews.

This is a damn shame. Both Owlsey and The Hard Way are fine power pop albums.

Evidently he leaves behind a wife and two children.

Sad news.

Desert Island Here I Come?

Joe Carter over at First Thoughts makes note of the Vatican's picks for the Top 10 Pop/Rock albums of all-time: Geezer Rock-Listening Baby Boomers Take Over Vatican Newspaper

Did Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski get a job at L’ Osservatore Romano? That seems to be the only explanation for the Holy See’s official newspaper including these works on their list of top ten rock and pop albums of all time:

The Beatles’ “Revolver”
Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of The Moon”
Oasis’ “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
U2’s “Achtung Baby”
Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”
Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly”
Carlos Santana’s “Supernatural”
Paul Simon’s “Graceland”
David Crosby’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name.”

According to the WSJ, the rock critics at L’ Osservatore claim the albums are perfect listening material for anyone who finds himself marooned on a desert island. This could not be more wrong. Unless you’re stranded on a island with a bunch of hippies, there is no way you want to listen to Pink Floyd, Donald Fagen, and David Crosby. (As a matter of fact, if you’re stranded on an island with hippies those are also the last albums you’d ever want to listen to.)

Unlike Joe, I believe they at least got "Revolver" right, but the rest of the picks have to go.

Here is my comment on what are the other nine albums should be:

1. The Kinks – Singles Collection: OK, maybe I’m cheating here, but this compilation of early Kinks’ singles thru to “Apeman” can’t be beat. “Sunny Afternoon” echoes trad jazz but no one at the time seemed to notice. Brilliant.

2. Simon & Garfunkel – Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme: Simply buries Simon’s “Graceland.” Garfunkel’s voice on “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her” is one of the prettiest things ever found on a pop record.

3. Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend: Were there any justice in the record business (or fewer record executives in the record business) this guitar driven power pop jam fest would have spawned the great music movement of the 1990’s. Sadly, that distinction went to Nirvana. Granted, a subtext here is Sweet’s mistrust of organized religion (e.g. “Divine Intervention” “Evangeline” and “Holy War”) but there isn’t as much rancor as you might expect.

4. The Alan Parsons Project – The Turn of a Friendly Card: Too prog for a lot of pop lovers, too poppy for a lot of prog purists, this album (best known for the two singles “Time” and “Games People Play”) is seriously underrated. The second side title track suite is gorgeous symphonic rock. That it examines the human cost of gambling and addiction makes it unusual, to say the least.

5. Jellyfish – Spilt Milk: Go ahead and roll your eyes if you must…I know this is a record that lots of folks claim as a “influence” and, normally, that would be enough to frighten me away, but this “throw everything including the kitchen sink production” is a sonic work of art. Yes, I realize there is a song about a penis here, but I just said it was “art” not “high art”. The track “New Mistake” is sublime.

6. Graham Parker – Heat Treatment: “Squeezing out Sparks” usually gets mentioned, and it’s raw power is impressive, but it is Parker’s blast of rocking R&B that I need to have with me. “Fool’s Gold” is the sort of anthem the world needs more of at all times.

7. Crowded House – Woodface: The finest thing ever to come from the Kiwi brothers Finn. The more patriotic among us may take exception to the song “Chocolate Cake” but maybe we do live up to it sometimes. As for the rest of the album, it is as smooth a piece of pop as you could want to hear. “Weather With You” sparkles from beginning to end.

8. They Might Be Giants – Apollo 18: Even among those who love TMBG, choosing between the records is a bit of a fool’s errand. They are so varied in their makeups that reactions will be even more subjective than normal. Still, this is a cornucopia of tunes, hummable, slightly smart, slightly stupid, and yet substantive. I’ve no idea how they manage it. “Mammal” and “See the Constellation” always make me smile.

9. Al Stewart – Between the Wars: For my money, easily the finest thing Mr. Stewart has ever done. Literate pop-folk with a good ear for the jazz rhythms of the age, and if it is a little sonically jarring it mimics the recordings of the 20’s while updating them. A list of the stand out tracks would simply be a listing of every track on the album, but I’ll mention “Last Train to Munich” and “Laughing into 1939″. Wow.

Now, as long as I get washed up on shore with a well stocked bar, I'm ready for that desert island.

Another Piece Of My Childhood Gone

Got this from my Facebook page:

We are very sad to have to tell you that Eric Woolfson passed away in the early hours of this morning after a long and brave battle with cancer. He very much enjoyed seeing all your kind comments and posts on this Facebook page and his family wanted to thank you for your appreciation of his work.

Online I found this:

Glasgow-born songwriter and musician Eric Woolfson, one of the key figures in The Alan Parsons Project, has died.

He recorded a string of albums with record producer Alan Parsons, as well as writing his own musicals and writing and producing songs for other artists.

Woolfson, 64, had been battling cancer and died in London on Tuesday night, his friend Deborah Owen said.

This saddens me greatly. I always loved the music of the Alan Parsons Project, music written largely by Eric Woolfson. In a sense I always felt they "belonged" to me in a way one couldn't say about the Beatles, for instance, who belonged to damn near everybody.

Damn.

I'll write more about this later. Enjoy Eric's writing and singing below.



Eric Woolfson (1945-2009) Rest in Peace.

Why Isn't Chris Von Sneidern Famous?

If that isn't a question you have ever asked yourself, don't worry, you are not alone. But for those of us "in the know," it is a bit of a puzzle. Luckily, there is a new documentary aimed at solving the conundrum.



All I can say is, if there ever came a time that someone wanted to question my life and ask what it has all added up to, it would be damn nice to have someone like Wes Stace saying nice things about me.

This Has To Be Exaggeration, Right?

Rock band Yes to tour with replacement singer

The classic rock band Yes, which was forced to cancel their 40th anniversary tour this year due to the illness of its lead singer, has decided to relaunch the tour with an "understudy" -- a Yes tribute band singer.

Benoit David, who sings in several Yes tribute bands in Montreal, will replace Jon Anderson on the "In the Present" tour, which kicks of Nov. 4 in Ontario, Canada, according to bassist Chris Squire.

There are "several" Yes tribute bands in Montreal alone? I know it gets cold up there, but there has to be something else to do.

The Trouble With Socialist Preening In The Art World

Joe Queenan has some choice words for "new" classical music: Admit it, you're as bored as I am

During a radio interview between acts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a famous singer recently said she could not understand why audiences were so reluctant to listen to new music, given that they were more than ready to attend sporting events whose outcome was uncertain. It was a daft analogy. Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public's lack of imagination. If they don't know in advance whether Nadal or Federer is going to win, but still love Wimbledon, why don't they enjoy it when an enraged percussionist plays a series of brutal, fragmented chords on his electric marimba? What's wrong with them?

The reason the sports analogy fails is because when Spain plays Germany, everyone knows that the game will be played with one ball, not eight; and that the final score will be 1-0 or 3-2 or even 8-1 - but definitely not 1,600,758 to Arf-Arf the Chalet Ate My Banana. The public may not know in advance what the score will be, but it at least understands the rules of the game.

I have to say that Queenan is almost certainly right here. I grew up in St. Louis when Leonard Slatkin was the director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and Slatkin enjoyed putting a smattering of work by new composers (or at least 20th Century composers) in many of his programs. They ranged from the unmemorable to the truly horrific. This was not because they offended my bourgeois sensibilities (as the preeners would always have it,) but because they offended my sense of beauty and every other standard by which I could discern "good" music.

Of course, these new academic composers are not interested in "good" music. They are interested in force feeding people steaming piles of crapola and brainwashing people into smiling and saying that they like it. This proves they are real "artists", you see, who aren't tied down by "the man" to things like melody and harmony.

What silly nonsense.

Queenan continues:

In March I saw Harrison Birtwistle's new opera, The Minotaur, at Covent Garden. I entered the concert hall with the same excitement I always have: prepared to be blown out of the room. This did not happen. The Minotaur, Frankenstein with a tauromatic twist, is harsh and ugly and monotonous and generically apocalyptic. Birtwistleites might dismiss me as a Luddite who despises new music, but the truth is, I find nothing new in The Minotaur's dreary, brutish score; it's the same funereal caterwauling that bourgeoisie-loathing composers have been churning out since the 1930s. To me, there is little difference between Birtwistle, now in his 70s, and Eric Clapton, now in his 60s. These are old men doing the same music in their dotage that they used to do as kids.

Earlier this year, I attended a concert at Carnegie Hall by the National Symphony under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. Slatkin is a canny, industrious conductor and a champion of American music. His philosophy seems to be that if Americans do not support living composers, American composers will cease to exist - though if the best America can do is John Corigliano and Philip Glass and the dozens of academics who give each other awards for music nobody likes, this might not be such a bad thing. Slatkin's programme consisted of three gimmicky pieces: Liszt's flamboyant Second Piano Concert, Ravel's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition; and an ambitious new work by a young American named Mason Bates. This last piece, entitled Liquid Interface, examined "the phenomenon of water in its variety of forms", something Ravel and Mussorgsky never got around to. It featured wind machines and bongos and an electric drum pad and a laptop and a gigantic orchestra. It was bloated but thoroughly harmless, and the audience responded warmly; nothing thrills a classical music crowd more than a new piece of music that doesn't make them physically ill. But the concert underscored the problem in including new work on the same programme as the old chestnuts: it is not just asking striplings to compete with titans; it is asking obscure, academically trained liquid interfacers to compete with titans at the top of their game. As the saying goes: you don't send a boy to do Franz Liszt's job.

That Queenan can still fork over the money to purchase tickets for such "events" says alot about his dedication to the art form. It also speaks to a reservoir of goodwill I have largely lost. Last fall I saw a program at the Minnesota Orchestra, which contained a modern piece built largely upon percussion instruments. It was by turns dull and grating, and, most gallingly, totally out of character with the rest of the program. [Adding: My wife informs me the piece was "Haunted Landscape" by George Crumb.] It was as if concert goers were required to do "penance" for the sin of liking music that is beautiful. It is an attitude I'm beginning to resent. I don't need to listen to atonal discordant noise...and that isn't what I pay money to hear. To be forced to listen to it so someone can prove what an ideological bad-ass they are just makes it worse.

I once saw a program in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Like a lot of small city orchestras, this program was designed more to suit the sensibilities of the listeners than anything else. It was the furthest thing from "adventurous" you would be liable to find...with one exception. Along with the old classical war horses they also played selections by the composer Raymond Scott, known best for his song "Powerhouse" which was a staple of Warner Brothers cartoons (usually scenes with assembly lines in them.) It was fascinating to hear 20th century music, some of which I knew in a different context, that displayed such energy...and yet was completely devoid of pretension. It wasn't that the music didn't have an ideological dimension ("Powerhouse" obviously does the same way Chaplin's film Modern Times does), but Scott doesn't preen. The subject matter is sociological, not autobiographical. It says "Look at the world we live in," rather than "Am I bugging you?"

It is a shame becuase I would love to hear something both new and beautiful. I certainly will not stand for being told its wrong for me to want both.

"Hey, That's My Handiwork!"

I've never come across my influence in a published work...until this very morning. I'm reading a biography of singer songwriter Al Stewart by Neville Judd. I'm sitting on my couch drinking my morning tea and reading away when I get to page 213 and I come across a lengthy quote from Al talking about an earlier lyric to his hit song "Year Of The Cat."

As I read it I started to think, "Hmmm...this sounds familiar." And, then it dawned on me. I heard Al makes these comments before. I don't mean I've heard Al tell the story of song before, I mean I heard this particular telling of the story.

Alright, so what is my contribution here? Well, back in 1988 I taped an interview with Al off of a local radio station in St. Louis (WMRY), where this quote originated. Several years later I made a transcript of that interview and posted it on the Al Stewart Mailing List (an email list for all of us geeky Al Stewart fans.) Obviously, Neville Judd must have come across my posting and filed it away amongst his other research material. I cannot think of another explanation of how such an obscure interview for a long defunct radio station could have made it into this book. It had to be my transcript.

It makes me wonder if, when I read further, I will see Al's musings from that day about french onion soup.

It's Lighten Up Time

Beatles Sue to Block 1962 Tapes' Release

Lawyers for the Beatles sued Friday to prevent the distribution of unreleased recordings purportedly made during Ringo Starr's first performance with the group in 1962.

The dispute between Apple Corps Ltd., the London company formed by the Beatles that helps guard their legacy, and Fuego Entertainment Inc. of Miami Lakes stems from recordings the Fab Four apparently made during a performance at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany.

Eight unreleased tracks are said to be among the recordings, including Paul McCartney singing Hank Williams' "Lovesick Blues" and McCartney and John Lennon singing "Ask Me Why."

...

Fuego Entertainment says the recordings were legally made. "Don't claim that these were just bootlegged," said Fuego president Hugo Cancio. "It's not like today, that you just go in with a phone or a blackberry and you record."

The lawsuit contends that the recordings are of poor quality and that circulating them "dilutes and tarnishes the extraordinarily valuable image associated with the Beatles."

Uh, really?? What a stupid argument. So, I'm supposed to believe that someone is going to hear these tapes and say "Oh, my God! Revolver and Abbey Road must actually suck!"

And I don't see how The Beatles could make this argument when they themselves released tracks on the first Anthology disc which could only charitably be called low-fi. ("In Spite Of All The Danger" anyone?)

Give the fans a break. Most of them won't want to buy the thing in the first place.