Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.

 
Emptying Out The Bookmarks #9

The Alphabet Synthesis Machine

the description from the site explains it better than I can...

"The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an interactive online artwork which allows one to create and evolve the possible writing systems of one's own imaginary civilizations. The abstract alphabets produced by the Machine can be downloaded as PC-format TrueType fonts, and are entered into a comprehensive archive of user creations. The products of the Machine probe the liminal territories between familiarity and chaos, language and gesture. ."

Good for budding sci-fi authors, or those looking to exercise the other half of their brains.

posted by tofu at 11:52 PM

 
a snippet from the .microsound list...

"...[the recording] industry is ALL about driving demand through spectacle and fetishization
(desire)...the CDs they sell are merely widgets to shift in order to make
money...in the throes of its current collapse they are mining the past 25
years of music for fragments of melody/chord changes and repackaging it to
kids growing up listening to their parents "classic rock" records...this
subtle formula of subliminal "re-familiarization" or nostalgia is how they
are making most of their money today"

and the reply...

"that's got to be the best review of The Strokes' album that I've ever read."
posted by tofu at 2:08 PM

 
Emptying Out The Bookmarks #8

The S.N.I.T.C.H. Report

Devastating satire or not? The "Terrorist Test" particularly frightened me, as apparently I'm a big risk to national security. The T-Shirts poses are wonderfully styled, especially the two young lasses at the bottom right of the page.



posted by tofu at 10:58 PM

 
Snooze Manifesto
Until this year my two older kids had gone to school in their mother’s town, about 70 miles away. I got them on weekends. This year we made a change: my daughter is a senior so it only made sense for her to finish up over there, but my 14-year-old son came over here to start high school. It has been great to have him around during the week, to help him with homework (not much actually, he’s
been very motivated and diligent - he’s already better at math and science than I ever was, anyway), to share the cocoon of a regular schedule, our clocks synchronized.

And that’s the problem: no matter how hard he tries, he just can’t get enough sleep during the week with his schedule. Normally we get up at 6:30AM to be ready by 7:30 for me to get him to school by 7:50. According to studies, teenagers need more sleep than anyone other than infants - 9 hours a night to support their freaky growth spurts, their exploding hormones, their forced march from childhood to adulthood.

My son needs at least 9, and he knows it, so he is pretty good about TRYING to get to bed by 9:30PM, even though it always feels early to him and there is always something left to do. It feels early to him - even when he is bone tired - for good reason: due to their internal body clocks, teens feel awake until about 11PM.

To top off our problems, for the last two months we have had to get up at 5:30 every other day for him to get to baseball practice by 6:30AM. Thank God that has ended, but now he has baseball every day after school from 3-5. Then he has to do his homework, then practice his bass, or listen to music, or watch a little TV. Somewhere in there he has to take a shower, eat something, talk to friends, groom and admire himself in a fittingly adolescent manner, etc. Mondays he has a bass lesson at 7:30PM. This last Wednesday night he had a school band concert at 7:30 (in a snowstorm, it took almost 1/2 hour to go four miles). This is all very normal, most teens have lot’s of activities. He is very conscientious and trying very hard at everything, his grades are mostly excellent, but he just isn’t getting enough sleep. By the end of the week, he’s a zombie. (I know it’s the same at the other end because when my daughter comes over for the weekend, she collapses and sleeps about 12 hours each night.)

Other kids are worse. The national average is about 7 1/2 hours per night for teens, my son averages about 8 1/2. They all need 9. Picture those sleep deficits piling up leading to car wrecks, nodding off in class, early caffeine use (my daughter lives on coffee, she’s 17), and severe crankiness.

The numbers are obvious: if they don’t get sleepy at night until 11, and if they need 9 hours sleep, then teens should get up at 8AM. School should start at 9AM, last 6 1/2 hours, they get out at 3:30PM. Teachers and administrators hate that late a schedule because they want to get the hell out of there and go eat bonbons or do whatever they do. But school is supposed to be for the kids, not the other way around. Let’s quit depriving our youth of sleep and pretending it’s their fault.
posted by Anonymous at 2:15 PM

 
Cool Tunes
Huge news! We are doing a co-promotion with Cleveland.com, the most active site in Ohio at 22 million impressions (!) per month. In conjunction with the Rock Hall inductions on March 18, we are conducting a reader's poll as to who deserves to get into the Rock Hall. We will play the results on Cool Tunes on March 16. Who do you think should get in? Vote here.

On this week's show: punky festivities, groovy electronica, swingin' jazz, concert previews, and focus on Steve Earle, Richard Thompson, and James Brown. The spring concert season is heating up even as the snow falls. We preview concerts by Unwritten Law, The Calling, Zebrahead, Rev Horton Heat, Agent Orange, Ether Net, Richard Thompson, John Scofield, and Pat Metheny.

Cool Tunes is a radio show in a magazine format Saturday nights at 10pm (Eastern) on WAPS, "The Summit," in Akron, Ohio. I play new music, reissues, and preview shows coming to town each week. Musically it is among the widest-ranging 2 hours in the country: modern rock, punk, electronica, jazz, reggae and ska, roots rock, Americana, blues, world, funk, hip hop, avant garde, etc. - if it's cool I play it. Cool Tunes has been proudly serving humanity since 1990. Listen live here.

One hundred years from now Steve Earle may be included in the same grade of classic American singer/songwriters as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Neil Young. Earle has a fine new single, “Some Dreams,” soon to be available on two albums, the forthcoming The Rookie film soundtrack; and his own collection of unreleased tracks, alternate takes, and film music, Sidetracks.

“Dreams” is in the twangy neo-British Invasion style he has perfected over the last few years (especially on the brilliant Transcendental Blues) and continues his remarkable recent roll. MCA Nashville has also just reissued Earle’s amazing alt-country debut, 1986’s Guitar Town. (You can hear the title track and “Some Dreams” on Cool Tunes tomorrow night.) Clearly country, but with a rockabilly beat and worldly sensibility, Guitar Town is the transitional album between the Texas outlaw country of Willie, Waylon, and the like in the ‘70s, and the Americana hybrids of the ‘90s.

In The Encyclopedia of Record Producers, premier country producer Tony Brown discusses the album with Melinda Newman:

[Brown] declares Earle's 1986 MCA full-length debut, Guitar Town, the favorite of the records he has made. "That's the one I go back to," he says, "I love it better now. It was one of those things we - me and [co-producer] Emory Gordy Jr. and [session guitarist] Richard Bennett - were really trying to make our mark. We finished it and nobody liked it but the press, and the press turned our company and Nashville back on to it."

The thin, fresh-faced aspiring country hero of 1986 is barely recognizable in the confident, fleshy, bearded, sadder-but-wiser visage that stares out from recent photos. The sound has evolved as well: from adventuresome country to a more extreme, personal blend of bluegrass, traditional Irish, roots rock, folk, and the jangling, psychedelic, neo-’60s rock to be found on Transcendental. Much has transpired in the interim.

After Earle had made a big splash with Guitar Town and Copperhead Road in the late-’80s, he fell into heroin and cocaine addiction and didn’t record for five years. He had a tremendous personal and musical comeback in ‘95 with the acoustic Train A Comin’, followed by success after success with I Feel Alright (‘96), the Grammy-nominated El Corazon (‘97), The Mountain (‘99), then the great Transcendental (‘00).

Produced by Earle and his partner Ray Kennedy, Transcendental is a tour de force of all of his styles, held together by strength of conviction, expansive heart, and great songwriting. The album is by turns fierce, sweet, reflective, honest, and very real in its pursuit of transcendence through love (he’s been married six times), music, passion and justice. It was probably the album of 2000.
posted by Anonymous at 11:54 AM

 
Great Songs, Great Artists, Great Producers: History of Record Production Until 1950

Congrats to all the Grammy winners, especially our friend Manfred Eicher, who won best classical music producer for the sublime Morimur. Manfred rules.

As you may know if you read the upper left hand side of this page, the three of us are producers. Marty is an actual famous-type who worked with the NY Dolls, Ramones, Blondie, Suicide, Fleshtones, etc. We met when I interviewed him for The Encyclopedia of Record Producers. Mike is also a real producer, having worked with Indian Rope Burn, Witch Hazel, and Dink, as well as his own electronic project, Tofu. Although I compiled the Straight Outta Cleveland CD in ‘95, that’s not a real producer, just a compiler. I finally joined the ranks when I started recording with Mike as Elliptical last year. So we’re all producers. Below is my essay on the most important records and the people who made them from the pre-rock era, with a special emphasis on the unsung heroes, the producers. You probably haven’t heard their names before, but they deserve to be known. There wouldn’t have been a recording industry without them. You can check out discographies for all the producers mentioned here at our Encyclopedia site.

While there is a fair amount of consensus regarding the most important popular music of the past century (which also fairly neatly coincides with the history of recorded music), there has been relatively little attention paid to the people who enabled the artists to make those records, the producers. There is even less awareness and understanding of the intrepid souls who made recording history in the pre-rock ‘n’ roll days of cylinders, shellac, and 78’s. In an attempt to rectify this situation, let’s take a look at some of the most important early recordings, the artists who performed them, and the producers who made them possible.

What we now call “producers” were called “recordists” in the earliest days, “A&R (artists and repertoire) men” or “supervisors” in the ‘20s through the‘40s; use of the word “producer” came into vogue in the ‘50s. Originally, the title “producer” implied someone with a financial stake in the recording process - like a film producer - who may or may not have had anything to do with the actual recording process; today we call these people “executive producers.”

Today the title “producer” implies physical responsibility for the recording process itself and the music being recorded, yet there is still room for slippery ambiguity: an “engineer” physically records a session, but at what point does an engineer who also has musical input become an “assistant producer,” or a “co-producer”? Does an engineer become the producer if there is no other producer involved with the project? (typically yes).

In the smallest of nutshells, the producer’s job has been - and will remain - to make records. As recording (and the business of recording) has mutated over the decades, so have the tasks required to make records, yet someone has always had final responsibility for turning out the best possible recording - that someone we now call the producer.

Before we review recording history, let’s take a moment to think about how that history has changed our experience of music. Music is sound, and sound came and went - evaporating into the ether as it was heard - prior to the invention of recording and playback devices. Before the phonograph music was a fleeting, singular experience shared subjectively by one or more persons. Music could be recreated from its only tangible form, written notation, but once completed, a given musical performance existed only in the memory. Prior to the 1890’s only a small percentage of the population had ever heard a professional musical performance.

With the advent of recording, music became a “thing,” a thing that could be possessed, and, with the proper equipment, reproduced, exactly the same way over and over again by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Our egalitarian culture of entertainment-on-demand-for-all began with the availability of recorded music.

The first sound recording instrument, the “phonautograph,” was created by Frenchman Leon Scott de Martinville in 1855 using a horn and membrane affixed to a stylus that recorded sound waves on a rotating cylinder wrapped with blackened paper. There was no playback device. In 1877, Thomas Edison, aggravated by the fact that his telegraph tape kept slipping out of alignment (a man who sleeps only four hours a night gets aggravated easily), rigged up a steel spring to keep the tape aligned and noticed that when the tape was run at high speed, the indented dots and dashes made a "light musical, rhythmic sound, resembling human talk heard indistinctly."

Edison reasoned that if he could record a telegraph message, he could also record a telephone message. Edison, who was hard of hearing, hooked up a short needle to the diaphragm of his telephone receiver and rested his finger against the needle; the pricks against his finger told him how loud the voice was being received. Edison realized that he could record a series of loud pricks. By the end of ‘77 Edison had invented the phonograph, consisting of a hand-cranked cylinder wrapped in tin foil and mounted on a threaded shaft, and a horn-like mouthpiece connected to a diaphragm and a steel stylus that indented sound patterns from a sound source on the rotating foil. For playback the stylus tracked the indented foil, whose vibrations were reproduced using a more delicate diaphragm. Edison’s version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was the first recorded performance.

In 1878 the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was created to manufacture and exhibit the talking machines, of which the first commercial applications were live stage demonstrations. James Redpath, the founder of a successful speaker's bureau in Boston, was put in charge of presenting the curiosity to the public. He assembled a staff of actors, carnival barkers and others fleet of tongue, trained them in the care and feeding of the phonograph, and sent them out to assigned territories.

"Ladies and gentlemen, for your edification and amazement, I present to you a machine that speaks like a man, quacks like a duck and sings like a trumpet. This is Thomas Edison's miraculous phonograph. By the wizardry of modern art and science, this machine will now greet you in tongues gathered from the four corners of the globe."
("HELLO")
The Boston audience, sophisticates all, gasped as one. The cylindrical body turned and a voice came out of a cone above the cylinder.
("BON JOUR," "HOLA," "KON-NICHI-WA")
"Having greeted you, the phonograph will now recite Lincoln's Gettysburg Address."
("FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO........)
The address was completed to thunderous applause and more than one tear.
"Meaning no disrespect, it is now time for a tour of the barnyard."
("MOO" "QUACK" "GOBBLE, GOBBLE" "BAAA" "HEE HAW")
Howls of delight and a chorus of animal sounds echoed from the audience.
"Now, some of you ladies and gentlemen may think that some form of trickery is afoot in this demonstration. There's nothing up my sleeve. There's nothing hidden on this theatrical proscenium and I am not possessed of the ventriloquist's art. It is the machine that speaks. To certify the authenticity of this demonstration, may I importune the audience for a volunteer? Is there a doctor in the house?"
An impressively mustachioed man in the front row shyly raised his hand.
"Thank you very kindly, sir. Don't be shy, just step right up here. And you are Dr...?"
"Ah, Edison. No relation."
Much laughter.
"Now Dr. Edison, if you would be so kind. What is your specialty, sir?"
"I'm an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist."
"How fortuitous, sir! Now Dr. Edison, Ear, Nose and Throat specialist, will you be so kind to look around, behind, and under the table for any foreign bodies?"
Dr. Edison tentatively poked around, finding nothing untoward, meanwhile the showman gave the phonograph a surreptitious crank.
("COUGH")
The doctor jumped nearly out of his skin. The audience guffawed, then returned a chorus of coughs. The phonograph sneezed. The showman handed the doctor a stethoscope, bringing down the house.
"Please forgive my little jest, Dr. Edison. Thank you so much for your patience, but you will no doubt confirm that our ‘patient’ is the genuine article, though there is no need to write him a prescription."
The show concluded with a musical demonstration including the sounds of a harp, a violin, a piano, and wrapped with "America the Beautiful" played on a trumpet. Demonstrations of this sort generated up to $1,800 per week. Edison took 20% of the take, Redpath 60%, and the showman 20%. The phonograph was off and running as a moneymaker.

Unfortunately, Edison turned his prodigious attention to the electric light bulb, and the phonograph remained little more than a novelty for the next ten years. By 1887, a team led by telephone-inventor Alexander Graham Bell had improved the device by replacing the tin foil with a wax cylinder (which improved sound, durability, and lengthened recording time to around 2 minutes), and the hand crank with an electric motor (which unified pitch). Edison responded with similar improvements of his own and law suits, which were followed by countersuits. Both Edison (“phonograph”) and the Bell team (“graphophone”) perceived their devices as dictation equipment for business.

Music entered the picture in ‘89 when Edison’s California franchise developed a coin-operated attachment to the phonograph and installed it in a San Francisco saloon - where very little dictation took place - helping to create a demand for recorded music. By ‘91 coin-operated machines (2 minutes for a nickel) were common in bars, cafes and drug stores, earning an average of $200 per month each. Parlors specifically for listening to music through tubes in private booths (where moving pictures could also be seen) arose, further driving demand. Because the wax cylinders were not a subtle software medium, loud and clear instruments and vocalists translated best - brass bands best of all. Columbia, originally the Washington DC Edison phonograph franchise but now a rival linked with Bell’s graphophone, recorded John Philip Sousa’s U.S. Marine Band in 1890 and had the first No 1 record, “Semper Fidelis” (the band’s “Washington Post March,” also from 1890, is available on Sony’s Soundtrack For a Century collection - it sounds like an AM transistor radio from under a pillow). Victor Emerson, Columbia recording director from 1896-1916, was the producer of that first No. 1, shouting the name of the band and the song into the recording horn before ducking out of the way of the brassy blast. Also popular at the time were “artistic whistlers,” minstrels, vaudeville acts, ethnic tunes and various orations.

The next major recording development was Emile Berliner’s flat hard-rubber disc gramophone, introduced in 1893. The first “records” were cheaper to reproduce than cylinders, and as opposed to the cylinder brute force reproduction method (originally cylinders were recorded literally one at a time forcing the artist to sing or play the same song thousands of times! Later, several machines were linked together to record a performance simultaneously. Edison developed a mass-duplication molding process by 1902, but it was still relatively expensive and the wax remained brittle), they could be reproduced from a zinc master an unlimited number of times with no reduction in quality.

The first great record producer, Fred Gaisberg, went to work for Berliner in 1894 as a talent scout/piano accompanist, and in ‘95 discovered that shellac worked better than hard rubber for the discs. Gaisberg met an inventor named Eldridge Johnson in ‘96 whose spring motor failed to run sewing machines but was perfect for records, creating the standard of 78 rpm. Berliner’s and Johnson’s companies merged in 1901 to form the Victor Talking Machine Co. with the famous dog-with-his-head-in-the-horn as trademark.

Gaisberg went to Europe on a scouting trip in 1902 and attended a performance by the young tenor Enrico Caruso in Milan at La Scala. Gaisberg paid Caruso $400 to record ten songs the next day, ten songs that generated millions for the company over the years. Gaisberg remained among the most important producers of classical music over the next half-century.

Victor, Columbia and Edison duked it out over the next 20 years with the quality of recordings improving steadily, the price of recordings coming down. Victor released its furniture-quality, self-contained record player, the Victrola, in 1906, the success of which forced Columbia to switch from cylinder to disc that same year, with Edison finally relenting in 1913. There was little popular music of note (although the barbershop quartet stuff, especially the Peerless Quartet, is pretty cool) recorded in the era, with sentimental pop songs, light dance bands, and novelty numbers dominating. Important music - jazz, blues, country - was evolving outside the purview of the recording industry.

By the late-teens various patents had expired and many new companies entered the phonograph-manufacturing and record-making business (records were primarily seen as marketing tools for phonographs until the ‘20s) including Okeh, Brunswick, Vocalion and Emerson. A recording of “Livery Stable Blues” by a mediocre white ensemble, the Original Dixieland Jass (later “Jazz”) Band (available on RCA Victor 80th Anniversary: The First Label In Jazz collection), was a big hit and gave white America its first (albeit watered down) exposure to the indigenous American art form.

1920 was a banner year in America: the economy was thriving, movies were booming, radio was introduced, transportation had improved drastically since the turn of the century with the automobile (and even flight) now a common reality. America was ready for something new, exciting, and even a little dangerous in its entertainment: Mamie Smith’s version of “Crazy Blues” (Sony’s Soundtrack For a Century) was the first authentic blues on record, recorded for Okeh by the visionary Ralph Peer (see below). It whetted the public’s appetite for something new and authentic, and ignited the blues craze.

Frank Walker (1889-1963) produced the first crucial popular music recording in human history: Bessie Smith’s (1894-1937) double-sided smash "Down-Hearted Blues/Gulf Coast Blues" for Columbia in 1923 (The Essential Bessie Smith). Following school, banking, and the Navy, Walker went to work for Columbia in 1919 to learn record manufacturing. After a brief foray into concert promotion (including Caruso), Walker went back to Columbia to do A&R work. Under disputed circumstances, in February of 1923 Walker sent songwriter/arranger/accompanist/publisher Clarence Williams to Philadelphia to importune Bessie Smith - “The Empress of the Blues,” who was already well-known within the black community - to come to NY to audition for Columbia. Backed only by Williams on piano, Smith astonished Walker with three songs, including “Down-Hearted Blues” (written by Alberta Hunter) and “Gulf Coast Blues,” and he immediately signed her to a year’s contract. Though still the acoustic era of recording (i.e. shouting into a horn), Smith’s “audition” (which sold over 800,000 copies within six months) dazzles even today. From an era where vocalists sound as though they were singing from the bottom of a well, Smith’s aching but sinewy blues crawls out of the well, over Williams’ toy-sounding piano and into your soul.

While at Columbia, Walker also did field recording, roaming the backroads of the South, often on horseback, following the lead of local record store owners and the like. He discovered and recorded hillbilly greats Clarence Ashley, Charlie Poole, Riley Puckett and Gid Tanner (whom he introduced to each other to form the Skillet Lickers) in the ‘20s.

In the ‘30s and ‘40s Walker worked for RCA Victor and recorded blues, country and jazz, supervising three more essential recordings: Glenn Miller’s (1904-44) “In the Mood” in ‘39, Coleman Hawkins’ (1904-69) “Body and Soul” in ‘40, and Duke Ellington’s (1899-1974) “Take the ‘A’ Train” in ‘41. Miller’s “In the Mood” (which was No. 1 for 12 weeks, available on Miller’s The Popular Recordings 1938-42) exemplifies “Big Band” for many people. Solos by tenor saxmen Tex Beneke, Al Klink, and Clyde Hurley have echoed cheerfully through dance halls for 60 years, accumulating iconic weight along the way.

Hawkins’ “Body and Soul” (Coleman Hawkins: A Retrospective 1929-63) is also an icon: the measure of any tenor player to this day is his handling of the tune against the first master of the instrument. A 3-minute, lightly-swinging ballad recorded as an afterthought at the end of his first U.S. sessions after a five-year stay in Europe, “Body” boasts Hawkins’ rippling harmonic excursions, rhythmic perfection, and the drama of his unfolding auto-one-upmanship have placed it at the center of jazz history.

Also at the center of jazz history is Edward “Duke” Ellington’s inimitable Blanton-Webster Band. Ellington had been leading his great band since the ‘20s, but in the early-’40s new additions led to new heights for jazz’s greatest composer and bandleader: Ben Webster was the Ellington band’s first great tenor sax soloist; Jimmy Blanton (who died of TB in ‘42 at 23) was both the first great melodic voice on the string bass and an unparalleled rhythmic swinger; Billy Strayhorn had recently joined up as arranger/composer (”Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Lush Life,” Satin Doll”)/2nd piano to Duke; and Ray Nance had recently replaced Cootie Williams on trumpet.

“’A’ Train” (The Blanton-Webster Band) is a timeless composition, with internal drama between the reeds’ long melodic line and the brass’ bursts of punctuation. Nance’s classic muted-then-open solo became so ingrained in the public’s imagination that subsequent Ellington trumpet players had to reproduce it note-for-note or suffer the wrath of fans. Walker’s main contributions to these jazz greats was to shut up, get out of the way and let talent follow it’s course. Often this is the best possible action a producer can take. Walker headed the V-Disc recording program of troop entertainment during WWII, then returned to RCA. In ‘47 he headed the new MGM Records where he signed Hank Williams (see below) after other labels had turned him away.

Advances in telephone and radio technology in the late-teens and early-‘20s (many precipitated by WWI research) led to such electronic devices as microphones and amplifiers. By ‘25 these tools made their way into the recording studio. The strictures of acoustic recording had kept heavy percussion out of the studio - a strong drum beat made the recording stylus jump the groove. Electronic (then called “electrical”) recording (replacing the etching of actual soundwave forms onto records with the etching of electrical impulses representing those wave forms) greatly reduced distortion, allowed for a widely expanded frequency range (which brought higher highs and lower lows), and allowed the drums into the studio. Recording climbed out of the well and could now match the sound of radio. Radio-phonograph combo machines came into vogue, a pairing reflected in corporate structure when the Radio Company of America acquired the Victor Talking Machine Company in ‘29 to form RCA Victor.

The first essential recording of the “electrical era” was also one of jazz’s greatest recordings, Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” (Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man 1923-34, Legacy/Columbia) recorded for Okeh in 1928. Armstrong (1901-71) took up the cornet at the New Orleans Colored Waif’s Home, where he had been sent after firing a gun into the air at age 11. He eventually came under the tutelage of cornetist King Oliver, whom he followed to Chicago in ‘19. After leaving Oliver’s band, Armstrong recorded in New York with Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith, and a host of others.

In ‘25, Armstrong was performing with his wife Lil’s band in Chicago when he began a series of recordings with studio-only bands, the Hot Fives, and Hot Sevens. Within these recordings Armstrong turned away from the New Orleans group style of improvisation and became the first, and many still say greatest, jazz soloist.

Armstrong soloed as if he had something effervescing inside of him that couldn’t be contained. The polychromy of human emotion from raucous joy to tender sorrow danced from his horn, borne upon dazzling technique, buttery tone and a subversive sense of timing that wound in and around the main melody line, swinging it and commenting upon it at the same time. His scat singing derived from the same wellspring as his playing, adding another virtuoso (if already gravelly) instrument to the mix. On “West End Blues” and many other Hot tunes (“Cornet Chop Suey,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue”), Armstrong showed the world the peaks musical self-expression could attain, and established a jazz soloists’ vocabulary for decades to come.

Armstrong’s impact was all the more powerful and pervasive because his work was recorded with (then) startling electrical clarity by Richard M. Jones (1889-1945). Jones is an extremely significant figure: in addition to being a pianist and composer (“Trouble In Mind,” “Riverside Blues”) of note, he was most likely only the second significant black producer (after Paramount’s great blues producer J. Mayo Williams) in recording history.

Jones was a multi-instrumentalist from a musical New Orleans family who led a band, the Four Jazz Hounds. which occasionally included King Oliver. He went to Chicago in 1919 to establish a branch of the aforementioned Clarence Williams’ publishing company and music store. He played in Chicago bands including Richard M. Jones and the Jazz Wizards in the ‘20s, but was most important as manager of Okeh’s “race” record division, where he recorded Armstrong.

Ralph Peer (1892-1960) was the single most important figure in the establishment of roots music (“race” and “hillbilly,” aka “blues” and “country”) as commercially viable in the ‘20s as a talent scout, producer and music publisher. Peer was born in Kansas City and helped his father sell sewing machines, phonographs and recordings as a teen. After high school he went to work for Columbia, followed by service in the U.S. Merchant Marine during WWI.

Peer was hired as recording director of the Okeh label in 1920. Success came almost immediately when he produced Mamie Smith’s aforementioned “Crazy Blues” in New York. More important than the urban blues sung by the likes of vaudeville entertainer Smith were Peer’s field recordings where his feet found the talent, his ear sorted out the best material and his personality brought out relaxed, confident performances by blues and country greats Sara Martin, Fiddlin’ John Carson (the first genuine country recording “The Little Old Cabin In the Lane” in ‘23), Ernest “Pop” Stoneman (“The Titanic,” ‘25 one of the biggest sellers of the ‘20s), Lonnie Johnson, Victoria Spivey, and Sippie Wallace, all for Okeh.

Peer went to Victor in ‘25, where in addition to founding the modern country music publishing business with Southern Music (his deal with Victor allowed him to solicit publishing rights for any song he recorded), he produced an incredible series of blues and country records on the road in Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis and Charlotte with Jimmie Davis, Sleepy John Estes, Alberta Hunter, Tommy Johnson, Furry Lewis, Blind Willie McTell, Frank Stokes, and countless others. But his most famous discoveries took place in Bristol, Tennessee, in August of ‘27, where he found Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933) and the Carter Family.

Peer’s recordings with the great Rodgers included the various “Blue Yodels,” “The Soldier’s Sweetheart,” “Waiting For a Train,” and the rest of the Singing Brakeman’s classic catalog before his death from tuberculosis in ‘33. Perhaps the single most important song to arise from the Bristol Sessions (as they have become known), though, was actually recorded in Camden, NJ. A.P. Carter (1893-1960) was a roving church singing instructor and fiddler/guitarist from western Virginia when he met singer/autoharpist Sara Dougherty (1899-1979); they were married in 1915, and in ‘26 joined by Sara’s guitar playing cousin Maybelle (1909-78, she was also married to A.P.’s brother) to form a performing trio. The trio recorded six songs at the Bristol session and were called up to Victor’s Camden studios (where Rodgers also recorded) for a second session, where they recorded one of the most influential records in country music history, a Civil War-era song adapted by A.P., “Wildwood Rose” (Anchored In Love: Their Complete Victor Recordings 1927-28, Rounder), featuring Sara’s haunting vocal and Maybelle’s finger picking style - the “Carter lick” - which became the very foundation of country rhythm guitar playing. The song reached No. 3 on the pop charts in ‘28 (there was no country chart until ‘44) and sold over one million copies (check out Mike Ness’ rocking but faithful rendition on his recent Under the Influences CD on Time Bomb). Peer increasingly turned his attention to his hugely successful publishing business after ‘32, but left behind an amazing legacy of recorded roots music that transformed the industry and preserved authentic American culture for fun and profit.

William “Count” Basie (1904-84), second only to Duke Ellington of the century’s jazz band leaders, was discovered by the great producer/talent scout/activist John Hammond Jr. (1910-87), who heard the bluesy, swinging Basie band on his car radio in Chicago, live from Kansas City, on a snowy night in early-’36. Hammond - who also discovered and/or produced Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan - is probably the most important producer of the century; however, with irony to spare, none of his actual productions made our essential recording list, although many of his artist’s did.

Regardless, when Hammond heard pianist Basie’s 9-piece band - with drummer Jo Jones (who evidenced “extraordinary wit in his playing”), Lester Young on tenor sax, and Jimmy Rushing, the great, rotund blues singer on vocals - Hammond called the band “one without any faults.” Hammond talked up Basie to everyone he knew and wrote extensively about him, so that when he went to Kansas City to sign the band for Brunswick, Decca’s Jack Kapp had been there first. Basie’s three-year recording contract was at union scale with no royalties, so his greatest hits of the period - and of his career - “Stop Beatin’ Round the Mulberry Bush,” “Jumpin’ At the Woodside,” and his classic theme song “One O’Clock Jump” (The Complete Decca Recordings 1937-39), earned him nary an extra dime.

Jack Kapp (1901-49), the perpetrator of that not-unusual contract and producer of as many hits as anyone in the 20th Century, began his record career as a high school shipping clerk for Columbia in Chicago, where his father was a salesman. After graduation he took a full-time job with Columbia, and then moved to Brunswick in ‘25 to run its race division.

When Al Jolson’s “Sonny Boy/There’s a Rainbow Over My Shoulder” became a million seller in ‘28, Kapp was put in charge of all recording. He recorded Bing Crosby (the most popular artist of the first half of the century), the Mills Brothers, the Dorsey Brothers, Guy Lombardo, Louis Armstrong, and many others, who followed him when he was appointed head of the new American Decca Records when it was formed in ‘34.

Kapp was a shrewd businessman (ask Basie) with a great ear who helped move the record business into the youth market with the release of reduced-price, $.35 records, and an emphasis on dance band music which played well on the jukebox. By ‘38, jukeboxes accounted for 60% of all record sales, of which 75% were Decca releases.

Though Decca was successful with a great many artists, Crosby (1903-77) was always its cash cow, and not surprisingly, he was Kapp’s favorite artist. Crosby was among the first to understand the vocal intimacy that the introduction of microphones afforded in the late-’20s, and he helped invent the crooner style. In a fifty-year career he sold over 500 million records. Just before his death in ‘49 Kapp wrote of Crosby: "Bing has become the symbol of America and what it represents to all the peoples of the world. In his off-hand, unpretentious, and wholly native way, Bing is Mr. America...." Bing’s greatest recording, ‘42’s “White Christmas” (Bing! His Legendary Years 1931-57, MCA), has sold over 30 million copies and shows Der Bingle at his mellifluous, whistling best on the Irving Berlin classic. For many, it still isn’t Christmas if it isn’t White.

Robert Johnson (1911-38) was born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, the illegitimate son of Julia Dodds and Noah Johnson. Nothing in Johnson’ childhood foretold his eventual status as the greatest bluesman of all time. He left little impression upon his childhood community of Robinsonville, save that he played a fair harmonica and a less notable guitar.

Johnson’s first wife died in childbirth when he was 19 and she was 16, and for the next year Johnson wandered about the Delta. He returned home on a melting summer Saturday night possessed of a new air of gravity, dragged his guitar into the local roadhouse, and while performers Son House and Willie Brown took a break with most of the crowd outside, Johnson began to play. His anguished yet supple singing and startling guitar accompaniment drew a gasp from the crowd outside.

Word quickly spread that Johnson had “sold his soul to the devil to get to play like that” (according to House in Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train). Word of Johnson’s prowess spread as he traveled to St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit and New York, astonishing audiences with his musicality and raw power. A white music store owner named H.C. Speir passed on word about Johnson to Ernie Oertle, ARC’s talent scout in the mid-South, and Oertle agreed to take Johnson to San Antonio to record with Don Law.

Law recorded Johnson’s entire 29-song body of work direct-to-disc in a San Antonio hotel room in November, 1936, and in a Dallas warehouse in June of 1937. Though Johnson was 25 and 26 when he recorded, his shy boyishness led Law to think he was a teenager. Johnson was so shy that he turned to face the wall when he recorded. Women were Johnson’s crutch and his undoing; he was poisoned to death by a jealous husband at a roadhouse in 1938.

Johnson’s greatness lies in his songwriting (“Cross Road Blues,” “Come on in My Kitchen,” “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Love In Vain”); his eerie, straining voice; and his complex walking bass and slide guitar style that served as counterpoint to his harrowing fables of hellhounds, meetings with the devil, and untrue women. Johnson didn’t just play his guitar, he had a relationship with it that took the form of a dialogue - an unresolved dialectic that reflected both the anguish and the exhilaration inherent in pursuing a satisfaction that was never to be his. All of Johnson’s recorded output can be found on The Complete Recordings box set released by Columbia in 1990.

Though Don Law doubtless recorded other bluesmen in his field recording years with ARC, he is best known as one of the most important producers in country music history, recording Lefty Frizzell, Flatt and Scruggs, Ray Price, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton, Carl Smith, Jimmy Dean and dozens of others in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s for Columbia Records.

Law (1902-82) was wellborn in London, England, and began a series of picaresque travels in 1923 that meandered through Poland (as a gun toting cashier for a timber company), New York (selling etchings), a sheep ranch in Alabama, and Dallas, where he became a bookkeeper, then A&R man for Brunswick Records. When the American Record Corporation (ARC) bought Brunswick in 1931, he began working for a fellow Englishman similarly predisposed toward American roots music, Art Satherley (see below), who would become his mentor.

Law took over the Columbia country music department in 1953 when Satherley retired, and became one of the first producers to work at Owen Bradley’s (see below) Quonset Hut - the first studio built on Nashville’s Music Row - thereby stamping Columbia’s approval on the burgeoning Nashville scene.

Benny Goodman (1909-86), a tough guy from Chicago who became the greatest white musician in jazz history, made his living playing as a session sideman and fronted an all-white band in ‘33 when John Hammond brought him in to play for a Bessie Smith session. Goodman told Hammond that if anyone knew he played with black musicians, he would be barred from work. New York was as segregated as Birmingham in ‘33. Hammond’s first two records with Goodman were with an all-white group and were moderately successful. Hammond then took Goodman to see Billie Holiday and they recorded together in late-’33 - the color line was officially broken, at least in the studio.

Hammond then brought in black piano player Teddy Wilson from Chicago and he began to record with Goodman. Hammond encouraged the formation of a small jazz combo, and the Benny Goodman Trio, with (great white drummer) Gene Krupa and Teddy Wilson was formed.

Throughout the ‘30s Hammond and Goodman broke barrier after barrier when first Wilson, then vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and electric guitar great Charlie Christian were added to the Goodman band, which became among the most popular in the land. Hammond brought in Fletcher Henderson to write arrangements for Goodman and the swing swung like never before.

Ironically, it was Albert Marx (who owned and produced for the Musicraft, Trend, and Discovery labels, including recordings by Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Chico Hamilton, Shelly Manne, Joe Pass, Artie Shaw, Mel Torme, Sarah Vaughan, Teddy Wilson) who very successfully recorded with a single overhead microphone the Goodman Carnegie Hall show of 1938, the first jazz show at the august venue, and a show considered by many to be the most important in jazz history. The concert, recently reissued in its entirety on Legacy/Columbia, featured Goodman’s Orchestra, Trio, Quartet (the Trio plus Lionel Hampton on vibes), and a jam session with members of the Basie and Ellington bands. It was the first live performance of integrated bands and was an unqualified success. Jimmy Mundy’s arrangement of Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing),” which came near the end of the show when success was already assured, was arguably the highlight of the show as Krupa’s maniacal jungle tom-tom pounding propelled the Orchestra skyward. Goodman’s clarinet and Harry James’ trumpet solos sparkled, and Jess Stacy’s piano solo (Goodman can be heard moving the mic closer to the piano) over the final two minutes of the 13-minute dream was the greatest of his career. The audience rightfully went apeshit and began shouting with abandon - in defiance of Hall decorum - after the Orchestra’s coda rave up.

Milt Gabler’s (b. 1911) career in music dates back to the ‘20s, and he was integral to some of the most important developments in pop and jazz history. He ran the legendary Commodore Music Shop in New York (the first jazz record store anywhere), then Commodore Records (the first independent jazz label), then worked for thirty years (‘41-’71) as a producer and A&R man for Decca Records. Along the way he became the first jazz impresario, promoted the first jazz jam sessions open to the public, and recorded Eddie Condon, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Brenda Lee, Peggy Lee, Louis Jordan, The Weavers, and Bill Haley and the Comets.

From his first session with Eddie Condon and the Chicago Rhythm Kings in 1938, Gabler was a hands-on producer. “I told the engineer, ’They sound one way in the studio and another way through your monitor. You don’t have the men balanced properly.’...I told the guys to play and then move around until I could hear all the instruments. Then I balanced the rhythm section because we only used two mics in those years..That’s all there [was to it].”

Billie Holiday (1915-59) opened a long engagement at NY’s Cafe Society in late-’38. By April of 1939 she wanted to record a song that had become her stage finale, a bluesy ballad telling the shocking tale of a lynching, “Strange Fruit,” the title of which referred to the body of a lynched man with “bulging eyes and twisted mouth” hanging from a poplar tree. Holiday’s label at the time, Columbia, was afraid to put out the song for fear of alienating Southern customers; in a visit to his store, Holiday complained to Gabler about the situation. Gabler expressed interest and Columbia granted Holiday permission to record “Strange Fruit” and three other songs for Gabler’s Commodore label. The songs from the ‘39 session (and ‘44 sessions) appear in an excellent collection, Billie Holiday, The Complete Commodore Recordings. In the collection’s liner notes Stuart Nicholson declares another first for Gabler in that “Fruit” was the first popular song “that became impossible to disentangle from a single, specific recording....Singer and song are bonded in a way that exhausts the meaning of the material.”

The norm for the time was for any hit song to be recorded by a multitude of artists - success with a song did not convey ownership. Prior to “Fruit” (which no one covered until Cassandra Wilson’s 1995 version), a song held ontological primacy over any given recording of it. Holiday’s recording of “Fruit” became the only imaginable version of the song: the recording achieved primacy over the
song itself (just a collection of notes and words) or any given live performance of it. Hence, for the first time, a producer, Gabler, became co-creator of a primary work of art, not “just” a recordist.

In Jerry Wexler’s autobiography Rhythm and the Blues he writes: “Gabler..is one of my role models...because over the decades he truly understood the natural art of bending and blending genres,” most particularly when he “infuse(d) Louis Jordan’s spirit into the work of Bill Haley (1925-81) and the Comets, one of the first seeds of black rhythm and blues to bloom into white rock and roll,” and as a result “Rock Around the Clock” became the first No. 1 hit of the rock’n’roll era. Gabler recorded both Jordan and Haley, who until then had been a journeyman rockabilly performer, at the Pythian Temple, an old ballroom on West 70th. Gabler used a lot of “tape reverb and reverb from the room,” he told Ted Fox in In the Groove. “At the Pythian, you could blow because there was this big high ceiling, we had drapes hanging from the balconies, and a live wooden floor...When they got it down...that thing rocked!...I had three mics on the drums alone...We had the guy slap the bass...then I had..the steel player...hit what I called lightning flashes, where he’d take the steel bar and hit it across the strings of the steel guitar and make it arc.” When “Rock Around the Clock” was added to the Blackboard Jungle soundtrack in ‘55, the rock ’n’ roll revolution began.

As the U.S. entered WWII in late ‘41, materials required to make records, such as shellac, were diverted to the war effort. The American Federation of Musicians union agreed to stop recording any music that didn’t directly contribute to the cause in August of ‘42 and for all intents and purposes the industry shut down for the next two years (recall that Frank Walker led the V-Disc campaign). When the war finally ended in ‘45, technological advances spurred by the conflict began to be applied to the recording industry (as they had after WWI). Developed by the British in order to more exactly record the operating vibrations of submarines, FFRR (Full Frequency Range Recording) was introduced in ‘45 extending the frequency range of recording and playback from 130 - 4,200 cycles per second, to 80 - 15,000 cps (the human ear can hear from 20 - 18,000 cps).

Peter Goldmark of Columbia Records, now owned by CBS, finished work on the LP (long player) in ‘47, which was made of finely grooved vinyl (“microgroove”) and played at 33 1/3 rpm, extending the average playing time of a record side from about seven to about 20 minutes. In retaliation, RCA introduced the 7” 45 rpm microgroove single, which was perfect for jukeboxes. The brawling stopped in ‘51 when Columbia and RCA agreed to accept both the 12” LP and the 7” single vinyl microgroove formats, and variable speed record players became the standard (though shellac lived on with some labels until the late-’50s).

On the recording front, the Germans had been laboring over magnetic tape (paper or vinyl acetate covered with a fine layer of brown iron oxide) since the late-‘20s, and by the ‘40s the German BASF company made recording tape that approximated the frequency range of records (developed to carry Hitler’s logorrheaic stream of propaganda). Several tape recorders were captured by the Allies near the end of the war and brought back to the U.S and England, where they were eagerly torn apart and examined. Soon, 3M became the first American company to manufacture magnetic tape and Ampex the first to make professional tape recorders. Bing Crosby gave acceptance of the technology a boost when he began taping his radio show for broadcast in ‘48. ABC Radio and Capitol Records - founded in Hollywood in ‘42 by singer/songwriter Johnny Mercer, theatrical producer Buddy DeSylva, and record retailer Glenn Wallichs - were among the first companies to purchase tape recorders.

Lee Gillette (1912-81) grew up in Peoria and Chicago, and was a singer and drummer with local orchestras. He played in a trio (The Campus Kids) with future country production great Ken Nelson (Buck Owens, Ferlin Husky, Wanda Jackson), then joined the radio orchestra for Fibber McGee and Molly, which subsequently moved to Hollywood with the cast. Gillette got to know Glenn Wallichs, who recorded the show on transcription discs. Gillette went back to Chicago for a time to work in radio, but in ‘44 Wallichs called him back to be an A&R man for Capitol. Gillette worked primarily in country at first, recording Tex Ritter, Tex Williams (whose “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! That Cigarette” was the label’s first million-seller in ‘47), Merle Travis, Jack Guthrie, and Tennessee Ernie Ford before taking over pop and jazz production in ‘50. He had also worked from the beginning with a jazzy threesome, the King Cole Trio.

Nat King Cole’s (1919-65) career followed a similar path to that of Louis Armstrong (who ante- and postdated the short-lived Cole) in that both began as jazz innovators and ended up as beloved popular entertainers. When each died, many fans weren’t even aware of their heroes’ early jazz lives. Cole’s piano style was known for its flow, wit, and rhythmic drive. By the time Gillette hooked up with Cole in ‘44, his Trio (with Oscar Moore on guitar and Wesley Prince on bass) was a West Coast jazz legend. Their first hit together
was the swingin’, jivey Cole composition “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” As the ‘40s progressed Cole began to move into the vocal pop (the great “Christmas Song” with strings was recorded in ‘46) that would carry him to the very top of the entertainment world as his incomparably warm, humane, quietly self-possessed voice mellowed and matured. There are many Cole songs that could be listed as essential (“Nature Boy,” “Mona Lisa,” “Unforgettable,” “L-O-V-E”), but the Bobby Troup-penned “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” from ‘46 combines the swanky best of the Trio with a pleasing portion of the sweetness that was to come (all available on the Capitol Masters: Nat King Cole collection). “Route 66” is the perfect nexus of the divergent arrows of Cole’s career.

Gillette and Cole’s lives were inextricably intertwined, and although he also produced huge hits for Dean Martin, Les Baxter, Peggy Lee, Stan Kenton and many others, the wind evaporated from Gillette’s sails when Cole died of lung cancer in ‘65, and, heartbroken, he quit the business.

The ubiquity and energy of swing helped drive the youth market for records and buoyed the industry through the tail end of the Depression and in the euphoria immediately following WWII. But some jazz musicians felt that swing had grown stale as a creative outlet by the ’40s. John Birks Gillespie (1917-1993), from South Carolina, then Philadelphia, began trumpet as a teen, studied harmony and theory, and while he took music dead seriously, his irrepressible sense of humor led to the nickname “Dizzy.” Gillespie aspired to the speed and nosebleed upper range of Roy Eldridge, whom he replaced in the Teddy Hill band in ‘37. The famous upturned horn was the result of an accident - when forced by circumstance to play with the bent horn, Gillespie decided he liked the sound dispersal better and bent it was to remain.

Gillespie played with Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, Benny Carter, Lucky Millinder, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines (where he met Charlie Parker) and became musical director of Billy Eckstine’s band in ‘44. Meanwhile he was experimenting in small combo settings at the famous Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House clubs in Harlem with alto saxist Parker, pianist Thelonious Monk, guitarist Charlie Christian, drummer Kenny Clarke, and others, creating a new style called “bebop.”

The change from swing to bebop reflected an increase in tempo and a harmonic change from diatonic (using just the notes that form a particular major or minor scale) to chromatic (all the other notes) scales, i.e., from a loping beat with “pleasing” tones, to a slamming beat with jarring tones. Tonal effects like vibrato and smears were also out; and, the final perversion, stress in phrasing was moved from the strong to weak beats.

The net result was a musical world turned upside down - dogs and cats sleeping together - and music that was defiantly not for dancing. No wonder there was so much antipathy to the new music. Musicians who refused the change became known as “moldy figs” to the boppers (oldsters Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young did play with boppers). Swing tenor great Ben Webster is reputed to have said, “That horn ain’t supposed to sound that fast,” when he heard Parker play. Calloway called it ”Chinese music.”

In addition to helping set the musical trend, Gillespie became the visual and cultural focal point for the movement with his beret, shades, goatee and infectious humor. He was also the first to lead a bop big band (‘45), and a few years later would incorporate Latin rhythms into bop to form “cubop” - a style still dominant in Latin jazz.

Pianist/composer/producer Leonard Feather (1914-94) is perhaps the most famous jazz critic of all time. He moved to NY from London in ‘35 and was almost alone among critics, championing bebop in the pages of Esquire and Downbeat. A true jazz renaissance man, Feather acted upon his convictions and produced a Gillespie bebop seven-piece (featuring Don Byas on tenor sax and Milt Jackson on vibes) for RCA in ‘46 (found in Gillespie’s The Complete RCA Recordings). This session produced one of the classics of bebop: the exotic, contrapuntal “Night In Tunisia.” Halfway through, the muted lurking ambiance is shattered by Gillespie’s percussive, arcing solo over a quick swing groove, followed by Byas’ similar workout.

Feather also produced Dinah Washington (for whom he wrote “Evil Gal Blues” and “Salty Papa”), Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and many others including his own recordings. As a writer he created the blindfold test in Downbeat (where critics reacted to music without any prior information), the Encyclopedia of Jazz book series, and was syndicated in 350 papers from the L.A. Times.

While Gillespie was bebop’s most visible proponent, “Bird” Parker (1920-55) was its greatest talent. Although his personal and professional life was marred by drug addiction (heroin on and off, mostly on, from age 15) and general dissipation, the Kansas City-born Parker recorded some of the most incredible music in jazz history, with his recordings for Savoy and Dial from ‘45-’47 most
astonishing of all. Despite his condition, Bird had the ability to memorize an arrangement on sight, from which his fertile - even febrile - imagination then worked its lightning rearranging magic. In early-’46, Gillespie and Parker took a bebop band for a two-month engagement at Billy Berg’s nightclub in Hollywood, where Parker met up with jazz record collector and owner of the Tempo Music Shop, Ross Russell (b. 1909).

Russell had discovered jazz while attending UCLA in the early ‘30s, and become a collector of hot jazz 78’s from the ‘20s (Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, etc.). Russell became a writer, then served as a radio officer in WWII. He opened Tempo in June of ‘44, with much of the stock coming from his own record collection. Many of his customers were young “hipsters” who turned Russell on to bebop.

Russell was so taken with Parker’s genius that he started the Dial label specifically to record him. After a disastrous first session where Parker was a no-show, Russell recorded Parker with a septet including Miles Davis at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, March 28 of ‘46. Four songs were recorded, including the bebop classic “Ornithology.” This was still direct-to-disc (no tape yet) and mistakes by the band, especially the young Davis, required the tunes to be repeated in their entirety, some as many as five times, before a take was acceptable to Parker. On “Ornithology” (take 3, found on The Legendary Dial Masters, Jazz Classics) Parker erupted masterfully with a driving, leaping, yet light and utterly clean solo that alone justifies his stature. Russell recorded Dexter Gordon, Dodo Marmarosa, and Howard McGhee, among others, for Dial before shutting down the label in ‘49. His Bird Lives! is the definitive Parker bio.

Bill Monroe (1911-96), the “Father of Bluegrass,” was one of the most important American musicians of the century. The bluegrass he perfected was both emotionally potent - his “high lonesome” tenor keened mournfully of and over the rolling Kentucky hills - and technically dazzling. The breakneck speed and precision of his greatest band, the Bluegrass Boys with Lester Flatt on guitar and Earl Scruggs on banjo, stands up technically and imaginatively to the finest jazz of Armstrong, Parker and Coltrane.

The eighth child born to Buck and Melissa Monroe in northwestern Kentucky, Bill took up mandolin as a child because no one else in the family played it. After his father died, Bill lived with his uncle, Pendleton Vandiver (“Uncle Pen”), still remembered as one of the best fiddlers in the area. The pair played square dances together, where Bill perfected his sense of timing. Monroe also played with, and was influenced deeply by a black fiddler/guitarist, Arnold Schultz. After stacking oil barrels in Indiana for several years, Bill and his brothers Birch and Charlie were hired as touring square dancers by Chicago’s WLS National Barn Dance in ‘32, and were exposed to some of the hottest country string bands, including the Prairie Ramblers and McMichen’s Georgia Wildcats.

The Monroe Brothers (Charlie and Bill) began playing radio stations around the Carolinas and Georgia in ‘34 where they were heard by A&R man Eli Oberstein, who then signed them to Victor. After recording sixty songs, including “What Would You Give In Exchange,” and enduring about the same number of fist fights, the Brothers broke up in ‘38. Bill convened the first Blue Grass Boys in ‘39, which recorded with Frank Walker for Victor’s Bluebird imprint, including classics “Mule Skinner Blues” and Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel No. 7.” After the war, Monroe and a new Blue Grass Boys were signed to Columbia by Art Satherley.

“Uncle Art” Satherley (1889-1986) was, with Ralph Peer and Frank Walker, among the pioneers of the country music industry. Born in Bristol, England, Satherley came to the U.S. in ‘13 and worked for the Wisconsin Chair Company making Edison phonograph cabinets. The same company owned the Paramount race label in Chicago, where Satherley moved into promotion behind Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, and other blues greats. By the late-’20s he was with the ARC label where he produced Gene Autry, Bob Wills, Roy Acuff, Hank Penny, Hoosier Hot Shots, Floyd Tillman, and many others, moving to Columbia in ‘38 when it merged with ARC. In ‘45 he signed Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys.

After recording “Blue Grass Special” in ‘45, the first version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” in ‘46, the band hit their rip-roaring peak with “Blue Grass Breakdown” in ‘47, the most important instrumental in bluegrass history. Flatt and Scruggs’ more-famous “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was clearly derived from this: Flatt with his signature bass-G runs at the end of each “verse,” Scruggs rolling his magical three-finger banjo style, while Monroe busted out tasty licks on the mandolin, all at a careening pace that cornered on two wheels threatening to tip at any moment. It never tipped and it’s never been topped.

Hank Williams (1923-53) is the most important artist in country music history, but he couldn’t have done it without Fred Rose. Born in rural Alabama and raised by a strong mother in the Depression South when his father was committed to an institution, young Hank lived for music. It is reputed that Hank picked up rudiments of guitar and performing from blues singer Tee-Tot (Rufe Payne) as a child in Greenville. The family moved to Montgomery in ‘37, and Hank was already good enough to win a talent contest with an original song, “W.P.A. Blues,” that year. With a repertoire of Roy Acuff, Jimmie Rodgers and original tunes, Williams had his own radio show on WSFA by ‘41.

A back injury kept Williams out of the Army, so he worked in the shipyards of Mobile by day and played the honky tonks by night. He met another strong woman, Audrey Sheppard, who had enough confidence in Hank’s talent for the both of them, and they were married in ‘44.

Fred Rose (1897-1954) was a child prodigy on piano who played for tips in the saloons of St. Louis. He gravitated to Chicago by his teens, where he performed, recorded player piano rolls, and wrote scores of songs, including “’deed I Do“ and “Red Hot Mama” for Sophie Tucker. Rose played briefly with Paul Whiteman’s band, drifted to Nashville in ‘33 where he had his own radio show on WSM (Fred Rose’s Song Shop - “you suggest the title and Fred will compose the song live on the air!”), then to the songwriter’s mecca, New York’s Tin Pan Alley. Another songwriter introduced Rose to Gene Autry, whom he accompanied to Hollywood and with whom he co-wrote 16 film songs including “Tears On My Pillow,” and the Academy Award-nominated (‘41) “Be Honest With Me.”

Rose returned to Nashville in ‘42 and had his country music epiphany one evening listening to Roy Acuff sing “Don’t Make Me Go to Bed and I’ll Be Good” at the Opry. Rose began writing country songs in earnest and accepted when Acuff asked him to go into partnership on the first all-country music publishing company, Acuff-Rose. By ‘45, Rose had turned over the daily management of the company to his accountant son Wesley in order to concentrate on songwriting, talent hunting, and marketing (i.e. song plugging). Father and son Rose were engaged in their daily table tennis session when Hank and Audrey Williams walked unannounced into their office in September of ‘46.

Rose immediately saw Williams’ talent for what it was and signed him as a songwriter. The rest is legend on its way to myth: under Rose’s guidance as song publisher-polisher/producer/father figure, Williams became country’s biggest star (recording briefly for Sterling, then for MGM, where he was signed by Frank Walker) and most accomplished songwriter, generating genre-transcending classics “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Move It On Over,” “You Win Again,” “Jambalaya,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You),” and arguably, greatest of all, “I’m So Lonesome I’m Could Cry,” before dying in the back seat of his limo after a yearlong bender at the age of 29 (all on The Complete Hank Williams, Mercury).

“Lonesome” wasn’t even a hit single for Hank (it was released as the B side of “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” in ‘49), but the song’s stature has risen ever since, its quiet desperation unsettling each generation anew. It is reputed that Rose had Williams change the last word in the song’s refrain and title from “die” to “cry,” tipping the scales back to despondency from despair, but he couldn’t disguise the true nature of that cry.

In many ways Williams is a doppelganger of Robert Johnson: rural Southerners possessed of a genius that burnt through the possessor as it expressed itself, a genius for the expression of loneliness in men who desperately hated to be alone, a genius that grew as it peered deeper into the darkness until the darkness was all that remained.

Their differences are also instructive: Johnson, who preceded Williams by about a decade, achieved stardom only on the most intimate level - those who saw, knew, but Johnson performed in the middle of the Depression for small, black audiences and there was no mechanism for translating his greatness into stardom (in a final bitch-slap from fate, Johnson’s death precluded his inclusion in John Hammond’s Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall). Williams peaked during a post-war boom, and, supported by a strong woman, had his genius plugged into an awaiting apparatus by an avuncular string-puller, all of which turned his greatness into stardom of the highest order. Yet what these men shared goes far deeper than what they didn’t - both translated the deepest, rawest pain within themselves into something beautiful, then died.

posted by Anonymous at 8:45 PM

 
Recording Industry Totally Not Kidding Dammit

from the SF GATE MORNING FIX
Thu, 28 Feb 2002

Recording Academy President C. Michael Greene used his speech at the
bland and totally rigged Grammy Awards to lobby for an end to rampant
electronic music-swapping, which he said is damaging the recording
industry and totally screwing with his ability to scam millions of dollars
from the idiot public in a thinly veiled act of major ongoing consumer
fraud. "This illegal file-sharing and ripping of music is pervasive, out
of control and it's oh so criminal," Greene said, as no one anywhere
actually had any idea what this guy actually does for a living,as in
actual work. The industry complains that record sales are plummeting and
profit margins are thin, largely because of the illegal swapping of music
files over the Internet, and not because the recording industry has been
ripping off consumers for years and gleefully overcharging and gouging
artists for major chunks of their livelihoods and artificially inflating
the cost of CDs and being entirely slothful in keeping up with new
technologies because they're largely lazy and corporate and unethical.
"You little punk-ass kids keep this up, and I won't be able to make my
Hummer payments," Greene should've added, wagging a finger, secretly
longing for the time when a very drunk David Hasselhoff serenaded him in
his hot tub and he felt his first real pangs of genuine love.

posted by tofu at 1:37 PM

 
Emptying Out The Bookmarks #7

Bernard Shifman Is A Moron Spammer

A clueless spammer provides constant amusement for all -- be sure to check out the dance remixes of the threatening phone calls in the "Kreative Korner" section. Embrace the vitriol...
posted by tofu at 10:46 AM

 
ANNIE DEFIANT

"This society is set up to condition most of us to be slaves, while the patricians are taught to take as much as they possibly can from us, the plebes. It's amazing how much submissive indoctrination we receive from infancy to old age. We are told we must be good, fair, to share, to love, to help. All of these characteristics are the characteristics of victims. The patricians are taught how to set the rules so they can skim millions and millions from those of us who are raised to be satisfied with next to nothing. Whenever a scandal like this becomes public I have a difficult time restraining myself form becoming a total anarchist.

The republicans have been trying to deregularize big business to the point that blatant robbery of the population will be rampant, if it isn't already. For the almighty buck, the environment will be destroyed and poisons will continue to be sold to us in the form of toxic goods like tobacco. And most appalling is the reality that accounting rules can be followed to the letter, if not the spirit, and a company like Enron can swindle stock holders, banks, and their employees and perhaps be technically still within the letter of the law. What a mess, what a disgrace. "
ANNE DEON
posted by Anonymous at 1:34 PM

 
Slipping Away
The mainstream music industry will celebrate itself again with the 44th annual Grammys tonight, but perhaps more than ever, the music isn’t the story. Every year a new category or two are added to please some subsection of the industry, to reflect the Recording Academy’s commitment to “diversity,” and to deflect the age-old criticism that the Grammys are out of touch with the “street.”

Listen to this blather from Michael Greene, President/CEO of the Recording Academy, taken from the nomination press release of January 4:

“Once again, this year's nominations reflect many different musical points of view — from those established artists whose influence has shaped the evolution of our musical language, to newcomers who speak with a unique resonance."

Or resonate with unique speech. Better still is the paragraph announcing this year’s new category:

“This year the Academy announced first-time nominees in the Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category, a new category which will be introduced at the 44th GRAMMY Awards as part of the Academy's ongoing effort to broaden its reach and fully reflect the dynamic diversity of the always evolving music world. This new category will honor a Rap/Sung vocal collaborative performance by artists who do not normally perform together. Nominees include: Eve Featuring Gwen Stefani for "Let Me Blow Ya Mind"; Ja Rule Featuring Case for "Livin' It Up"; Jagged Edge Featuring Nelly for "Where The Party At"; Ludacris Featuring Nate Dogg for "Area Codes"; and Mystic & Planet Asia for "W."

As if any of the above are truly startling pairings: only Eve and Gwen Stefani could even be said to have come from different stylistic backgrounds, and even their salt and pepper action is hardly revolutionary. Blacks and whites have been recording together since Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday in the ‘30s. And what is the “Artists who do not normally perform together” line supposed to mean? Are there recording police who judge such things? If any of these songs were really great, wouldn’t they be nominated in the Record of the Year category? Many rappers sing some and many singers rap some, where do these miscreants fit in with the recording police?

There are now 101 categories in the general Grammys, and another 39 in the Latin Grammys. At approximately five nominees per category (some variation for ties and other numerological arcana), that makes about 700 nominees. I am a big fan of modern music - I am not one of these “they don’t make music like they used to in my day” butt plugs, but are there really 700 super good records that came out between October 1, 2000 and September 30, 2001? Why not just nominate all 20,000 or so records that came out domestically last year? That would be quite “inclusive.”

Looking only at one marquee category, Album of the Year, the effort to balance diversity, street, and heritage creates a “one from category A, one from category B, one from category C” hodgepodge that is certain to inspire no one. Who has even heard of India.Arie, this year’s obscure critic’s choice? Who cares but her mother that she makes mildly interesting acoustic soul?

Bob Dylan’s record is nice enough, but pretty much his same old cranky “real music stopped in the ‘20s” type iconoclasm that he’s been into for a while: all anti-modern posturing and not many real songs. Since he’s an icon, doesn’t fit into any easy category, and is still a prickly old fart, he gets nominated just for putting out a record that doesn’t suck. I love Dylan but I won’t play this one in five, let alone 20 years.

Outkast’s is just a mildly provocative, tuneful rap album. One could listen to it and say, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” It isn’t egregiously stupid, self-referential, or sociopathic like most rap with street cred, so it’s in, G.

Similarly to Dylan, U2 made an album that doesn’t blow chunks and is a return to it’s brand of “inspirational” modern rock that so wowed the Grammy voters in the ‘80s. Again, I really like U2 and this is their best record since ‘91’s Achtung Baby, but it only has a few songs I can even remember (“Beautiful Day,” “Stuck In a Moment,” “Walk On”), and all it really says is you can hit 40, still rock a little, stop being a solipsistic pud, and retain a whiff of “relevance.” Just because it is their first album that hasn’t sucked in 11 years is hardly reason to swoon.

Lastly is the nomination of the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack. This is the oddest, and in a sense, most depressing nomination of all. Is it being rewarded for totally unexpectedly selling a shitload of copies? For well-representing about 70 years of traditional country and bluegrass recording history? For being a strangely good movie? Here’s how I judge records: do I ever feel like putting it on if I don’t have to? Do I like it if I do?

I probably would never put on India or Outkast. Sorry. If a fever came over me, I might put on the Dylan and like it for a few songs, then get bored and dump it. I might put on the U2 if about seven better discs of theirs (not including hits collections: Boy, War, Under a Blood Red Sky, Wide Awake In America, The Joshua Tree, Rattle and Hum, Achtung Baby) were stolen, and I would like it until ennui set in after five or six songs.

O Brother would probably fare best under this guideline because it’s various quality artists (Norman Blake, Emmylou Harris, Fairfield Four, Cox Family, John Hartford, Chris Thomas King, Alison Krause, Gillian Welsh, the Whites, Ralph Stanley) doing rerecordings of trad country and bluegrass, along with some original recordings (James Carter, Harry McClintock, Stanley Brothers), so it has novelty appeal and consistency. But what in the name of the Yodeling Brakemen’s ghost does this have to do with music in 2001? This is great old music that deserves to be heard but it should no more be nominated for Album of the Year than should the Beatles’ 1, an even better collection of old music.

No, the real news on the day of this year's extravaganza has nothing to do with music, but to do with the industry itself, which is literally on the verge of falling apart. As Neil Strauss wrote Sunday:

”The major record labels depend on three things to survive: the money of fans, the music of their artists and the support of the multinational corporations that own them. But the labels are suddenly realizing that they can't depend on any of these.”

Though the industry was down 5% last year, this is nothing compared to what the very near future seems to hold. Check out this litany of testicle-crushing woe:

“Radio stations with ever more limited playlists, at the downloading of music from the Internet, at the increased ease of duplicating CD's on home computers and stereos, at the skyrocketing costs of marketing albums, at artists fighting their record companies, at the replacement of musically knowledgeable executives with corporate bean counters and at multinational companies that demand quick profits and instant hits. Add to all this new judicial and political problems, most recently a court ruling Friday in the Napster case that states that the record labels' own Internet services 'may run afoul of Internet antitrust laws.'”

One executive claims the profit margin for the majors is down to 8-10% from 30% as recently as 1994. Ironically, things look pretty good for the music industry as a whole with sales shifting over to CD burners, MP3 players, big hard drives for computers, blank CD’s, etc., but the labels themselves would appear to be entering the same phase as did the ice-delivery business after the invention of the refrigerator.

The high-end artists are also ganging up on the labels, forming the Recording Artists Coalition. Last night, at least 15 whoppers including Billy Joel, the Eagles, Stevie Nicks, No Doubt and the Dixie Chicks performed at four different concert halls in Southern California in a benefit for their new advocacy group. Per Strauss:

”Their aim is to overturn legislation exempting artists from a California labor code that limits service contracts to seven years, but the long-term goal is to get adequate compensation from the labels.”

Just before the great Peggy Lee died in January, she won a class-action suit with hundreds of other artists and their heirs over $4.75 million in unpaid, miscalculated, and unauthorized deductions from royalties. Others including Courtney Love and the Dixie Chicks have suits pending over accounting practices. The chickens, and the Chicks, are coming home to roost. I’m not gloating, and my personal dealings with the labels as writer, author, and radio man have been quite genial; but in the big picture, this couldn’t be happening to a nicer bunch of multinational conglomerates. I wish not for the destruction of the industry, which would make my life much more difficult and chaotic, but for a more equitable arrangement between label and artist along the lines of major league sports, and a better deal for the consumer as technology cuts out most of the grasping hands of middle men. See also this for more Strauss on the industry, and this for last Friday’s Napster copyright ruling.
posted by Anonymous at 12:09 PM

 
WE THE PEOPLE

Enron is mainly a matter of greed that backfired. USA "business as usual" is what it is all about ... only this time the "Enron-ites" got caught with their hands in the cash register.

Money rules in America. Money is power. The capitalists and politicians want us peasants to believe that the alternative is something like communism but all the "isms" fall short of satisfying the people. We have been desensitized and do not face up to the real issues of the day -- like racism, affordable health care, over-taxation, the need for better education, the environment, the separation of church and state, our corrupt justice system, prison reform, AIDS, abortion, homelessness, the miltary industrial complex.

Someday, if the world doesn't nuke itself first, or perhaps after the world nukes itself, a system will emerge that will benefit all us pathetic earthlings. Sad but true. America is corrupt and out of control. Sweeping changes are required and they're not gonna happen. The people are too brainwashed to force change and the people in political power are too indebted to money interests to act in the best interests of the people. We the people. What a joke.
MT
posted by Anonymous at 4:09 AM

 
Enron Spits Upon John Calvin
Enron is a byzantine scandal of enormous financial and political dimensions. A veteran of the biggest scandal of them all, John Dean, emphasizes the political aspects of the debacle, citing California Congressman Henry Waxman’s accusations that Enron "managed to become one of the most influential voices in Washington and a significant presence for both parties. It was able to persuade the federal government to adopt policies that resulted in less oversight and contributed to Enron's demise," based upon a lengthy list of specific examples including:

"The White House Energy Plan includes no less than 17 policies requested by Enron, including further deregulation the company sought.

Vice President Cheney's has opposed price caps despite California's soaring electric prices. Enron opposed the price caps too, and told the Vice President so.

The White House assisted Enron in its negotiations with the government of India regarding the sale of a $2.9 billion power plant. Indeed, Vice President Cheney personally intervened.”

Dean feels that Enron’s political influence buying will ultimately be an even greater scandal than the financial one now being pursued by every Congressional panel and its mother. While Enron clearly had influence over politicians - most obviously over the White House Energy Plan, which reads like an Enron Christmas list - a quid pro quo relationship will be very difficult to prove.

I think the deeper significance lies on the financial side, and for reasons deeper than I have heard suggested thus far. The lead story (now in the Premium Archive) in the NY Times “Week In Review” section of Feb. 17, sums up the prevailing view:

”The public fascination with Enron expresses an anxiety over whether the trust people place in their employers, political leaders, and even capitalism as it is currently practiced, is misplaced.”

I’m sure all of that is true, but I think people are more engaged and enraged by Enron than they have been by financial wrongdoing since perhaps the Depression because they feel deceived on a metaphysical level.

The moral underpinnings of capitalism, and in particular the rampant capitalism dominant in the U.S., derive ultimately from a branch of Protestantism called Calvinism. One doesn’t have to be Calvinist, Protestant, Christian, or religious at all to buy into this belief system, as it has been woven into the subconscious fabric of America from the beginning. According to political philosopher and sociologist Max Weber, the Calvinist belief in predestination is at the heart of capitalist success, and this is at the heart of the Enron problem.

John Calvin (1509-64) was one of the most important figures of the Reformation. Fleeing persecution in his native France for his Protestant views, Calvin settled in Geneva, which became a refuge for Protestants from all over Europe. In addition to founding Calvinism (which evolved into Presbyterianism), Calvin greatly influenced Protestant thought in general, especially through his notion of "predestination," the doctrine that God has predetermined from eternity who will be saved and who will be damned, and that we cannot influence the outcome.

According to Weber, this left the Protestants rather anxiously looking for signs as to who was going to end up rejoicing amongst the cherubim and seraphim and who was going to spend eternity caterwauling in unspeakable torment. This was an issue of more than passing interest: our time upon this mortal coil was viewed as but a moment’s pause before the gaping maw of a very real time without end. People wanted to know where they stood. Folding neatly with this anxiety was the concept of “calling,” as described by Alister McGrath in his First Things article "Calvin and the Christian Calling":

”Calvin regarded vocation as a calling into the everyday world. The idea of a calling or vocation is first and foremost about being called by God, to serve Him within his world. Work was thus seen as an activity by which Christians could deepen their faith, leading it on to new qualities of commitment to God. Activity within the world, motivated, informed, and sanctioned by Christian faith, was the supreme means by which the believer could demonstrate his or her commitment and thankfulness to God. To do anything for God, and to do it well, was the fundamental hallmark of authentic Christian faith. Diligence and dedication in one’s everyday life are, Calvin thought, a proper response to God.”

Working this diligently for God rather naturally led to economic gain, which was not squandered in material aggrandizement by the austere and self-disciplined Protestants, but saved and reinvested - the same qualities coincidentally required for success in the emerging capitalist economy. Hence the Protestant work ethic. In an interesting bit of psychology, the Calvin-influenced Protestants also came to view economic success as a sign from God, a little wink and nudge from the Almighty, that they were, in fact, among the Chosen. So much for the rich man, eye of the needle, theory.

Skip ahead three or four centuries. America has been built on the Protestant work ethic by Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucianists, Shintoists, Animists, and people who worship 6’ Styrofoam grasshoppers; by people who have never heard of John Calvin or predestination but feel deeply in their bones that hard work and saving will lead to prosperity, if not for them, then at least for their children. Wave upon wave of immigrants have bought the ethos, and more than a dozen generations have at least subconsciously accepted that those who “have” somehow deserve what they have, perhaps as an indication of their status in God’s grace.

If a large majority of citizens hadn’t tacitly bought this notion, they never would have accepted the huge economic disparity that has always existed within capitalism, within the U.S.; the concentration of capital in the hands of dynastic families and corporations, the “trickle down” theory, and the general acceptance that the rich are somehow “different.”

We aren’t idiots and we aren’t utterly naive; we have have generally not resented those who “have” for the subconscious reasons already stated, and chosen to view the system as one of open opportunity where our chance to join the saved is just around the corner. Enron pulls the foundation out from under the whole elaborate edifice.

These people have flouted even the lenient rules of the rich: they didn’t manufacture, create, or even amass wealth. They created the illusion of wealth through sleight of hand, a sleight of hand dependent on timing, a timing that profited hugely a tiny few at the expense of a moderate-sized city’s worth of employees and stock holders, who in a literal Calvinist sense were cast from heaven in the process. And, as far as we know up to now, it was all legal.

Only if Enron’s cynical, manipulative, immoral pretenders to the graces of predestination are cast down like Lucifer and his rebellious band from the ranks of the anointed will the foundations of American capitalism, the Protestant work ethic, again support the weight of a great people’s trust and bear the inequities that trust makes possible. No foreseeable political scandal could touch us so deeply.
posted by Anonymous at 8:33 PM

 
Prayer Life

A journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau has an apartment overlooking the Western Wall. Every day she looks out and sees an old bearded Jewish man praying vigorously. Certain he would be a good interview, she goes to the wall, and introduces herself.

"You come every day to the Wall, sir. How long have you done that and what are you praying for?"

"I have come here to pray every day for 25 years. In the morning I pray for world peace and for the brotherhood of man. I go home to have a cup of tea and I come back and pray for the eradication of illness and disease. And, very, very important, I pray for peace and understanding between the Israelis and Palestinians."

"How does it make you feel to come here everyday for 25 years and pray for these wonderful things?"

"Like I'm talking to a fucking wall."
Robin Petyan

posted by Anonymous at 12:39 PM

 
Emptying The Bookmarks #6

The Burroughs Cutup Machine

See what happens when you scramble your synapses with non-sequiturs and it opens a whole door to creative writing that doesn't involve any mind altering chemicals.

As an example: here's the last sentence after running it through the cutup machine...

"altering chemicals doesn't involve any mind to creative writing that opens a whole door synapses with non-sequiturs and you scramble your see what happens when it"


IE 5+ only -- NS has many javascript errors. There's also a downloadable version.
posted by tofu at 11:06 AM

 
Celebration
The Salt Lake City Winter Games were the greatest possible success: the city proved to be a genial, cosmopolitan host with the zeal and cheer of its Mormon base very much in evidence but with missionary dogma under wraps. The home team boost kicked in with a vengeance as the U.S. raked in 34 medals, more than doubling its past high water mark of 13. The major flaps over pairs figure skating, short track skating, and the usual handful of disqualifications over doping only added to the entertainment value.

The dual golds awarded to the Canadian and Russian pairs seemed a diplomatic, transcendent result; it seemed fitting that the magical Ohno would have falls and/or disqualifications figure into all four of his races, the result of which kept him out of the medals in his final two. It also seemed fitting that heavily favored Michelle Kwan would fall to the bronze while yet another perky teen skated past her. We must have greats who can’t close the final deal to remind us how difficult and precious the final deal is. It also feels right that though the U.S. made a quantum leap in Winter Games success, it lost the medal race to Germany by one, sustaining a spunky “we try harder” second place attitude rather than slipping into a leader’s smugness. The home crowds never seemed to resent the excellence of non-natives and cheered the performance as much as the flag. Topping off the list of successes was NBC's coverage of the Games: a ratings (overall 18% higher than CBS’s of Nagano) and aesthetic winner capitalizing on skill and luck (great weather, compelling performances, drama).

All of these things made the athletes and the IOC very happy, restoring America’s Olympic viability after the lapses of Atlanta had left a bad taste in the collective mouth. But the underlying reason for the ebullience before, during and after Sunday’s closing is that no one got blown up. The world was able to gather - 2,526 athletes from 77 countries and 1.6 million spectators - in absolute defiance of Islamic militant strictures: a spectacular, garish, and lavish celebration of individualism, nationalism, and commercialism absolutely ramming the good life into the faces of those who would force austere “obedience” on all of mankind.

This affront to the pseudo-pieties of Islamofascism was greater still than the Superbowl because it boasted the “world” positively reveling in essentially American values, with the added ironic twist of the knife that it took place on the turf of a creed that on its surface would seem to share some sympathies with Islamist calls to self-denial, abstinence, and propriety (and even the role of women). But the Mormons were able to show that they are Americans and citizens of the world apart from their religious affiliation, a not-incompatible duality of loyalty that spits on the Islamist after kicking him down. A rollicking, good natured, sentimental, orgy of physicality (EVERYONE wore a skintight suit of some kind; women’s faces weren’t covered, they were pored over from every angle) and emotion is as good a reply to September 11 as a daisy cutter shower. And no one got blown up. Shove that up your Islamofascist Tora Bora.

Who knows what the future holds, but we have shown that we can live our lives to the fullest, celebrate our values, AND protect ourselves at least under limited circumstances. This is indeed cause for celebration.
posted by Anonymous at 9:40 AM

 
Reply to Roach
My friend in South Africa sent this letter last week. This is my partial reply:

I am also uncomfortable about the Bush administration’s energy policy, and its ties to Big Oil/Energy. It is clear that Enron was able to influence the deregulation of the energy industry to its own (temporary) aggrandizement. But, ultimately the U.S.-based global capitalist system worked to the extent that Enron was allowed to fail - there was no intervention from the U.S. administration as the walls came tumbling down.

I feel for the thousands who lost billions, but I am certain that there will be civil and criminal penalties to pay for those who perpetrated the most grievous deceptions and who profited from inside knowledge of impending disaster. And again, the capitalist system worked, albeit clumsily, as it lurched to close off an artificial loophole created by deceptive accounting practices. Deception + Time = Disintegration and Recrimination. There is no free lunch; truth comes out in the end.

I am in agreement with the NY Times editorial of February 18 that the time has come to dramatically reduce our “crippling reliance on imported oil,” indeed on petroleum in general. The President’s answer, to overturn the 1980 ban on drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is shortsighted and perverse. Per the Times editorial, “The surest road to greater energy independence is a disciplined program of energy efficiency, coupled with a major effort to develop renewable non-petroleum sources. This is the road Jimmy Carter started on after the oil shocks of the 1970's, leading to fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. Yet Mr. Bush continues to put his chips on an alarmingly unbalanced House bill that provides $27 billion in subsidies for traditional energy sources and only $6 billion for conservation.”

Not even dwelling on the need to preserve an environmentally sensitive wilderness area from the depredations of drilling and spilling, Bush’s contention that the oil to be found in ANWR is enough to substantially reduce our dependence on foreign oil is simply wrong. New technologies and conservation would have a much greater impact: “Increasing fuel-efficiency standards to 40 miles a gallon — a reasonable expectation, even with existing technology — would save about 2.5 million barrels a day by 2020. That is about five times what the Arctic refuge is expected to yield and, as it turns out, is roughly the same amount as our present imports from the Persian Gulf.” The U.S. has about 3% of the world's oil reserves. It is simply not possible to produce our way to oil independence, even if we sacrifice all of our wilderness, parks, refuges, and coastlines.

So we have areas of agreement, while some of your statistics would seem to be off, even where we are in philosophical agreement: you say the U.S. uses half of the world’s energy, it’s actually closer to 25%. Also, while we have some philosophical agreement, we also have some areas of very deep disagreement, namely regarding the very character of the United States. You say its difficult to maintain the opinion that the American government is acting for the good of all. Clearly it isn’t - it is acting for the good of the U.S., that is its job. The U.S. isn’t the world government, and where there is conflict between national interest and “world interest” (if there is such a thing), it is our government’s duty to look after national interest, as it would be for any other government.

Your view of the press is unique. In relative terms CNN is more “liberal” than the Fox News Network, which is decidedly “conservative,” but both clearly view the world from an American perspective. Again, how could it be otherwise? Both are based in the U.S. and their audience is primarily American. Yet their journalistic standards are as neutral as any other nation’s press, and are much more impartial than, say, Al Jazeera, which is nothing more than an Islamic/Arab cheering squad. Your most telling statement is “when innocent Americans get killed, this is 'terror' or 'evil'; when innocent foreigners get killed, this is 'collateral damage.'” I cannot put the matter more succinctly than did Michael Ignatieff in his review of Caleb Carr’s The Lessons of Terror:

“There are those who equate the civilians killed by American bombing in Afghanistan with the civilians killed in the World Trade Center. All are dead, but death does not create any moral equivalency among them. In one case, civilians were massacred deliberately, and without warning, during a time of peace, by a nonuniformed group whose intention was to spread terror. In the other case, civilians were killed during an exercise of legitimate self-defense by a state, in response to an act of war, and were killed unintentionally despite good-faith efforts, by targeteers and weaponeers, to avoid doing so.”

This is not “propaganda,” simply truth.

Section 802 of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 (not the “Homeland Security Act” as you stated), enacted October 26, 2001, changes the definition of terrorism as follows:

(5) the term `domestic terrorism' means activities that--
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended--
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping;

As you say, this has not been subject to serious abuse thus far, but I agree it is possible that a legitimate protest that escalated into violence could possibly be construed as an attempt to “intimidate of coerce” the civilian population or the government, and thus be found to be “terrorism.” I also believe that if this happened, this construction would be deemed unconstitutional under the
First Amendment.

I simply reassert the below:

The US cheerfully helps any country that is willing to play by the rules of relatively free enterprise, individual human rights, free exchange of ideas, and private property. These then eventually yield the prosperity of capitalism and freedom of democracy.

This is so for reasons of self-interest. We want nations to trade with. Democratic, capitalistic countries that live by the rule of law are the most stable countries to trade with, and are the least danger to us militarily, so it is only to our advantage to aid countries to reach these goals.

You are mischaracterizing Bush’s statements regarding being “with us or against us.” He is referring specifically to the matter of terrorism, terrorism of international scope that has killed many thousands over the last few decades, and it was simply time to stop our policy of appeasement and containment of terrorism that dates to the Nixon administration.

Bush made a decision in the immediate aftermath of September 11 that this time, things would be different. From a purely strategic standpoint, the magnitude of his attack was bin Laden's greatest mistake. The shocking, horrific loss of life; the theatrical manner whereby this was achieved; and the very real fear of what the future might bring made the decision to go after him and his kind with the full capability of the U.S. military easy to defend, if not inevitable. Despite my many differences with the president on other matters (see above), this was absolutely the right decision: to take the war to the terrorists, to hold those who harbor and abet them as equally responsible, and to make the destruction of terrorists and the disruption of their organizations and activities the top foreign policy priority.

As you stated in your first letter, “either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem.” This is exactly what Bush has been telling the other nations of the world regarding terrorism. This is a perfectly reasonable and sensible thing to do.

Your next points regard globalization in general. The U.S. isn’t the cause of globalization, just the largest player as the world’s largest economy. Without going into the details at this moment, either you believe the vast majority of economists that relatively open trade borders, the free flow of capital and information, and the rights of consumers to have access to the largest array of products at the lowest prices is best for the majority of the world’s citizens over the long run or you don’t. Of course this system favors those with the highest education and access to capital, but it also provides the greatest opportunities to the greatest number of people, and is the best way to raise the overall level of prosperity. Does it force people to change? Does it displace workers in outmoded or inefficient economies? Does the system require a safety net? The answer is yes to all of the above.

The world has never been fair in outcome. The world’s great attempt to assure a fair outcome for every person - communism - failed utterly because it failed outright to take into account human nature. People become slothful and unmotivated when no benefit derives from their work, when no competitive advantage accrues to their efforts. In addition, the “dictatorship of the masses” period that is supposed to be temporary while the playing field is forcibly leveled, turns out to be the permanent form of government. The more power that is condensed into fewer hands, the less likely that power will ever be redistributed to the governed, and the more likely those holding power will be corrupted by it. That’s just human nature. The genius of the American system is that it pits power against itself, and emphasizes that all power derives from the people. Any system that posits the power of the collective over the rights of the individual will inevitably fail in the long run. Surely if we have learned anything from the most violent of centuries, the 20th, it is that.

The Americans are a caring people. They know they are fortunate and feel a responsibility to the world. They want to help, but they most want to help those who want to help themselves. They would rather invest in the future than “throw money down a hole” (which is similar to how they feel about their own countrymen who do not support themselves). America gave almost $14 billion in foreign grants and credits in 1998 (the last year with complete statistics) - that’s money just given away, and that’s just the government. That doesn’t include the billions given by private individuals. Do we favor those who would cooperate with us? Of course. Is this coercion? We don’t owe anyone anything - it just makes sense that we would favor those nations who forward our aims and/or ideals. Would you expect it otherwise?

Regarding pollution, the U.S. needs to do far more to reduce the amount of pollution that it is spewing into the world’s environment; however, contrary to popular belief, it ranks near the top third of countries (45 out of 142) on the Environmental Sustainability Index.

I will address America’s economic role in the world, why the assertion that “you [Americans] have because we do not have” is absurd, and a discussion of purportedly reliable, “unaligned” media in another posting.
posted by Anonymous at 3:56 PM