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

 
Bush World
For various reasons, including the six-month anniversary of 9/11 and the publication of Frank Bruni’s tales from the Bush presidential campaign trail, Ambling Into History (the current subject of Andrew Sullivan's book club), assessments of George W. Bush as very much in vogue. Today in the NY Times, Bill Keller takes a crack at it. Keller believes, not unreasonably, that right-of-center thinkers are most in tune with Bush, and he canvasses several for his piece.

The result is a broad consensus that coincides with my own observations. Bush is a moralist “crusader” (his use of the word just after the attacks was not a mistake) pursuing “universalist” (read monotheistic) ideals: at home in the form of soul-nurturing, nuclear family-oriented self-sufficiency (examples: welfare reform raising work requirements, a proposed $300M a year for counseling and other efforts to encourage and support marriage), and - galvanized by 9/11 - a mission to root out “evil” from the world in the forms of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in “irresponsible” hands. Keller quotes and agrees with this Bush observation by “influential conservative” Norman Podhoretz:

"On tactics, he may be listening to Colin Powell. But he's very clear as to his strategic objectives — not just to clean up Al Qaeda cells but to effect regime changes in six or seven countries and to create conditions which would lead to internal reform and modernization in the Islamic world."

All but the most vindictive concede that Bush isn’t stupid. Bruni, a liberal writer for the NY Times, in response to questioning from Sullivan’s book club readers, opines:

Some of the questions about Bush's intelligence arose from what can, I think, justly be called his poor brain-to-mouth coordination, and from his relative inelegance or simplicity in talking about policy. That's a yardstick that gets used, and it's probably a shallow one. But there are so many other yardsticks - knowledge of one's own strengths and weaknesses, the ability to make accurate visceral judgments about people, the mental discipline it takes to keep an eye on the forest without getting distracted by the trees, a good and accurate sense of the atmosphere around you at a given time. And by these yardsticks, which are also incomplete and probably insufficient, Bush fares much better, I think.

In addition to not being stupid, neither is Bush unserious or a “lightweight.” Keller, also a NY Times liberal, writes, "Mr. Bush is a serious man, meaning resolute and full of purpose," although he also states, "The sometimes skillful work of his speechwriters, which he sometimes delivers with conviction, cannot disguise the fact that he is not a deep thinker, a student of ideas, or even a very curious man."

Now, perhaps conveniently buoyed by his conviction that fighting terror and purging the world of evil is his “mission from God” (literally), Bush has a moral justification for a certain political ruthlessness, a ruthlessness that got him into office in the first place, and which he is clearly ready to use to keep him in office in the second place (his imposition of anachronistic steel tariffs was a purely political move aimed at bolstering support in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia).

How you feel about Bush comes down to your priorities. I didn’t vote for him and thought him to be something of a dolt, which I still do in a way because he’s good at things I’m not and vice versa. I’m a lot more articulate than he is, and, being good at it, articulateness is something I normally value highly. I’m perhaps more intellectual than he is, but he’s got me in all those other categories: the world vision thing, Bruni's “knowledge of one's own strengths and weaknesses, the ability to make accurate visceral judgments about people, the mental discipline it takes to keep an eye on the forest without getting distracted by the trees, a good and accurate sense of the atmosphere around you at a given time.” (I imagine if I was better at those things I’d be further along in life by now.) My priorities have changed since 9/11, and the things Bush excels at now seem more important than glibness and a way with theory.

It isn't that I suddenly agree with him on everything, though. Domestically, I’m opposed to much of what he’s up to: I’m a medium-strength environmentalist, think we need an aggressive alternative fuel policy, and oppose the steel tariffs as anti-free trade even though I live in Ohio. In principle I can hang with the welfare reform (which Clinton began), although it is perverse to require more hours of work from recipients without providing secure daycare to make it feasible.

However, at this point, I’m less concerned with individual policy than with the big picture, and right now the big picture is the state of the world. I don’t have a problem with his handling of Afghanistan, nor do I have a problem with his “axis of evil.” I think picking three countries and making sure one of them wasn’t Islamic was a bit cynical and overtly political, but who in their right mind would say Iraq, Iran and North Korea don’t have regimes that blow dead rats in the gutter?

I do believe in a carrot and stick approach: we can’t just blow them up, we have to build them back up as well, but at least Bush’s new three-year, $10B promise to boost aid to poor countries is a step in the right direction. Right now, I fear Democratic equivocation and lack of resolve on this biggest issue. We must restructure the world, period, and if that means blowing up countries one at a time until they collectively get their shit together, then so be it. Might doesn’t make right - but we have the might and it’s time to set things right, nuances and niceties be damned. You don’t clean a cesspool with a toothbrush - you drain the stinking mess, sanitize it with steam, and start over again, even if it takes another seven years.
posted by Eric at 9:02 PM

 
A Vote For Censorship
From NY Post (thanks to Marty)
"The wonder of the Web is that it makes it so easy to access information from remote areas of the world. If you're sitting in Afghanistan, you can access this. Our enemies are those who would use our technology against us. Look at Sept. 11."
- White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, on an administration order to clear government Web sites of information concerning weapons of mass destruction.
posted by Eric at 4:52 PM

 
News and Commentary Roundup
The finest of the day's journalistic harvest, preselected by Jerry.

Kausfiles, by Mickey Kaus

It's not just a 60-day blackout: The ACLU points out that, in presidential election years, the newly passed McCain-Feingold-Shays-Meehan law would suppress issue ads that mentioned the names of any of the presidential candidates for virtually the whole year. ... That's because the law bans such broadcast ads (when they aren't funded by strictly limited PAC contributions) 30 days before a primary, and there's a primary somewhere every couple of weeks! In 2000, the ACLU claims, only August would be left as a free speech month....

"The Politician's Wife: Behind every great woman is a dead husband” by Chris Suellentrop, Slate

Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Dole, and Tipper Gore share one thing in common: A dead husband. Not literally, of course. Blood still pumps through Al's and Bob's and Bill's veins. But their husbands' elective careers are dead, though each man may be in a different stage of grief: denial (Al), bargaining (Bill), and acceptance (Bob). Hillary, Liddy, and Tipper aren't just political wives. They're political widows....

"The Gambler Loses Again" by David Ignatius, Washington Post

Back when he was a general, Ariel Sharon was often criticized as a bold but unreliable leader -- a man who took big leaps without knowing where he would land. That kind of adventurism is dangerous enough if you're commanding troops, but it's close to unforgivable if you're responsible for the security of an entire nation....

"What We Don't Know" by Richard Cohen, Washington Post

Sen. Hillary Clinton was "very mad." Her colleague, Sen. Charles Schumer, was critical as well. New York's mayor, Mike Bloomberg, was not happy either, and neither was New York's governor, George Pataki. As for myself, I am painfully perplexed. For once, the right answer eludes me....

"They Splutter Through the War" by Charles Krauthammer, Washinton Post

It is not easy opposing the war on terror. Sept. 11 seems to have been a fairly definitive declaration of war on America, leaving us little choice but to fight. Nonetheless, we are blessed with a cadre of thinkers for whom failure to oppose a war -- any war -- is a kind of self-betrayal. Whether out of distrust of American power or reflexive sympathy with whoever is today carrying the banner of anti-Americanism (yesterday, communists; today, Islamists), they have sallied forth carrying the flag of protest....

"How Does Bond Keep It Up?" Ian Fleming's sadistic, snobbish Cold War tales are the latest Penguin Modern Classics - and the secret of their success lies in the way they anticipated the world of bin Laden” by Christopher Hitchens, The Observer

There are many reasons for the immense adhesiveness of the 007 classics, and one of these reasons is certainly the loving attention paid to what we now term the 'designer' aspect of culture: the brand name and logo and product-placement element that, nowadays so pervasive as to be wanting in any sort of style, was quite a daring refreshment in the post-austerity 1950s....

"Behavior Modification: Soon after the Afghan war began, the Air Force dramatically altered its tactics. What lay behind the change?” by James Fallows, The Atlantic

When fighting begins, military establishments are nearly as eager to observe and record the results as to win. This emphasis is natural, since claims about what did and didn't work may be used for decades afterward to settle arguments, justify new weapons, and affect military doctrine. Long before the first bombs were dropped on Afghanistan, some of the Pentagon's official historians had been invited into the building to observe the proceedings....

posted by Eric at 4:34 PM

 
Emptying Out The Bookmarks #15

After the Telecondom, it only seems natural (so to speak) to point you to Nori The Original Nasal Passage Cleaner.

The pictures say so much more than I could...


posted by tofu at 10:13 AM

 
Skankees
The shadowy Jerry reveals himself as a Mets fan in this email exchange.

While I don't wish any physical ill to Jason Giambi, this Mets fan hopes you're right about the fate of the Yankees - especially the aging and (let's face it) evil pitcher Roger Clemens.
Jerry

Right on J! I used to wish for the Yankees' plane to crash (in the abstract, of course), 9/11 put a quick stop to that nonsense.
Eric

Maybe Giambi can get a paper cut that prevents him from gripping the bat. Or perhaps Ruben Rivera can return and steal all his bats. When you look at Giambi's OPS numbers next to Tino Martinez's, it's scary how much the Yankees have upgraded, particularly when you consider that Giambi is moving from a pitcher's park to the short porch at Yankee Stadium.
Jerry

Funny you should mention all that, because I think it will take some time for the Skanks to adjust to every old fart and errant thrower being purged. I have learned with the Indians that an Allstar at every position doesn't necessarily mean squat. The "chemistry," uncanny ability to do whatever needs to be done at the critical moment, and, of course, pitching is what has won for them. Giambi is a big dopey goof who may disrupt the delicate "chemistry" through no fault of his own. With nice-guy, humble-to-a-fault Jeter as the only superstar, there has been balance; egos (Bernie) may be bruised by all of the attention Giambi gets. My real hope, though, is that the pitching really IS getting old (El Duque 50?, Clemens is due for another breakdown, Wells is too old and fat to tie his shoes, Pettite is due for a down year, Mussina is still very solid), and the mystique of invincibility has been broken. HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Eric

posted by Eric at 5:54 PM

 
E.T. Phone Box Office
Prior to today’s 20th anniversary rerelease of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the beloved Spielberg alien/family flick had grossed about $400M domestically, putting it in 4th place all-time behind Titanic ($600M), Star Wars ($461M), and Star Wars The Phantom Menace ($431M). With some restored scenes and a high-profile marketing campaign, it stands a good chance of regaining second. Everyone who liked it before likes it again save for two curmudgeons: Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, who notes,

But other "improvements" smack of PC revisionism. Elliot's mom once scolded him for looking like a terrorist in his Halloween costume; now she says he looks like a hippie. And remember those guns the feds carried? Thanks to the miracle of digital, they're now brandishing walkie-talkies. Gone, too, is that moment when Elliot calls his brother "penis breath." Is this what two decades have done to free speech?

(Good point, actually) And, this interesting take from the Village Voice comparing E.T. to a dog (genre) movie.

If E.T. is indeed a higher intelligence, as Elliott insists, what does he have to teach? Evidently he is one of those autistic genius types that Hollywood adores—capable of crafting an interstellar communicator out of toys and cutlery, but completely inept at basic social skills. Despite his ability to learn English in a couple of hours, what does E.T. have to say? The boy learns about tolerance, loyalty, his capacity for love. Well, that's all fine, but it's nothing you can't learn from an earth dog.

We shall see.
posted by Eric at 3:02 PM

 
Take the Cash, Flash
While we’re talking baseball, the sad case of Jaret Wright (4th item down) is once again proof that a) you never know what’s going to happen, so b) always take the security of the multi-year deal. As a cocky rookie, Wright almost won the 7th game of the World Series in ‘97. The cockiness turned to overweening pride and a decline in '98, then shoulder problems reduced him in ‘99, and pretty much elimiinated ‘00, and ‘01. ‘02 isn’t looking good either. Fortunately for him, he signed a 4-year, $9M deal after the ‘98 season, so if he has to, he can pay someone to lift his arm for him. It’s still sad.
posted by Eric at 2:03 PM

 
Rock Hall Final
Check out Bob Gruen's cool pics from the induction ceremony and Phil Spector’s after-party.
posted by Eric at 1:19 PM

 
Sports News Out the Wazoo
First, humble Kent State, just down the road a piece, has people screaming “Cinderella” as they advance by beating Pitt in overtime 78-73. Kent is the first team from the MAC to make it to the Elite 8. Jaded columnists are giddy. “Cinderella” may not be the right word, though, as the Golden Flashes have won 21 games in a row. Maybe the right word is “destiny.” Go Flashes.

Second, proud Poland Seminary High School, where my daughter is a senior, got steamrolled by LeBron James and St. Vincent-St. Mary in the Ohio state Division ll basketball semifinals yesterday. Poland certainly has nothing to be ashamed of, making it to the semi’s in basketball, after winning their state division championship in football a couple of years ago. The real story here is that at the high school level, unlike college or pro, an extraordinary talent can still utterly dominate.

Here is Poland, a bunch of “ordinary,” if talented and well-coached kids, going up against a guy who was on the COVER OF SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, for Pete’s sake. Extraordinary talent is an odd thing: you are viewed as some kind of freak, it isn’t fair, it isn’t real competition, expectations are at super-human levels and if you meet them - well, what do you expect? If you don’t, you choked or worse. You are coveted and resented, cheered and hated. It is very difficult to know how to behave: expressions of humility are viewed as false, statements of confidence are viewed as arrogance. On the outside a magical, mature athlete; on the inside, still a dopey teen like all the rest. Let’s hope he keeps it together as well as Kobe.

Speaking of SI, the new baseball preview issue gives the reviled Yankees the double whammy: Jason Giambi is on the cover, and the team is picked to win it all. Thank God, now we don’t have to worry about them. Giambi will probably rupture a spleen in April, and the aging Yankees pitching staff will limp through a geriatric season of brittle bones and palsy.

Things are looking up for the Indians, SI picks them as only the 14th best team overall, and third in their division. Hello World Series.
posted by Eric at 11:51 AM

 
News and Commentary Roundup
The best in journalism, preselected for your edification by Jerry.

"Wedded to Our Celebrity Culture" by Mark Steyn, National Post

On Friday, Shirley Temple Black, the beloved former child star of On The Good Ship Lollipop and Animal Crackers In My Soup fame and more recently U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, pulled out of Liza Minnelli's wedding. Her reason for cancelling at 24 hours' notice was that she was "weirded out" by Liza's fiance's vast collection of Shirley Temple memorabilia....

"411 Is a Joke: When 411 gives you a day-care center number when you ask for Yung's Chinese Carry-Out's, you know you've got a problem” by Laura Lippman, Slate

If you have a complaint about local 411 directory assistance, chances are you are a) lazy and b) gainfully employed. An industrious person simply grabs the phone book. The self-employed are too cheap to pay the 25 cents that the phone company (in my state, Maryland) charges 411 users after they run through the monthly allotment of six....

"Airline Changes Mind on Rushdie Flying Ban” Reuters

TORONTO - Salman Rushdie is once again free to fly on Air Canada after the airline backed down Tuesday from its policy of refusing to carry the author, who is under a death threat for allegedly blaspheming Islam. "After further consultation with U.S. and Canadian authorities, we have updated our position and will accept Mr. Rushdie for travel on Air Canada," airline spokeswoman Laura Cooke said Tuesday....

"Islam In the Slammer" by Matt Labash, Weekly Standard

“IN THE pre-September 11 world, the culture of correctional facilities used to rely on a certain natural order. A criminal would get busted, be sent to the joint, then along about the first time he got turned out by a guy named Fang while getting Zest-fully clean in the prison shower, he'd decide to find a community, buy a skullcap, change his name to something militant-sounding, and declare himself a Muslim....

"Delta Plan for Testing Biometrics Has Privacy Advocates Worried” by JANE COSTELLO, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

A select group of Delta Air Lines passengers may soon be asked to hand over fingerprints as well as boarding passes when they fly out of New York. SecurCom Inc., a Schiller Park, Ill., security firm, says it is in discussions with the airline to conduct a test of biometric boarding passes at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York this summer. Should the contract be approved, participation in the "BioPass" program will be offered to some of Delta's top frequent fliers on a voluntary basis....

"Bullet Points: What the Fox network could teach the Pentagon, etc.” by Scott Shuger, Slate

If the U.S. anti-terror campaign can employ quick strikes, then a column covering it can too:According to news accounts of Operation Anaconda, after it was discovered that a Navy SEAL was missing from a helicopter that had been attacked when it landed, in-theater U.S. commanders quickly dispatched two helicopters back to the battle scene, where they were assaulted in a firefight that ended up costing six U.S. dead and 11 wounded. So, here's a question for enterprising war reporters to look into: Why were the helicopters sent back to the landing zone without first softening it up with airstrikes or artillery barrages? (We do have precision weapons, so suppressing threats in an LZ doesn't require vaporizing the folks we're trying to rescue too.) Wasn't the importance of avoiding a "hot" LZ a lesson learned in Vietnam?...

posted by Eric at 10:47 AM

 
Massive Windstorm Whips China, Millions Squint
posted by Eric at 8:59 PM

 
Wienerville
This site is ideally placed above the below episode, mirroring its mentality well. Slightly less than half of the human population is appropriately equipped. Forewarned is foreskinned. My only objection is the "English" English. What exactly is a "wanker?"
posted by Eric at 8:41 PM

 
You Shook Me All Night Long
I was reminded of this drama in real life when AC/DC was voted Hall of Fame-bound in the Cleveland.com/Cool Tunes reader's poll. It was long ago and far away from a snowy March 21 in Northeast Ohio.

Spring, 1988. There are nuclear missile sites more accessible, but all of the amenities of a modern debauch are there: a portable stage, a generator, Bedouin tents for private consultation, two heavily fortified bars and a wooden parquet dance floor. These relics of party sacrament have been hauled two hours northwest of LA, over four freeways, three highways, two gravel roads, a dirt path and across 50 yards of loose, pebbly sand and tumblin' tumbleweeds.

The DJ maneuvers his stouthearted little red truck, burdened with equipment and records, from the second gravel road onto the dirt path. He curses the obviously faulty map that was hastily scribbled upon a torn record sleeve the night before by the extravagantly drunken social chairman, Dirk, a tall, athletic and square-jawed junior patrician who squints and expectorates under the influence of alcohol.

The ink of the impromptu map is smeared at more than one critical juncture. The DJ can't tell if he is headed toward the promised party land, or toward a dead end of dried drool.

The disgruntled DJ is on the verge of throwing his truck into reverse and backing his way toward civilization when he rounds a bend and beholds what appears to be a major archeological site, replete with dozens of hyperkinetic nomads in flowing regalia. He then notices the stage and the dance floor and begins to recognize some of the Arabians waving floppy scimitars at him.

There is the elongated Dwarf towering above the rabble, and Mush and Beak and John ("no nicknames, please"), the house president, and all of the other deranged but essentially benevolent frat lads. These archeologists seek not the treasures of antiquity, but an Arabian Night of revelry unattainable within the shadow of the Great Concrete Campus by the Freeway.

Dirk's square jaw reaches the DJ first.

"'Bout time, dude, you've got half an hour to set up before the bars open."

"I'd have been here sooner if you hadn't spooged on the map. Nice Indiana Jones set."

"This is Pismo's father's land. Someday it'll be just another suburb, then he'll be rich. I mean richer. Reagan's ranch is around here somewhere. Pledges! Help the DJ get set up. His word is law! He is a god!"

Dirk flourishes his robes dramatically. He is still articulate, but already speaking wetly.

Electric anticipation courses through the overheated, cloudless, late afternoon air. Pledges bound about like Middle Eastern pinballs. With, or despite the assistance of the pledges, the DJ is set up upon the stage and ready to rock at 6:00pm sharp. The most zealous pledge, the wraithlike Lard, fires up the generator as insects flee the din.

The DJ's turntables, amp and lights spring to life as the kegs are tapped, the liquor bottles liberated and the once-barren wasteland reverberates with the sound of ice merrily clunking in large plastic cups and ACDC over the sound system.

(Some time later)

"I'm George and I'm the girl's escort."

"Girls!"

"Bitches!"

"Professionals!"

Unseen voices interrupt from the direction of the dance floor as George addresses the throng from the stage.

"Excuse me, gentlemen - as I was saying - we have some rules here - especially here."

George's shaved head and devil's goatee swivel through the gloaming in an effort to survey his audience. His interior lineman's bulk slumps against the improbability of his surroundings.

"How many guys are out there?"

George whispers conspiratorially to his perceived ally, the DJ.

"80, 90, maybe 100."

"Are they good guys?"

"Well, I like them, but they like me."

George's eyes glaze and his muscles tighten against his already straining tank top. He pictures himself as heroic. Kerosene lanterns lick canvas in the distance from within the tents. The stage is a lonely island of civilization against the encroaching barbarism of the night - the alcohol, the sand, the drugs, the blast furnace air, the hormones of a battalion of insulated, callow, Masters of the Universe.

George readdresses the throng.

"No touching the ladies with your hands. Don't throw anyting, including money."

He again peers intently at the vague forms barely perceptible a few feet away from him.

"Oh, and guys - let's be gentlemen."

"Rurrh," protests the darkness.

"Phssst!"

"Mumble Mumble."

"Bring out the fucking bitches!!!"

George's eyes are glued to movement in the gloom as he inquires of the DJ out of the right corner of his mouth,

"How long have they been drinking?"

"The bars opened at 6."

"So they've been drinking for two and a half hours?"

"You mean it's 8:30 already?" the DJ queries as a gust of desert wind nearly knocks him over.

"You've been at it too, huh? They been doing anything besides drinking?"

"Bongs, lines, perhaps hallucinogens."

"Hmm." George frowns. "You ready with the tape player?"

"Ready, willing and able."

The DJ executes a sharp salute and notices the distinctly uneasy look on George's face, a look that is unaccustomed to sitting there. George's features reassemble into a more resolute pout.

"Ok, let's get this thing rolling. You're with me, right?"

"I'm with you George, dude."

"Cherry on Top is the first dancer. Here's her tape. Just start it and stop it when I tell you to. Got it?"

"Got it."

The DJ ingests the last remaining dribble from his water bottle. This does little more than turn the desert soot in his mouth to mud. Dust devils dance opaquely by.

George departs in the direction of the road and returns shortly with a compact, fine boned, busty blonde in belly dancer attire: a bantam Barbara Eden. Her buttery voice precedes her.

"God, where are we George, Death Valley?"

"Aah, it's not so bad. You did that biker convention around here somewhere. Remember?"

"Yeah, but the bikers didn't make me walk through this pricker shit, they rode me to the spot."

The DJ withholds comment. George and Cherry on Top join the DJ atop the compact stage.

"Ok, point the lights on the dance floor," commands George. The DJ has two rectangular boxes, with eight light bulbs of various hues in each, sitting atop each of his speakers. The lights have been facing inward illuminating the stage, George, the DJ and his equipment and records. The DJ turns them out toward the dance floor as commanded, bathing dozens of ersatz nomads in a queasy, carnival glow. They blink in unison - a mob of Arabian moles.

"Fucking about time!"

"All right!"

"Here comes the first one!"

"Nude up, baby!"

"I can't fucking see," shreiks a vertically challenged sheik. The mini-Arab holds his thick glasses in place with his left hand and brandishes his cardboard scimitar in his right as he executes a series of view-improving hops.

"Quit bouncing, Kareem."

"Get out of the way."

"Down in front."

A surge from the rear slams the foremost Arabesques into the stage, knocking the DJ, Cherry and George to their respective knees.

"A prayer before we begin," sprays Dirk.

"Get your thumb out of my eye."

"Get your sword out of my ass."

"Look at the mini-Genie, she's on her knees already."

"Yeah!"

"Yeah!"

Yeah!"

The DJ catches a whiff of Cherry's exotic aroma as she jingles back to her feet. What is the exquisite aroma? Frankincense, myrrh, bongwater?

The DJ's jaw tightens as Cherry brushes up against him with her pronounced and proud posterior. George disturbs the DJ's reverie.

"Say hello to the DJ, Cherry. DJ, this is Cherry."

"Hi Cherry, nice outfit."

"Hi sweetie, why aren't you dressed like a towelhead?"

"I'm with, but not of, the group."

The DJ is attired in his traditional warm weather party wear: t-shirt, big shorts, and his dancing, high-top Reeboks. He has bowed to the party theme by tying an extra-large white bandana about his perspiring head. George speaks a final warning to the congregation,

"Remember the rules: hands to yourself, stay back, and watch those god damned swords. Let's hear it for Cherry on Top!!"

"Cherry on Top!"

"No way!"

"Wow."

"I'll be on top of Cherry!"

"You wish, dildo!"

"You will? I will!"

"Pop her Cherry!"

"Hop on Cherry!"

"Hop on pop," cracks Lard in his excited high tenor. Cherry hands the DJ her tape. Her sweet smile contrasts with her "fuck you" posture and the oil that she rubs on her lean, brown thighs. Dust motes fight to cling to her.

"Just turn it on and let it go, sweetie. Don't stop the tape in between songs. Wish me luck."

She winks, then luxuriantly licks her lips with a round, pink tongue and tinkles away - bangles, baubles and bodice bouncing.

Cherry appears in the garish lighting of the dance floor as the sea of sheiks parts and closes again around her, obstructing the DJ's view. Cherry's beringed hand gestures above the be-toweled heads. The DJ pushes the "play" button on the tape player. "You Shook Me All Night Long" jackhammers through the sound system causing the assemblage to leap in unison and pound out air guitar power chords on their pseudo-scimitars.

The DJ can only glimpse an occasional gauzy garment tossed above the undulating, contracting and air guitaring throng. He is torn between wanting to see, and knowing that it is best that he doesn't. George wades into the sea, his hairless head reflecting pink and orange and green.

:"Back up, you morons! Back up, give her room."

George moves forcefully, asserting his mass against the Arabian sea. The sea yields reluctantly. Then the generator blows. What had been dark is now the black of a coal miner's nostril.

"Who turned out the lights?"

"Get that damn thing back on," commands the voice of John ("no nicknames, please"), the president.

"Wow, it's dark."

"Mumble Mumble."

"Mutter Mutter."

"Hey, what's this?" bleats Lard.

"Yeow!! Get yur filthy hands off of me! George, George. One of them has me. Let go - noooooo...."

Cherry's alarmed voice trails off as she dashes away, g-string glowing in the pitch. The dry wind carries her voice from a medium distance.

"Shit, oooh (sob, sob) I fell down in this pricker shit, and - I'm bleeding. I'm bleeding! I hate you, you little college faggot shits."

Derisive laughter meets her outburst. The DJ turns and strides toward his mental image of the traitorous generator. Following his compass-like sense of direction, the DJ shoots headlong off of the back of the stage and lands face down, mouth open on the desert. He spits out sand, pebbles and pieces of his broken luck. At least it is dark.

A few steps farther, he stumbles upon the generator. It fires up again cheerfully, unaware of the havoc that it has wreaked. The lights and music resume. The sea of sheiks leaks toward Cherry on Top's path of departure. The DJ gingerly hops upon the jittery stage and addresses the revelers,

"Gotta keep my levels down. Sorry guys."

George buffaloes onto the stage and stares at the dusty DJ.

"You need a shower, man."

The DJ grins, spits grit and mumbles, " Uh, a little accident back by the generator."

George seizes the microphone and bellows,

"You assholes blew it with Cherry. That makes me mad. If anyone touches the next dancer - that's it. No show - I keep the money. It's right in the contract!"

"Fuck the contract!"

"Fuck you, baldy"

"She sucked anyway."

"What good are they if you can't touch them?"

"Who needs a mini-Genie?"

"I thought we were getting the touchy-feely kind."

"Yeah, we paid for that extra shit."

"Yeah!"

"Yeah!"

"Yeah!"

"Shut up, you pecker heads or the show's over!" commands George impressively. The lights flicker ominously as the DJ scrambles to lower the microphone volume. The heckling dies down to wind-blown susurration.

"All right. The next dancer is Kitty Petty. She'll be doing something extra with whipped cream and shit like that. You guys have bills right?"

"Yeah, we got money but no pussy, hah, hah, hah."

"Yeah!"

"Yeah!"

"Yeah!"

George opts for a reasoned appeal.

"Gentlemen, I don't want to keep your money. I want you to have a good time and enjoy life. But we have to follow the rules - NO touching with your hands. You'll be able to use your mouths soon enough - If you're good! Are you ready for the sensational Kitty Petty?"

"Yeah!"

"Fuck yeah!"

"Fuckin A!"

"Kitty Petty, get it?"

"Can I petty your kitty?"

"Here kitty, kitty, kitty."

"Where is she, coughing up a hairball?"

Kitty Petty emerges from the inky blackness: an imposing, erect figure in a leopard skin leotard. Her tawny hair trails her like an entourage. Only the generator speaks. Kitty hands the DJ her tape, then smiles an inscrutable feline smile and purrs, her throat abuzz. The DJ presses the play button. ACDC echoes across the lunar landscape.

Kitty steps down off of the stage and is digested by the Arabian night. Kitty's mane tosses above mesmerized heads. Kitty and the lads are doing something with money, whipped cream and alcohol-sterilized mouths when the generator blows again.

"Hey, fuck you!"

"I can't see."

"Aaaagh!"

"Where'd she go?"

"Yeaah! Get your fucking hands off of me! Aah, they're touching me! Get your finger out of there! I'll kill you, I'll kill you all! My boyfriend kills people - he's going to get you! We know where you live. He'll cut your miserable little pricks off!!!"

This final threat resounds from another direction and trails off. Several dusty, crunchy footsteps follow in the direction of the voice at a perky clip. George's cool evaporates.

"DJ asshole! Get the lights back on! Get out of the way. That's it - show's over. You blew it, you fucking spoiled suck asses! You pissant scumballs! Out of the way! GET THOSE LIGHTS BACK ON!!!"

The wind kicks, howls and stings. The DJ stands motionless. He puts his hand in front of his face. He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes. No difference. He hears George wading through the mob. Groans, thuds, hard body parts striking soft body parts with authority. Dozens of sheets flap animatedly in the gale. Arabian laundry day. Spilt cups bleed multicolored liquids into the sand.

"Where's the bitch?"

"She ran off toward the hills."

"Which way is that?"

"How do I know? I can't see my dick to pee."

"Lard, you squat to pee anyway - haw, haw, haw," guffaws Dwarf, enjoying the mayhem.

"Where's that huge-ass Mr Clean?"

"I'm right here, douche bag. Take that!" (whack!)

"Oww!"

"Try this!"

Dwarf's body bullets onto the stage, rolls past the DJ's feet and off the other side. A cooling coating of sticky liquid attaches itself to the DJ, his records, the stage and environs. The cup is a 32-ouncer: less time waiting, more time drinking. When the body hits the ground, a dust cloud kicks up that sticks to everything wet. A particularly vehement gust sends the plastic turntable covers spiraling westward, toward the sea.

The DJ hears moaning from beyond the rear of the stage. Only he - The Dancing DJ - can return any semblance of order to the chaos all around him. He dashes manfully to the aid of the fallen Dwarf. Feral cries of pain, victory, defeat, and blood-lust fill the swirling blackness.

The DJ begins calculating the distance between the ground and the stage just as his trailing foot loses contact with it. He tries to drag his airborne feet behind him like a wide receiver but he is out of bounds, even in a college game. The flying DJ lands on the prostrate Dwarf, much to the DJ's relief and Dwarf's discomfort. The DJ reasons that Dwarf had been uncomfortable already and that the greater good has been served. The DJ is comfortable with situational ethics.

Reassured that Dwarf is neither dead nor suffering major organ damage, the DJ again springs in the direction of the inert generator. His aim is true but his shot is long; the DJ slams into, and cartwheels over the generator, airborne again.

The DJ warily, carefully locates the generator, rights it, and pushes the reset button. The generator again reanimates as though nothing untoward has happened. The gaudy lights reveal a miasma of mud, blood, bodies and beverages. There are pricks everywhere.

A lean flash of flesh streaks by, butt naked, hands flailing frantically to cover exposed body parts. Kitty Petty careens off of the stage-left speaker, dashing a light box to the ground, breaking six of the eight bulbs. She hisses, "Die! Die! You all will die." Her grime-caked breasts heave with the effort. She is closely trailed by several Middle Eastern pursuants brandishing semi-erect scimitars.

"We'll cut you bitch!"

"You almost broke my finger!"

"Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty."

"We just want to be friends."

"She's looking for her litter box - hah, hah, hah."

"Some party, huh?" Dirk sprays as he squints calmly at the DJ. "And the real girls aren't even here yet."

"Uh..."

"Hey, bold stroke with the generator. Your timing was perfect - both times!"

"I, uh, didn't..."

"That's why we wanted you for this one. Music is only part of it, right dude?"

"Right, uh, thanks, but..."

"You can always count on the dancing DJ. Hey, wanna beer? How about line? Bongload? It's time to rage!"

Dirk catches movement out of the corner of his eye, turns and peers toward the road. Seeing bus headlights, he dabs the moist lower half of his face with a stray corner of his towel ensemble.

"Later dude, the babes are here. I gotta greet them. It's my job. Heavy hangs the mantle of responsibility."

150 California harem girls shimmy out of the buses. John ("no nicknames, please"), the president, strolls by.

"I think we're ready for them, don't you?"

"Clearly."

The DJ recognizes most of the advance scouts as they light upon the stage - sorority girls.

"We're ready to party!" peals statuesque, blazingly blond Suzy.

"What the hell is going on around here?" demands the other Suzy, equally blond, but compact.

"Where's the bar?"

"What's happening?"

"Why is everyone running around?"

"Let's party!"

"Play some ACDC!"

Relieved that the women-folk are there, the DJ does their bidding, playing more ACDC among other customary party favorites, in between generator shutdowns.

"Hey man, you can cool it with the generator. That was just for the strippers. We've got tents for the real girls," notes John ("no nicknames, please"), the president, sternly, a buxom Arabian vixen on either arm.

"Some of the girls think it's was supposed to be a date party. Silly girls," says the DJ.

"It is a date party, but we invited about 50 extra girls in case we get bored, or whatever. Besides, you and the bartenders need to have some fun too!" notes Dirk magnanimously.

The DJ begins hitting the beer in greater earnest. His pricker sores become less of an irritation. He dances with stray flowers of the desert, often three or four at a time. It is a good time to be alive. The celebrants of both sexes become less and less concerned about recomposing their costumes as the evening wears on, and the tents became more densely occupied.

"You wanna poke?"

inquires an unknown and not scrupulously redressed Arabesque blonde of the DJ.

"Uh, no thanks, I'm working," stammers the DJ.

"Aah, yes. Well, maybe later then. I just screwed some guy's dick right off, so he's uesless to me now. See you later."

The DJ feels a bewildering assortment of conflicting impulses tugging at him. No it is just Julie,

"Have a beer, play some ACDC, let's party!"

(Sometime later)

The rickety little stage is filled with gyrating nomads when a fist of brutal hot wind scatters the carousers like the diaspora. Several of the flung parties strike the turntables, sending them noisily to the stage floor, sending the incumbent record (ACDC) spiraling toward the Big Dipper. Record boxes tip, record covers waltz above the stage, I Dream of Jeannie silks flap fiercely as they, too, try to take flight.

Just then, the buses begin flashing their lights signalling the end of the Arabian night. One half-hour later the coaches are loaded and wheeling their way back to the Concrete Campus by the Freeway. The DJ toils alone as the stars and the moon suddenly break through the cloud cover to reveal a magical, sparkling moonscape. Another half hour later, a bemused but cheerful couple appears, startling the DJ into dropping his final record box.

"Where is everone. Play some ACDC!"

He gives them a ride back to LA.

posted by Eric at 7:53 PM

 
News and Commentary Roundup
The most important recent journalistic pieces preselected by Jerry, often relating to geopolitics or something. No sense going anywhere else.

"Trading Places: If you love free trade, elect a Democratic president” by Steve Chapman, Slate

George W. Bush is prone to strange syntax and mangled pronunciations, but on the subject of free trade his views are crystal clear: He's for it. "Free trade is an important engine of economic growth and a cornerstone of my economic agenda," he asserted recently, bragging, "My administration has successfully launched new global trade talks, reignited the movement for free trade within our own hemisphere, and helped bring China and Taiwan into the World Trade Organization."...

"Washington Desk: The Unilateralist, A conversation with Paul Wolfowitz” by James Fallows, The Atlantic

Soldiers wear ribbons on their uniforms to signal where they have been and what they have done. People in Washington use photographs of themselves with famous officials. The typical lawyer's or lobbyist's office is decorated with trophy photos, on what has come to be known as the "I love me" wall. People who have worked in White House jobs often display pictures of themselves with the President in parts of their homes that guests will see....

"The World In 2005: Hidden in plain sight” by Robert D. Kaplan, The Atlantic

As Americans, we have a natural tendency to believe that world events over the next few years will unfold from September 11. But in truth much of the world will evolve without regard to September 11. Civil wars will continue, diseases will break out, and local economic crises will run their course. The challenge is to anticipate how these other processes will intersect with the war on terrorism....

"Islamabad: A Modest Proposal From the Brigadier” by Peter Landesman, The Atlantic

In the center of the biggest traffic circle of every major city in Pakistan sits a craggy, Gibraltarish replica of a nameless peak in the Chagai range. This mountain is the home of Pakistan's nuclear test site. The development, in 1998, of the "Islamic Bomb," intended as a counter to India's nuclear capability, is Pakistan's only celebrated achievement since its formation, in 1947. The mountain replicas, about three stories tall, are surrounded by flower beds that are lovingly weeded, watered, and manicured. At dusk, when the streetlights come on, so do the mountains, glowing a weird molten yellow....

"Tartarstan: Islam Versus the Pleasure Principle” by Jeffrey Tayler, The Atlantic

On November 14 of last year the chairman of the Council of Russian Muftis, Mufti Sheikh Ravil Gainutdin, announced that the victims of the war in Afghanistan were not the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The real victims, he said, were the "completely innocent civilian population of Afghan villages and cities." He went on to warn that the "struggle with international terrorism" was "taking on an ever more bellicose, anti-Islamic character" and was "intensifying confrontational moods between followers of Islam and other religious traditions."...

"Cheney's Transformed: The Moose notes that the Vice President departed for the Middle East as Dick Cheney and returned as Madeleine Albright” by the Bull Moose, Project for Conservative Reform

When it was learned that Cheney was making the Middle East sojourn, all of Washington was abuzz with the chatter about why Cheney and not Powell was making the trip. The conclusion was that Cheney was the one who had to deliver the hard line to the Arab capitals about the inevitability of taking out Saddam....

"The Good Arab: Amidst the hate being spewed from the Arab press are a few examples of moderation” by Claudia Winkler, The Weekly Standard

A PIECE I wrote two weeks ago featuring Benjamin Franklin's anti-Semitism--alleged anti-Semitism, that is, as portrayed in a repulsive 1935 Nazi forgery lately recycled in the Egyptian government press - drew a response from an editor in Saudi Arabia. He objected to my citing the work of MEMRI.org, which publishes English translations of articles from the Middle Eastern press. MEMRI, in his view, is a partisan organization "whose sole purpose is to make the Arabs look bad in the West."...

"Saudi Editor Retracts Article That Defamed Jews” by MICHAEL SLACKMAN, LA Times

CAIRO -- A prominent Saudi Arabian editor Tuesday criticized and disavowed an article that appeared recently in his own newspaper, Al Riyadh, that repeated the century-old fiction that Jews use the blood of Christians and Muslims to make holiday foods....

posted by Eric at 8:50 AM

 
Piss In the News
If you can’t sell your own urine, what can you do? You can move to North Carolina, where the right to pee into a bag and sell it has been preserved (spotted by Best of the Web Today). This one, though, that Jerry spotted, isn’t funny at all. What possible reason does a school board have for drug testing students in the chess club and the choir? Even teenagers have some rights, and generalized invasive suspicion is utterly unwarranted. Screen for weapons, do a drug test if there is a specific, reasonable suspicion, but leave the chess club alone.
posted by Eric at 2:52 PM

 
Ray Brent Marsh Take Note
It is much cheaper to fly a dead body as a passenger than to pack him up as cargo. Good thing it was a short flight. (Thanks to Best of the Web Today)
posted by Eric at 2:08 PM

 
Random
I guess it’s a day for righteous indignation. Life is just too unfair sometimes. There has been way too much of that in the last 6+ months. This poor 13-year-old girl goes to a hockey game and gets killed by the puck. It’s just random chance. The glass is high, but unless it goes all the way to the ceiling, eventually something that hard, traveling that fast is going to find its way into the crowd. It truly appears that no one is to blame, which in a way makes it worse, more random, more senseless. Are you going to blame the poor schmuck whose stick deflected the puck? The guy who took the shot? They may be able to get a good night’s sleep in about five years, the girl’s parents, maybe never.

In a ridiculous irony, the world's oldest person, a Michigan woman 115 years old, died the same night. No offense to the family, but too bad she wasn't the one at the hockey game. I’m sure she did no more to “deserve” to die at 115 than the girl did to die a day short of her 14th birthday. Random chance: easy to understand in theory, almost impossible to accept in practice when the downside happens to someone you love. But with billions of people engaged in billions of activities, over time not just anything, but EVERYTHING will happen. This could be an excuse to go Howard Hughes and live in a vault, or to say screw it and indulge every hedonistic fantasy. Probably the best you can do is to take normal precautions and try not to worry about it. You won’t find me at a hockey game, though.
posted by Eric at 1:27 PM

 
Go Jolby
The Indians’ Jolbert Cabrera is about as cool as it gets: he can play any position as well or better than the current starter, is fast, makes consistent contact, and is apparently indestructable. Talk about putting a “cap in yo’ ass,” this winter he was literally shot in the butt during a robbery in his native Colombia. But a mere bullet won’t keep him down.
posted by Eric at 11:59 AM

 
Pledge Drive Me Out of My Freaking Mind
I’m not sure I can express in words how much I hate NPR’s pledge drives, of which the Spring Drive is in full bloom. I loathe the interruptions in local and national programming for large blocks of tag-team manipulation, guilting, hectoring and mendicancy. They even write neat poems about their drives.

I know they need “listener support,” and those NPR inducements - like sporty NPR coffee mugs - are sure tempting, and that “blah blah percent of our funding comes from listeners,” and that the government “will cut off all funding at any moment,” and that “where else can I get this kind of in-depth coverage of a presumed-extinct woodpecker taking a dump on a tree stump?”

Don’t get me wrong, I listen to NPR a lot: pretty much every morning I get news from "Morning Edition," I often check in with "Talk of the Nation" now hosted by Neal “Conehead” Conan - on my way to pick up my daughter in the afternoon, and I usually get some afternoon news from "All Things Considered."

Locally, once in a while I’m in the mood to chill to some classical music from WKSU (where I have occasionally done commentaries), and I often get crunchy along with my friend Jim Blum's (who is one helluva nice guy and a brilliant radio man) folk show on the weekends. No problem there. And I also enjoy evening jazz pretty regularly on WCPN, Cleveland’s “ideastream” (I wonder how much they paid a consultant to come up with that one) with the suave Dan Polletta. Love that weekend blues show with Fitz, and there are many other national shows I won’t turn off when they come on, like "Rewind," "On the Media," and "A Prairie Home Companion" (unless Garrison is being particularly annoying that week).

I don’t much mind the "liberal bias" that so many whine about. Everyone is biased somehow: better “liberal bias” than, say, "deaf asshole bias," or "pedophile priest bias," or even "pasty-faced douche bag bias" (I must mention, however, that for the most part, Terry Gross, Click and Clack, "Says You," Michael Feldman, and most especially, Ira Glass, can fuck right off).

So the programming isn’t the problem: it’s the fact that NPR and “noncommerical” broadcasting in general now wants the best of both worlds. Other than some dinky-assed college or high school station that doesn’t have "underwriters," ALL stations are now commercial to the extent that they all run “commercials,” i.e. messages paid for by commercial enterprises, AND they still want listener money too. Of course they all claim, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, that only a small percentage of their funding comes from underwriters, but the fact that they are underwritten by “sponsors” is never discussed while they are droning on and on and on about how desperately they need my money.

Since they now get money from advertisers they should shut up and leave me the hell alone. They don’t need my money, they need my ears, because my ears give them better ratings, which allow them to charge more for advertising, just like the stations that don’t pretend that they don’t get money from advertisers.

I appreciate the fact that NPR-type programming features much more subtle advertising, and there is much less of it on an hourly basis, but when those (at least) quarterly pledge drives hit, they jabber and wheedle for blocks of five and ten minutes for weeks on end and it drives me straight into the arms of commercial broadcasting that doesn’t pretend to be functioning for my benefit.

I encourage you to give to your NPR station so I don’t have to. They hope if they irritate you enough, you will give them money to shut them up. I will never give anyone money to shut them up. When I hear Ira Glass, or any of the other misfits with speech impediments (nothing against speech impediments, really, but why on the radio? It’s like encouraging burn victims to get into TV) cajole me into supporting my local public radio station, I just want to kick them in the head right through my radio, which doesn’t do anyone any good. I had to take off my shoe to get my foot out of the dashboard waiting at a traffic signal the other day. I blame NPR.
posted by Eric at 11:25 AM

 
Global Warming, What Global Warming?
What we need is real, scientific PROOF that the earth's atmosphere is warming. Surely, 70 degree days in Northeast Ohio in February AND March is mere coincidence. Good thing I got out of L.A. in time before the monsoons hit. Surely, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island (see pics) breaking off and floating on its merry way isn’t cause for concern.

The total disruption of the world’s weather patterns might be fun: it’s great up here in Ohio, not sure how they feel about the ice storms in Georgia and Texas. Next year I hear the department stores in the upper Midwest are going to stock bathing suits year-round.

I wonder how things are going down in Australia, where some scientists predict IT WILL NEVER RAIN AGAIN: we should ask Tim Blair, who is the only conservative in the whole country. Hey, that floating Rhode Island might be a good source of water. Let’s lasso it and haul it over to the Land Down Under. Perhaps the fresh water melting near shore will keep the sharks away.
posted by Eric at 9:22 AM

 
News and Commentary Roundup
Top stories of the day selected by the enigmatic Jerry.

"They Died For Lack of a Head Scarf" by Mona Eltahawy, Washinton Post

The fire was a tragedy that could have struck anywhere. Fifteen girls between ages 13 and 17 were trampled to death and 52 others were hurt when a blaze swept through their school. Parents and journalists angrily demanded the resignation of education officials they accused of incompetence and corruption. There was plenty to be angry about. Some 800 schoolgirls were crammed into a building designed for only 250. The main gate to the school was locked. There were no emergency exits, no fire alarms and no fire extinguishers in the building. But another far more sinister detail in this particular tragedy shows that it could not have happened anywhere but Saudi Arabia....

"Palestinian Pretense and Israel Reality: What the world knows, but can't say, to be true” by Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

A common theme throughout classical literature is the role of pretext (prophasis) contrasted with the actual cause of complaint (aitia) - the great divide between what aggrieved people say publicly and what they feel privately. Nations, the historian Thucydides reminds us, also adopt such strategic postures. Their spokesmen often voice complaints that are either groundless or - even if partly justified - at least different from the "real" or "true" causes of their discontent....

"Suffering Must Come Before Peace Is Possible” by WALTER LAQUEUR, Wall Street Journal

As Israel's decision to occupy parts of the capital of the Palestinian Authority this week shows, the conflict in the Middle East has no end in sight. The attacks and counterattacks on both sides are multiplying, and so is the number of victims. How long will it continue, how many more victims will be killed and maimed until a truce will be agreed upon and a new peace process begins? The only possible answer, however inhuman it sounds, is that the conflict will have to run its course, until both sides will have suffered to such an extent that there will be a willingness to compromise....

"Airline Bans Author Rushdie" by Mike Fox, BBC

In Montreal.
The author Salman Rushdie has been banned from travelling on all Air Canada flights because the airline is concerned about the delays extra security measures would cause. Mr Rushdie had faced a death threat contained in a fatwa issued in Iran in 1989, which said his book, the Satanic Verses, was blasphemous....

"Debt of a Salesman" Village Voice

The way he's going, Bud Selig's going to need a bigger coffin for all those nails he keeps hammering in. Not content merely to piss off the players' union, the House Judiciary Committee, and Youppi the Montreal mascot, the commissioner last week launched a new gambit-announcing plans to start enforcing MLB's 60/40 rule on team debt come June-that could land him in hot water with the people who pay his salary: the owners....

"Ex-Enron Executive Related a Dispute Baxter Gave Account Before His Suicide” by Peter Behr and April Witt, Washington Post

Two weeks before his suicide in January, former Enron Corp. executive J. Clifford Baxter told investigators about conflicts with the company's then-president, Jeffrey K. Skilling, that Baxter said marred his final years at the company, according to a memo on the interview....

"Ebert's Oscar Picks" by ROGER EBERT, Chicago Sun-Times

I approach this annual task with a sense of foreboding. The 2002 Oscar race rests on shifting sands. There are scarcely even any absolute front-runners, unless it is Jennifer Connolly as best supporting actress. I am sure of one category, then another. Then I change my mind....

"Urine Trouble: Uncle Sam Wants You To Pee in a Cup” by Dahlia Lithwick, Slate

A question for the "Fray": If you could pick just one Supreme Court justice to spontaneously haul off the bench-say, in the middle of oral argument - and drag into a nearby bathroom, where they'd be forced to hike up their robe and pee into a Dixie cup whom would you choose? Take your time. We have all night....

posted by Eric at 8:58 AM

 
Terror Teen Talk
It took six months, but 9/11 terminology is leaking into the lexicon via the mouths of teens. This is either a healthy sign of psychological recovery or a slippery slope toward desensitization that could weaken resolve. Or both. Or neither.
posted by Eric at 3:49 PM

 
The Oracles of Delphi Were Huffers
According to this report in the NY Times, petrochemicals rising up through fissures in the earth beneath the ancient Greek temple caused the oracles of old to have visions. Tests have shown the presence of ethane, methane, and, best of all, ethylene:

"There's a fair amount of data on the effects of ethylene," Dr. Spiller said. "In the first stages, it produces disembodied euphoria, an altered mental status and a pleasant sensation. It's what street people would call getting high. The greater the dose, the deeper you go." Once a person stops breathing ethylene, he added, the effects wear off quickly.

Modern teenagers know of such intoxicants, including ones that in overdoses can kill. Experts say that youths who breathe fumes from gas, glue, paint thinner and other petrochemicals are toying with hydrocarbon gases.

In other words, don’t try this at home. One man's vision is another man's brain damage.
posted by Eric at 12:22 PM

 
Rock Hall Ex Post Facto
I’m really beat today, but had a great time at the Rock Hall last night webcasting the Induction ceremonies for Cleveland.com. It was very exciting, and not a little ironic, to see another generation enter the semi-hallowed halls: the punk/new wave movement as represented by the Ramones and Talking Heads arose as a direct reaction against the music industry that feted them last night.

The Heads reunion after 18 years was the musical highlight, with the Ramones induction the emotional highlight. Eddie Vedder’s strangely montone, very lengthy presentation drained much drama from the moment, and, due to Joey’s death and continued internal bickering amongst remaining band members, there was no Ramones performance. Green Day rocked out a great Ramones medley, but the impact was, of course, not the same.

Special thanks to Johanna and Loretta from Cleveland.com who provided technical and editorial assistance, and were, as always, a ball to be around. You can read the play-by-play of the entire proceedings here, before VH1 gets hold of the night and sanitizes it for popular consumption for tomorrow night. You can hear my after-show comments here.

During the evening I heard from legendary producer Craig Leon, who signed the Ramones to Sire and produced their classic first album.

Hi Eric,
It's good to hear from you. It's truly amazing that the Ramones have been inducted into the Hall Of Fame. They truly deserve it. I don't think it was something that we foresaw back when the band was starting out. It's also strange how the influence of the band has been felt from the day their first record came out. That was clearly not envisaged either. Hopefully someone out there today is hearing them for the first time and letting it influence them to go out and make some music that's fun, loud, and kicks the ass of the current musical establishment. Music is now, more than ever, truly in need of the spirit that inspired the Ramones.

posted by Eric at 10:54 AM

 
New and Commentary Roundup
Jerry picks the most important journalistc pieces of the day, no need to go anywhere else.

"Victory Lapse: The Pentagon and the media's chronic mistake” by Scott Shuger, Slate

Why does the Pentagon consistently fail to put its best foot forward when it addresses human rights issues related to the war? And why does the press so frequently fail to supply the context the Building leaves out?...

"Relief From Imports, for as long as it takes” by Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune

The president has decided that the struggling American steel industry needs relief from unfair foreign competition, so he has announced firm steps that will stem the tide of imports. But for those who warned of the dangers of protectionism, there is truly heartening news: The measures he imposed to help steelmakers will last only three years. Please understand that this is nothing permanent - merely a respite designed to give the industry some time to regain strength so it can compete without special assistance....

"Action Plan: Bush vs. Bush on Iraq” by Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune

I was not alarmed to read the news, leaked to the press last week, that the Bush administration has ordered the Pentagon to make plans for the use of nuclear weapons against countries that attack us with weapons of mass destruction. What alarms me is that no one has explained it to President Bush....

"Crony Capitalism American-style” by Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

Remember the East Asia crisis? when the US Treasury and its IMF allies blamed that region's problems on crony capitalism, lack of transparency, and poor corporate governance? Countries were told to follow the American model, use American auditing firms, bring in American entrepreneurs to teach them how to run their companies. (Never mind that under the leadership of their own entrepreneurs East Asia grew faster than any other region - and with greater stability - over the previous three decades.) The unfolding Enron scandal brings new meaning to two favorite American sayings: “What goes around comes around,” and “People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones....”

"Goldberg: Dear Diary..." by Tod Goldberg, Las Vegas Mercury

About five years ago, when Caller ID officially became a must-have, the rules of dating changed forever. Suddenly, calling l'object d'amour just to hear l'object's voice became a real test of your will: Were you willing to leave your house, find a phone booth not filled with human dung (no easy chore in Las Vegas, lemme tell you...), compile the correct change, and then spend the next hour fulfilling your various stalking needs? For anyone over 18, the answer has generally become no...most would rather just obsessively check their e-mail to see if the love interest had responded to that super-cool "You're old if in the '80s you owned clothing by Chams" list-o-humor that was accumulated to elicit that "Awww, he/she is thinking of me!" vibe. And, of course, chat rooms have replaced singles bars and Internet porn has replaced, at least for a certain segment of the community (read: the Las Vegas Mercury freelance staff), actual coitus....

"In Saddam's Shadow" New Yorker

In this week's issue, Jeffrey Goldberg reports from Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, where, in the late nineteen-eighties, Saddam Hussein waged a devastating chemical and, possibly, biological war against the Kurdish people. Today, the Kurds have achieved limited autonomy, thanks to the U.S.-British no-fly zone, but they still face the threat of ethnic cleansing. Goldberg's report also raises questions about fears of future biochemical attacks against America or Israel-as well as Iraq's possible links to Al Qaeda. Here Goldberg discusses his trip to Kurdistan and his article....

"Skies Won't Be Safe Until We Use Commonsense Profiling” by Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal

“The government's effort to upgrade airport security over the past six months has been massive and expensive: federalizing airport security forces; confiscating toenail clippers; frisking randomly chosen grandmothers, members of Congress, former CIA directors, and decorated military officers; stationing National Guard troops in airports; putting sky marshals on planes. Has it been effective?...

"Et Tu, Dick?" by Andrew Sullivan, Andrewsullivan.com

I'm trying hard not to feel immense disappointment in the administration for reverting so feebly and so quickly to the flim-flam propagated by various Arab satrapies about the urgency of the Palestinian-Israeli issue. The only reason for the vice-president to be in the Middle East right now is to prepare the way for ending the chemical, nuclear and biological threat from Saddam Hussein's Iraq....

"Our Cold War Hangover" by Jackson Diehl, Washington Post

Islam Karimov, strongman of Uzbekistan and newly minted U.S. strategic ally, had just finished delivering a paean to democracy over the conference table at Blair House. So the follow-up question from the assembled journalists seemed logical enough: Does this mean, Mr. President, that you might be willing to hold free elections in your country?...

posted by Eric at 10:20 AM

 
Join Me at 7:30 From the Rock Hall on Cleveland.com
Refer back here for bios, links, features, and whatnot. Running out of time, gotta chug on down to the Rock Hall for the ceremonies: here are the bios of Little Miss Dynamite, Brenda Lee, and one of the great sufferers of rock 'n' roll history, Gene Pitney.
posted by Eric at 5:37 PM

 
Jim Stewart is this year’s “Nonperformer” inductee, the founder and owner of the legendary Stax Records. More on Stax here. And this from legendary rock writer Robert Palmer.
posted by Eric at 5:26 PM

 
Chet’s a Rocker Too
One of the most revered instrumentalists, producers, and executives in country music history, the late guitarist backed rockers like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers also. Here is his entry from The Encyclopedia of Record Producers. He enters the Rock Hall in the “Sideman” category.

Chet Atkins
Chet Atkins has long been known as one of the world's greatest guitar players. That title has often eclipsed the fact that he's also a legendary producer credited with developing the"Nashville Sound." As head of RCA's Nashville division, Atkins’ production skill shaped the careers of artists such as Jim Reeves, Don Gibson, Jerry Reed and Dolly Parton, and helped the country genre gain deserved respect in the music world.

Born June 20, 1924 in Luttrell, Tenn., Chester Burton Atkins developed love for the guitar early. He watched his older brother play the instrument, and at 5, started playing an old ukulele with strings made of screen door wire. A sickly child who battled asthma, Atkins went to live with his music teacher/evangelist father in Georgia when he was 10. At 17, he left home to pursue a music career and wound up working for local radio stations and with country artists such as Red Foley, Archie Campbell, Bill Carlisle and Homer and Jethro.

He signed to RCA Victor in 1947 and moved to Nashville in 1950, the same year he began playing on the Grand Ole Opry as a soloist and guitarist for the Carter Sisters. It was during this period that singles like "Mainstreet Breakdown" and "Galloping Guitars" established Atkins as a major instrumentalist. In the mid-'50s he began working for RCA A&R man Steve Sholes. "I started out doing covers," he remembers. "My boss in New York would send a pop hit down and say 'Go in and record this with Johnny & Jack or Minnie Pearl and Grandpa Jones.' The first one I did was 'Papa Loves Mambo' with Minnie and Grandpa Jones. It was fun.

"Then Mr. Sholes, my boss, had bought Elvis' contract and became a big man in the company. He got promotions so that gave me a chance to record all the artists. I took over and started recording all the country artists and eventually started recording some of the pop artists, too. We'd bring in Perry Como and people like that. It was fun making pop records. I did that and I finally realized I was working much too hard and putting too many hours in the day . . . So I hired Jerry Bradley and he hired some more people and gradually I turned all the artists over to producers who worked within the company."

Before turning the reins over to other producers, Atkins carved a successful niche for himself at RCA and was known for adding his talents to a variety of important sessions. In 1956, he arranged the first Nashville sessions for Elvis Presley and played guitar on "Heartbreak Hotel" and "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You." His guitar prowess can also be heard on such Hank Williams hits as "Jambalaya," "Settin' the Woods On Fire," and "Your Cheatin' Heart." He was promoted to manager of operations for RCA in 1957, the year he moved his work to the legendary RCA Studio B. By 1968, he was named RCA's VP/Nashville operations and continued to head the label until he resigned in 1981. A year later he signed as an artist to Columbia, for which he still records.

Atkins says he enjoyed his years in production. "It was one of my favorite roles because I was able to get with my friends in the studio and have a lot of fun producing records," he says. “We’d all gather around the piano and work out an arrangement and it was a good chore. I don't really know how they do it now. I think they do it different. I don't think they gang around the piano and everybody contributes like we used to."

Atkins' philosophy as a producer was simple. "I looked for good songs I thought fit the artist. I encouraged the artist to look for songs also, and I tried to find a hit along the line somewhere," he says. "I also watched for good musicians who came to town who would be able to add something different to the records I made. Floyd Cramer is an example of that. I talked him into coming in from Shreveport, La."

In addition to good musicians, Atkins was always on the lookout for good songs. When asked what he thought made a hit, he says, "It was my first impression, if I liked a tune when I first heard it. I realized that my senses were right . . . I realized that I was kind of square and what I liked, the public would usually like also."

When it came to signing talent, Atkins says he looked for artists with a unique quality to their voice. "My boss told me years ago you have to find an artist with an edge to his voice," Atkins relates, "somebody who will sound good on the jukebox. On jukeboxes years ago, there were no highs; about all you could hear were the lows because of the way they were constructed . . . So we selected artists who had an edge to their voices. Ernest Tubb and Charley Pride are good examples."

Asked whether being such a stellar guitar player gave him a different view as a producer, Atkins counters that his production skills were shaped more by his musical influences. "It was a combination of things," he says. “My Dad was a classical teacher and I moved to Georgia when I was very young, and there was a lot of black blues down there and I got into that. And I got to listening to jazz a lot. I always loved jazz like they played in the '30s, '40s and '50s. I had influence from a lot of different directions, including country. So when production was turned over to me, I had a lot of different things to draw from."

A key architect of the Nashville Sound, Atkins pioneered a smoother, more pop flavored style that took country to a wider audience. He won't take credit for that, however. "I don't really remember," he says, when asked how the Nashville Sound was born. "I was just trying to keep my job and keep from getting fired and I'm sure Owen [Bradley - see entry] was doing the same thing. I was working for Mr. Sholes in New York and Owen was working for Mr. Paul Cohen and we were just trying to survive, and the way you survive is by making hit records. I'd been fired many times in my life, in many time zones, so I was just trying to keep my job, and every once in a while I made some hit records. I made two smashes in one day, 'I Can't Stop Loving You' and 'Oh Lonesome Me.' So after that I regained confidence and realized I knew a good song when I heard it and I realized I could go into the studio and make hit records, and I did that."

Atkins has won nine Country Music Association Awards and 14 Grammy awards. One of the entertainment industry's most lauded luminaries, Atkins has a street named after him in Nashville and has been inducted into the Georgia Music Hall Of Fame. In 1992 NARAS awarded him their Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy ceremony and in 1997 he was honored with the Billboard Century Award. Atkins has recorded 75 albums and has collaborated with numerous artists, including Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra, Mark Knopfler, Eric Johnson, Earl Klugh, Les Paul [see entry], Jerry Reed, Hank Snow, Merle Travis, Doc Watson, Paul McCartney [see entry], George Benson, Neil Diamond, Steve Wariner, Lenny Breau and Tommy Emmanuel. Still active on Nashville's live music scene, Atkins could be found Monday nights performing to standing room only crowds at Nashville's Caffe Milano. In June 1997, Nashville held its first Chet Atkins' Musician Days, a week-long festival celebrating Atkins' idea of honoring "the people who make the singers look good." Chet Atkins died June 30, 2001.
-Deborah Evans Price

posted by Eric at 5:18 PM

 
Tonight is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremonies - I will be webcasting live from the Rock Hall tonight. All music, all day on Tres Producers: Bios, features, links, book excerpts on the Ramones, Talking Heads, Tom Petty, Isaac Hayes, Brenda Lee, Gene Pitney, Chet Atkins and Jim Stewart. A veritable cornucopia.
posted by Eric at 4:36 PM

 
Isaac Hayes is also being Inducted into the Rock Hall tonight. An excellent performer, he was an even better songwriter and producer as a cornerstone of the great Stax/Volt sound of the ‘60s and ‘70s. He was also one of the more interesting interviews I conducted for The Encyclopedia of Record Producers.

Isaac Hayes
Another man with Isaac Hayes’ credentials - musician, singer, songwriter, producer, actor, humanitarian, radio personality - would be called a chameleon, but Hayes has always been resolutely, undeniably himself. As a sideman at Stax, then co-producer and co-writer (with David Porter - see entry) of the great Sam & Dave hits ("Hold On I'm Comin'" - No. 21, "Soul Man" - No. 2, “I Thank You" - No. 9, "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby") and others for Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, William Bell, Judy Clay and the Bar-Kays, Hayes helped define soul music in the ‘60s.

Then, as a solo artist Hayes stretched the boundaries of soul adding strings and social themes; with Sly Stone, Gamble and Huff, Curtis Mayfield and Norman Whitfield [see entries], he helped move black music from a singles to an album format. On albums like Hot Buttered Soul (No. 8), The Isaac Hayes Movement (No. 8), To Be Continued (No. 11), Black Moses (No. 10), and especially the Oscar and Grammy-winning Shaft (No.1), Hayes took his brand of elegant but funky soul to a huge new audience.

Isaac Hayes was born August 20, 1942 in Covington, Tennessee. He lived on a farm until he was 7, then moved with his maternal grandparents (who raised him) to Memphis. The family was musical and active in the church, school and community. Hayes’ first public performance was a duet with his sister at church when he was 3. Already the musical perfectionist, Hayes halted his sister mid-performance when she made a mistake.

In high school Hayes won a singing contest, noted the attention his performance generated, and said “Hmm, this is what I want to do.” He took a year of band (tuba then sax) and began singing with a variety of combos: rock’n’roll, doo wop, blues, gospel, jazz. “I loved it all - this adventure into music - I was sucking up everything like a sponge,” he says.

“With the blues band we played the juke joints of Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas. We didn’t make much money: it was all the corn liquor you could drink and enough money to get back home. If the owner didn’t feel like paying you, he didn’t pay you and you didn’t argue because he had a .38 pistol on his hip,” he laughs darkly. “With gospel it was all the food you could eat, and then maybe a collection was taken up for expenses.”

Eventually he “learned enough piano to get along,” and wound up on the staff at Memphis’ Stax Records by around ‘63, having been turned down three times by the label as an artist. An old friend from his doo wop days, David Porter, was already with the label and said to Hayes, “You play music and I write lyrics, let’s team up and start writing and producing like Holland-Dozier-Holland [see entry] up at Motown.“

“When we started writing,” Hayes remembers, “guys around the city would tease us: ‘Hey hit men, how many hits did you write today?’ But we kept our noses to the grindstone and we finally clicked with Carla Thomas’ ‘How Do You Quit’ in ‘65. Then they chose David and I to write and produce for Sam and Dave, and after we had a big hit with them, more people around town wanted to write songs. We organized a writer’s workshop and everything,” recalls Hayes. Their writing for Sam & Dave was typical of their approach. “We would come up with a good subject or a good hook. For the meat of the song you have to ask yourselves some questions: If you want this girl, why do you want her? If you get her, what would you do? People have to able to get what you’re trying to get across. As far as music is concerned, you’ve got to come up with a groove with changes and things that keep the emotional content in it.

“Usually our songs came from personal experiences,” he continues. “For instance, with ‘When Something’s Wrong With My Baby,’ David and I were working and working and working, and we just couldn’t come up with anything. So we gave up and each went home. After about 30 minutes, he called me: ‘I got it, I got it, I got it.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He had just written it on toilet paper or something, and said, ‘When something’s wrong with my baby, something’s wrong with me.’

“He came over and we started going over the lyrics. I sat down at the piano and started playing something slow. We got the changes and the melody and put it with the first verse, and the rest was easy. Sam & Dave were in town - we would usually work on their songs when they were around - sometimes we’d have them sitting there while we wrote to get a good feel for them.

“‘You Don’t Know Like I Know’ was originally a gospel song: ‘You don’t know like I know what the Lord has done for me.’ Well, a woman can do some good things for you too. We just switched it around,” Hayes says with a chuckle. “‘Soul Man’ came about during one of the riots. I was watching TV and they said something about businesses being bypassed when ‘soul’ was written on the door. That reminded me of Passover in the Bible. So I thought about this ‘soul’ thing: there’s a lot of pride in it. I didn’t look at the rioting as destroying. I looked at it as frustrated people taking out their frustrations on whatever got in their way. I told David about it and we started working on it. Everything just clicked.”

Hayes recalls the Stax studio. “We only had a one-track recorder at first. [Label-owner] Jim Stewart was considered the king of one-track. If anybody screwed up, we had to start all over again and [trumpet player] Wayne Jackson’s lips would fall off. Eventually we got two-track when Tom Dowd [see entry] came in and installed it for us.

“Regarding arrangements, we did them in out heads, where Motown may have had them written out. We went on feel. I continue to do that. Otis [Redding] would come in sometimes with just an idea. He would get behind the microphone and say ‘work up a groove’ and start doing lyrics spontaneously - [singing] ‘I can’t turn you loose.’”

Though deeply in the groove, Hayes was always a thinking man with a conscience as well. “I was active even in high school in marches and things. I was afraid but I thought it was the right thing to do. When Dr. King was killed [in ‘68] I went through a period when I couldn’t write, couldn’t create. I just went blank. I was so hurt by that and I had so much bitterness and hatred for racist attitudes. Then one day after about a year I cognized: ‘Hey man, the only way you can make a change is to do what you do.’ So I got busy again.”

Hayes had recorded a very casual album in ‘67 that received a fair amount of critical praise and was given the opportunity to record again in ‘69. This time he took the affair more seriously, but still felt no particular pressure to succeed as an artist. That album became Hot Buttered Soul, and it established the recording career of Isaac Hayes.

Hayes was shocked by his solo success. “I couldn’t believe it because I had been behind the scenes so long. When David and wrote together, we wrote for other people so we had to match their personalities. I had a background in blues, jazz, pop, even classical and I wanted to get it all out. I had a funky groove underneath, but those strings on top. I was happy with it for myself, but a few million other people got into it too,” he laughs.

For Shaft, Hayes had the powerful image of a tough but vulnerable black screen detective to inspire him; he found his all-time resonant grooves for the title track and long instrumental passages that achieved a perfect balance between the funk and the sweet. Hayes has released almost two-dozen (mostly) successful albums since. He remains humble. “I never took myself too seriously. Each time I cut a hit record I would say ‘Whew, I made it again.’ I was honest with my music and said ‘if I hurt, I cry.’ A lot of men liked it because it said what they wanted to say but didn’t know how to. Women liked it because it showed sensitivity in a man, and that’s what they were looking for.”

Hayes could get away with sensitivity because of his tough, forbidding image in the way that Nixon could go to China. Some TV stations wouldn’t let him on because they thought he was militant. “The image was my security blanket, especially the shades (tough on the outside, sensitive on the inside),” he confides.

That image - shaved head, chains draped over muscles - led to an acting career. Hayes has appeared in over a dozen films and in recurring roles on TV. His favorite role so far is that of Gandolf Finch in James Garner’s Rockford Files TV series from the ‘80s. Hayes’ most recent album is the notable Raw and Refined from ‘95. He also did a Shaft parody for the Beavis and Butthead Do America soundtrack; and is the star of the Isaac Hayes and Friends radio show on “KISS-FM” (WRKS) in New York, playing “classic soul and today’s R&B” weekday mornings. He is also the voice of “Chef” on the Comedy Central hit animated series South Park. But most of all, he is Isaac Hayes.
-Eric Olsen

posted by Eric at 3:49 PM

 
"No Backing Down: Tom Petty has never given in to trends. It's clearly paid off, as he gets set to join the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” by ROBERT HILBURN, Los Angeles Times

Tom Petty's music has always reflected the purity and faith of a musician who had the courage and conviction to simply listen to his heart. Rather than tailor his style to better fit critical or commercial trends, the singer-songwriter and his band the Heartbreakers have remained true, in themes and presentation, to the basic rock 'n' roll tradition that they learned from the records of such classic figures as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds and Bob Dylan....

posted by Eric at 3:32 PM

 
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were THE American rock ‘n’ roll band of the ‘80s after a very strong beginning in the mid-’70s. They worked with two great producers over that period: Denny Cordell and Jimmy Iovine. Below are their entries from The Encyclopedia of Record Producers.

Denny Cordell
Denny Cordell had a remarkable ability to bring out the best in the artists he worked with; and over a thirty-year career he brought out the best in artists as varied as the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, The Move, Joe Cocker, Leon Russell and Tom Petty. In addition, through astute A&R work with Island and his own Shelter label, he was instrumental to the careers of Phoebe Snow, J.J. Cale, Dwight Twilley, Marianne Faithfull, Melissa Etheridge, The Grifters, The Cranberries and producer Tony Visconti [see entry].

Dennis Cordell-Laverack was born in Buenos Aires in 1944, but went to public school in England. Cordell’s initial interest in music was sparked by jazz . After public school, Cordell sojourned to Paris to track down Chet Baker, the West Coast school cool trumpeter and vocalist. Though still in his teens, Cordell managed the troubled troubadour for a time and even arranged and supervised a few recording sessions in the midst of Baker’s heroin addiction.

Cordell joined Chris Blackwell [see entry] at Island Records to run the new sub-label Aladdin in 1965, but he left soon thereafter to work with the Moody Blues. He convinced the band to cover an American soul track, “Go Now,” by Bessie Banks. Sung by Denny Laine (who joined Paul McCartney’s - see entry - Wings in 1971), it was a Top 10 hit, and for many, the band’s defining moment. Cordell set up the deal as an independent producer and made some large change - a pattern he continued when set up his own production company, Straight Ahead.

In 1967, Straight Ahead aligned with Decca's Deram label where Cordell produced the Move’s first album. In September, Cordell moved to EMI's Regal Zonophone label to produce the white soul classic “A Whiter Shade Of Pale,” by Procol Harum, which reached No. 1 in England and No. 5 in the US. Matthew Fisher’s languid organ, derived from Bach’s “Sleepers Awake” cantata, sets an atavistic tone for Gary Brooker’s world-weary reading of Keith Reid’s Chaucerian lyrics - a rare medieval blues.

Having set all of the elements in motion, Cordell was reportedly visiting the loo when the final take was recorded. This song began the “art rock” movement while remaining incongruously soulful. Literary to a fault, Procol Harum’s first album also includes the Cervantes-inspired “Conquistador.” A young Tony Visconti met Cordell in New York just after "A Whiter Shade Of Pale." Cordell was impressed by Visconti’s production and arranging skills, and tapped him to serve as his assistant in London.

Cordell urged Visconti to explore the London club scene in search of talent. Visconti’s first two finds were a pair of eccentric singer/songwriters named Marc Bolan and David Bowie [see entry]. In an example of Cordell’s thirty years of mentoring, he passed on Tyrannosaurus Rex for himself, but invited Visconti to produce them under the auspices of Straight Ahead and funded the first recordings. Having had success with blue-eyed soul, Cordell then moved to the next level with the production of Joe Cocker’s first album. With his spastic motions and barbed wire bellow, Cocker is a ripe target for parody; but Cocker is also one of the great stylists in rock history, infusing every song with a passion and intensity worthy of his idol, Ray Charles. Denny Cordell brought the right material and a savory, Memphis-style soul feel to Cocker’s first four albums: the the zenith of Cocker’s career.

The title track of 1969’s With a Little Help From My Friends dares to take on the Beatles and leaves poor Ringo gasping in the dust. Cocker’s remake features a stirring guitar intro from Jimmy Page [see entry], then lies low before Cocker and his three female background singers call-and-respond a la the Raelettes, making the throwaway lyrics seem as serious as salvation.

Cordell and Leon Russell then put together an all-star band (Russell, Chris Stainton, Don Preston, Carl Radle, Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Bobby Keys, Rita Coolidge) to tour with Cocker, which led to one of the great live albums of all time: Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Englishmen rocks with loose, wild renditions of “Cry Me a River” and the Boxtops’ “The Letter,” highlighted by Cocker’s wail, Russell’s honky tonk piano and a smoking horn arrangement. Cordell and Russell were so inspired by the results that they formed a record label together - Shelter - on Russell’s home turf, Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1970.

Shelter had remarkable success. Cordell produced or co-produced Leon Russell’s great early work, albums by Freddie and Albert King, and Tom Petty and the Hearbreakers first two albums. In addition, Shelter released albums by J.J. Cale, Phoebe Snow, The Gap Band and the first two Dwight Twilley albums. Leon Russell, Leon Russell and the Shelter People, and the pseudonymous album of country covers, Hank Wilson’s Back Vol. 1, are excellent albums, but 1972’s Carney is the highlight of Russell’s career. Cordell leads Russell into a highly personal and weird world of Roller Derby queens, expired junkie girlfriends and the queasy thrills of the carnival.

The jaunty hit “Tightrope” pushes Russell’s vocals up front and neatly captures the vertigo inherent in relationships and similar balancing acts. The album, Cordell and Russell all peak on “This Masquerade” (later covered by George Benson), which opens with strange vibraphone and eerie electric guitar interplay that is beautiful, evocative and fathoms deep. A simple strummed acoustic guitar and Russell’s most natural singing blend with a light Latin beat into a flickering pool of intrigue and regret.

Cordell continued his amazing production streak with the first Tom Petty album. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is one of the great debuts of the ‘70s, and, alive with youthful energy, is Petty’s most compelling album. Again, Cordell’s production hits the mark. “Rockin’ Around With You” kicks off the album with an insistent backbeat, Petty’s patented mush-mouthed delivery and an almost-new wave intensity. “Breakdown” was Petty’s first radio hit; it comes alive with an insinuating guitar line from stalwart Mike Campbell, and Petty’s nuanced vocal over a great melody, buoyed by a loping beat.

“American Girl” is the best song Petty has ever recorded: the kind of anthem that few southwest of Springsteen were recording in the ‘70s. “Girl” generates a level of excitement that belies a relatively tame arrangement. The chiming guitars, the syncopated drums and Petty’s vocals - both pleading and defiant - leave no doubt as to the archetypal nature of this “American Girl” or this American band. Shelter also released Bob Marley’s first U.S. single, "Duppy Conqueror," shortly before Cordell launched Mango Records in a joint venture with Blackwell in 1972.

Cordell sold his interest in Mango 1975, but not before The Harder They Come Soundtrack was released, helping to acclimate American ears to reggae, and paving the way for Marley’s enormous success. In 1980, Cordell left the music business to concentrate his production abilities on thoroughbred horses and enjoyed moderate success in that field.

Cordell returned to the music business in 1991, again forming a partnership with Island’s Blackwell. Cordell brought the Cranberries with him to the label from Ireland. The band’s debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We?, became the largest-selling debut in Irish history.

Prior to his death from lymphoma in 1995, Cordell had recently formed a new music publishing company, Realization Music. A man who loved life and had not one, but two successful careers in the music business, Cordell took a bottle of Irish whiskey, a spliff, and his favorite Ellington record with him to the Great Beyond.
-Eric Olsen

Jimmy Iovine
Jimmy Iovine is a legendary figure who produced or co-produced an exceptional array of rock and modern rock by Tom Petty (Damn the Torpedoes - No. 2, Hard Promises - No. 5, Southern Accents - No. 7), Stevie Nicks (Bella Donna - No. 1, The Wild Heart - No. 5, Rock a Little - No. 12), Bob Seger (The Distance - No. 5), Dire Straits (Making Movies - No. 19), U2 (Under a Blood Red Sky, Rattle and Hum - No. 1), Patti Smith (Easter - No. 20, Dream of Life), The Pretenders (Get Close), Graham Parker (The Up Escalator), and Lone Justice (Lone Justice, Shelter) among a multitude of others between the late-’70s and late-’80s. Since ‘89 Iovine has co-owned (with Ted Field) the highly successful Interscope Records (and sublabels Nothing, Aftermath and Trauma), with acts including Blackstreet, Bush, Dr. Dre, Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, Smash Mouth, and the Wall Flowers.

Jimmy Iovine was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1953. He loved music, especially the rock of the Rolling Stones, Cream, Sly and the Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix. Iovine played guitar in a band, “but I wasn’t any good at all,” he declares. Given his interest in music and the lack of employment prospects in other fields, Iovine felt fortunate to enter the recording industry in the early-’70s when a cousin’s friend introduced him to songwriter/producer Ellie Greenwich, who got him in the door at the Record Plant as a second engineer. The job was rough: Iovine had no electronics background, the hours were grueling, and having barely set foot out of Brooklyn before then, Manhattan was a strange world full of strange people. He spent his time “concentrating on doing the job and trying to figure out how to adapt culturally. They would throw you out if you made too many mistakes and I needed the job,” he says.

Young, desperate and dedicated, Iovine learned his trade quickly, engineering for John Lennon, then for Bruce Springsteen starting with Born to Run in ‘75. Iovine met Patti Smith when she was recording Radio Ethiopia at the Record Plant in ‘76. They got along well, hung out together, and Smith asked Iovine to produce her next album - which turned out to be her commercial breakthrough - Easter. A solid, more rock-oriented affair than her punky first two albums, Easter rode to victory on the back of Smith’s first hit single, “Because the Night” (No. 13).

The rousing anthem started as a demo written, recorded and rejected by Springsteen for his Darkness On the Edge of Town album, which Iovine was engineering. Once Springsteen nixed the song from Darkness, Iovine asked Bruce if he could record it with Smith because he needed a single for her album, and he had “always found a woman singing from a man’s point of view to be interesting,” he says. Iovine’s instinct was correct as Smith’s ballsy reading shot her into the mainstream, and became the highest charting Springsteen-penned single to that point.

Easter began a sensational 10-year run for Iovine (and his engineer Shelly Yakus) that included four great Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers albums, establishing them as the American rock’n’roll band of the ‘80s. Not only did the albums all go Top 10, but Iovine (and co-producer Petty) turned Petty into a singles artist, scoring six Top 20 songs between ‘79 and ‘85 including “Don’t Do Me Like That” (No. 10), “Refugee” (No. 15), “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (No. 13), and with Stevie Nicks, whose Bella Donna album Iovine calls one of his favorites, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” (No. 3).

Iovine co-produced (with Mark Knopfler [see entry] the excellent Dire Straits album Making Movies with “Tunnel of Love” and the epic “Skateway.” Iovine produced Lone Justice’s self-titled cow punk classic, featuring the mighty pipes of Maria McKee on her most appealing performances: Tom Petty and Mike Campbell’s “Ways to Be Wicked,” and her own “Sweet, Sweet Baby (I’m Falling).”

Iovine produced U2’s classic live EP Under a Blood Red Sky in ‘83, and then their double-album mega-work Rattle and Hum in ‘87. Though its reach exceeded its grasp, this collection of live and studio tracks contains one of the band’s rockingest tunes, the Bo Diddley-rhythmed “Desire” (No. 3); the Memphis Horns-powered, Billie Holiday-tribute “Angel of Harlem” (No. 14); and the lovely, affecting “All I Want Is You” (No. 4 U.K.).

By the time of Hum, Iovine felt the icy breath of winter on his neck. “I felt that my best days as a producer were behind me,” he sighs. Having had a child and feeling that music was going to change heightened the feeling. “I felt like an athlete past his prime, and that there was no way a 20-year-old would want to work with me. I realized that I had to move on to something else to get back the feeling I had when I was a kid.”

So he created Interscope. Did the feeling come back? “No, but close,” he says. “There’s no experience like making the records. You’re in there with a bunch of people working together. There’s a real bond that has nothing to do with business and only to do with emotion. When it’s successful it’s an incredible feeling.”

How did he measure that success? “For me it was always hearing it on the radio. I’d say, ‘Wow, I worked on that.’ I fuckin’ don’t know why I was successful. I just know I brought an enthusiasm. I learned cooperation by working with people who were more talented than I am: Springsteen, Bono, John Lennon, Tom Petty. When I was a kid I gained a lot of respect for the process because I made some money and my life got better. I still have enormous respect for when someone comes in and makes a great record.

“The other side of it is instinct,” he continues. “I have no idea how I know what I know about music. I went for feeling: the feeling I got when I first heard ‘River Deep Mountain High,’ or ‘Sympathy For the Devil,’ or ‘I Want to Take You Higher.’ Not the same sound, just the same feeling. With music it’s either great or shitty. It’s not that complicated.”

At Interscope, Iovine functions as a meta-producer. “I love working with Teddy Riley, Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor [see entries] - people who are as true about what they are as some of the people I worked with when I was younger. I try to give them the independence that we fought for when I was in the studio: noninterference from the record company, yet support and belief at the same time. The label is a vehicle. My main job is to set the attitude of the place - a place where people can say ‘this record company is not in my way.’ Sometimes it’s hard. Interscope is something I’m extremely proud of because it feels the way I pictured it would feel.”
-Eric Olsen

posted by Eric at 2:56 PM

 
"Talking Heads Talking" by John Soeder, Cleveland Plain Dealer

And you might ask yourself: Is David Byrne going to wear his big suit when Talking Heads are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Fat chance. Actually, the scene-stealing XXXL outfit he sported in the group's acclaimed concert film "Stop Making Sense" is ready to be shipped to Cleveland....

posted by Eric at 2:08 PM

 

Emptying Out The Bookmarks #14

Are You Ready For The Telecondom?

...asks the headline on the site. Post 9/11 you would think this would be a slam dunk business investment, but it's a Ghost Site now, having last been upated 2/99.

"TELECONDOM comes packaged in a zip lock bag easily carried in the wallet, pocket, briefcase or purse. Remove from the zipper bag and unfold. Grasp the TELECONDOM's attached stowage envelope between the fingers and thumb of one hand and slip the open end over the telephone handset, held in
the other hand. Now you have a sanitary, treated, 2.0 millimeter plastic barrier between you and a colony of micro-critters. These concept fundamentals are, of course, based on contemporary rocket science."

But my favorite line has to be: "Howard Hughes might be alive today with TELECONDOM"

posted by tofu at 1:49 PM

 
Head Producer Eno
Visionary musician, producer, theorist Brian Eno helped shape the Talking Heads sound. Here is his entry from The Encyclopedia of Record Producers

Brian Eno
The scope of Brian Eno’s influence spans beyond music into art, fashion and the very fabric of our culture, which was the goal all along. "I suppose ideas are what I really think of as my job. My dream is to do for culture what Darwin did for the natural sciences. He established a frame in which it was possible to look at all life, ask serious questions about it and organize it in some way," he explained to an interviewer from GQ magazine's U.K. edition in 1996. "I've been wanting to do the same thing for culture for a long time." Along the way he has produced groundbreaking albums for himself, David Bowie, Devo, Talking Heads, and most famously, U2. If ideas are his business, then Eno is a successful man.

Born in the English village of Woodbridge, Suffolk on the 15th of May, 1948, he was educated by the De La Salle order. Then, disdaining conventional employment, Eno enrolled in a two-year course at the Ipswich Art School. He's said: "I saw a job as a trap and something to avoid. In fact, that's a characteristic of my life: making moves not so much towards things as away from them, avoiding them."

While he was at Ipswich he began to experiment with tape machines and by the time he left for the Winchester Art School in 1965, he had accumulated 30 recorders, although only two were in full working order. While his ear bowed towards avant-garde music, including the music he composed with his band, Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet, Eno also had a budding taste for rock’n’roll, spurred by the release of The Who’s "My Generation."

"I thought 'Oh-oh - rock music is going to do something' and realized that this area - which I'd previously imagined to be rather unserious - might actually turn out to be interesting after all," he's said.

Soon thereafter Eno had a random encounter with a saxophone player whom he had met at an avant-garde concert in Reading. That player, Andy MacKay, had joined a band called Roxy Music. At the end of 1971 Eno received a phone call from the band, asking him if he would consider helping them out, mostly because he owned a Revox and they wanted to make a demo tape. Shortly thereafter he was introduced to the synthesizer and a man with no formal musical training found himself in one of the most influential bands in the history of rock.

Eno contributed mightily to the first two classic Roxy albums: Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure. Always more of a sound sculptor than a musician, Eno bent a weird band in even weirder directions by creating atmospheres with tape loops and his new toy, the synth.

Eno’s influence can be heard particularly on “Ladytron,” “Virginia Plain” and “Sea Breezes” on the first album (1972); and “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” “The Bogus Man” and the awesome freakishness of the title track on For You Pleasure (1973). Probably inevitably, Eno and singer/songwriter Bryan Ferry had a falling out over the direction of the band.

Eno left to concentrate on a solo career, which was launched with the 1974 release Here Come The Warm Jets. Ever since, Eno has been at the forefront of experimental music. He can claim ambient music as his own creation, just as he can take credit for finding the magic formula that has musician's creating some of their most accessible and successful songs while working with him.

From the GQ interview Eno explains the role of producer with what seems to be classic understatement: "I always say that the first thing that you have to remember about producing is that it's a well-paid form of cowardice; you'll notice that producers never get blamed unless they make a total cock-up...But producers can make a huge difference to the atmosphere in which a record is made."

Though Eno wasn’t credited as producer, one of his early collaborators (after Robert Fripp) was David Bowie [see entry], who was attracted to Eno because of the sonic soundscapes he had created within his own music.

The two collaborated on Bowie's 1977 release, Low, while Bowie was living in Berlin. Of the song "Sound and Vision," Eno has commented: "That's a beautiful song. I remember I had the idea of making the intro very long so that you wait and wait for the vocal to come in. That's me on synthesizer [playing the bit of percussion that goes tshhhhhhh].

“The drum sound is interesting. Corgghh! Corgghh! Very boxy. The snare drum is being sent to a treatment that pitches it down, then fed back again, so it goes beuggh! beuggh!, like it's talking. Boy. We used to make these records so fast. That's a couple of days' work."

For Bowie's second Berlin release, Eno worked on one of Bowies most intimate and inspirational songs, "Heroes." "Bowie has this ability to write songs that are full of yearning, and the music really echoes that. I remember we needed a guitarist, so we rang up Robert Fripp, who was in New York, and he got on a plane and came over the same night I think, came straight from the airport to the studio, and started playing as soon as he heard the song. So you get this wonderful out-of-tune guitar, circling round the melody, matching the yearning of the words, and then he finally gets there, and there's this great sense of relief," Eno has said.

Eno’s work with Bowie gained him attention, and the offers started coming in, including American art rockers, the Talking Heads. The band and producer collaborated on three albums, culminating in 1980's Remain In Light, where AfroCaribbean rhythms came to the fore. Of the song "Once In A Lifetime," Eno remembers: "That's an interesting one. It's got a strange rhythm. I always heard it differently from the Talking Heads. I was hearing the 'one' on the first beat, which is empty. They were hearing it on the third beat, like a normal pop song. So there was this tension between my picture of the song and theirs. Impossible for classical people to understand."

Until this point Eno had worked with essentially quirky, culty-type artists. That all changed when he got a phone call from U2's drummer Larry Mullen. Although Eno wasn't convinced he was right for the band, they were convinced he was. In a 1990 conversation with Robert Sandall from Q magazine, Eno remembers a long conversation with Bono.

"I said, 'Look, if I work with you, I will want to change lots of things you do, because I'm not interested in records as a document of a rock band playing on stage, I'm more interested in painting pictures. I want to create a landscape within which this music happens.' And so Bono said, Exactly, that's what we want too."

Unfortunately, U2’s record label (Island) didn’t see the pairing. Owner Chris Blackwell [see entry] was vehemently opposed. "He thought I was completely the wrong person for the job. He thought I'd turn it into art rock. And I thought this was a possible outcome myself. I took out the insurance policy of bringing Dan (Lanois - see entry - who had worked as Eno's engineer on some of his ambient albums) along. I thought that at least if he were there it would be a well-produced record with good performances, because Dan has a very good way of working with musicians. He's very encouraging and he can get people to do fantastic things. I was never very interested in musicians or musicianship until I met Dan."

Rather than mulling over song construction with the band day and night, Eno felt his role was to find songs the band had written which didn't seem typical. Such examples include "Promenade" and "Bullet The Blue Sky," as well as the song "Mothers Of The Disappeared," which bears the Eno stamp. The song was created by slowing down the drum track from another song, dousing it with reverb and then adding Bono's vocals. In short, classic Eno tape manipulation and studio trickery.

The result of all of this has been U2 standards The Unforgettable Fire (No. 12); 1987 Grammy winner for Album of the Year, The Joshua Tree (No. 1); Achtung Baby (No. 1); and Zooropa (No. 1).

A devout theorizer, Eno, of course, has a production philosophy: "I try to find out what isn't being done that ought to be done," he told Q. "Now sometimes that means somebody ought to make the tea. Sometimes it means somebody ought to re-write the whole bloody song. With Talking Heads I was a sort of tea boy/arranger. With U2 I championed the songs that didn't seem very U2-ish, or things that had strong beginnings but no clear destination."

Above all, Eno seeks to avoid "Hollywoodization." His term, as he describes it, "is the process where things are evened out, rationalized, nicely lit from all sides, carefully balanced, studiously tested against all known formulas, referred to several committees, and finally made triumphantly noticeable... It's where deficits of nerve, verve and imagination meet surfeits of glitz and gloss." At least we know what the Eno catalog is not.
-David John Farinella

posted by Eric at 1:48 PM

 
Head Keyboard
Here is Talking Head keyboardist/producer Jerry Harrison's entry from The Encyclopedia of Record Producers.

Jerry Harrison
As Jerry Harrison sees it, his role as a producer is merely an extension of his life as a musician. "In many ways what I do as a producer is quite similar to what I did joining Talking Heads and Jonathan [Richman] in Modern Lovers: taking a songwriter who has a very distinct, but in some ways inaccessible style, adding what I play and helping him (or them) round out the sound or complete the picture," he says. He has helped such artists as Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Crash Test Dummies, BoDeans, Live, Poi Dog Pondering, Violent Femmes and the Verve Pipe successfully complete their pictures.

Harrison (born February 21, 1949 in Milwaukee) has now spent more time working as a producer than a musician, but he still has a musician’s sensibilities when it comes to producing. "I always try to draw out from the artists what they can do," he says. "I'll sometimes suggest a player who I think can add something, who's a specialist; but even when there's a keyboard player, and I play keyboards, I'd rather work with [the band’s keyboard player] on tones and sounds. I think maybe because I make my own records, my feeling is that this is their record and I want them to shine. I think the producer is the person who just tries to get whatever has to be done, done."

Harrison entered the production realm when the Talking Heads began to produce their own albums. "I really felt that since we had done all that work with [Brian] Eno [see entry] we had overcome the idea of the studio being sort of off-limits. I definitely saw it as a tool, the same way you'd think of an instrument as a tool."

And while he was part of the big puzzle at Heads sessions, when he went out on his own to produce a Nona Hendryx single, he remembers with a laugh that things were a bit different. "Having the engineer ask me all these questions like, 'What kind of tape do you want to use?' I said 'I don't know, what tape do you usually use?'"

After the sessions with the Talking Heads and Hendryx, Harrison set off to work on The Red and the Black, his first solo album; an album by his friend and co-producer on the Hendryx sessions, Busta Jones; and assisted David Byrne on his The Catherine Wheel album. While he had built a pretty extensive resume by then, it was during the recording of the Violent Femmes’ The Blind Leading The Naked in ‘86 that he felt at home in the producer’s chair. "I think during that album I thought, 'This is going to be a part of my life.'"

And while he was getting more and more calls to produce, he was still committed to the Talking Heads. "I was really trying to juggle all of these careers that I had," he remembers. "I really liked producing and I really thought I was good at it." So, in between Heads albums and tours he recorded with the Fine Young Cannibals, the BoDeans and Poi Dog Pondering. "I think originally record companies saw that I had been in two bands that they would consider out on the fringes and they thought that I would be a good choice for bands they didn't know what to do with," he says.

Then he got a phone call from Gary Kurfirst who was just about to sign a band out of Hershey, Pennsylvania by the name of Live. "Gary said, ‘I'm quite sure I want to sign them and I want you to produce them, I think you'd be perfect. Here's zero dollars, go make an album,'" he remembers. He met with the band and made Live's Mental Jewelry album; three years later they reconvened and made the wildly successful Throwing Copper (No. 1).

"When Live became successful I started to get more tapes from a little more mainstream bands. I think I got the reputation that I could develop someone and make a record that had potential to sell. Getting new bands to succeed is maybe the most difficult thing to do, to get their expression across," he says.

One of the keys to his success has been his dedication to finding a sound for each album. "I try to really come to terms with where I'm going to go with the record and feel comfortable with it," he explains. "There are times I hear good music, but I don't take the project because I don't have any idea what I want to do with it."

In fact, before working on the Verve Pipe's Villains release, Harrison admits the he had turned down a couple of their previous independent releases merely because he couldn't find anything to add to their sound. But when he does take on a project, he wants to make sure that he's on the right track. “I discuss it with the band and make sure we're all on the same page, but things are always going to evolve in the studio. Sometimes I don't even have it quite in words, but I have a picture."

It's that philosophy he took into a session with Kenny Wayne Sheppard, which was a return to his blues beginnings. "I came up with a plan that I wanted to do. Everyone from Kenny Wayne Sheppard, to the record company, to the management thought it was good." That plan included adding Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon - the Double Trouble rhythm section - to Sheppard's early tracking dates. The trio recorded a version of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) and "I Don't Live Today," which was a lifelong dream of Harrison's, "I was in (the studio) going, 'Wow, isn't this great?'"

Even after spending his entire life working around music, he says his production gigs are satisfying because he can immerse himself in any number of musical genres. "There's something wonderful about being a producer, it's like working in a genre that you know as a player you could never come up to the level they're at, but you can still think about it. So, as a producer you get to express yourself through the artist."
-David John Farinella

posted by Eric at 1:32 PM

 
Hometown Heroes
The Voice gets excited about two bands from the scene making it into the Rock Hall.
"Punks In the Hall: The Ramones and Talking Heads Battle Their Way From CBGB to Cleveland” by Bill Werde, Village Voice

Gary Kurfirst, the longtime manager of Talking Heads, illustrates just how irreverent the band was when they started touring in the mid '70s. "They were in Boston," recalls Kurfirst. "It must've been around '77, and we were in a nasty fight with the headlining band—they didn't want to let us use their stage lights. Finally David [Byrne] walks up and says, 'Screw it!' They played the whole show with the house lights on!"
Ask Kurfirst the name of the bullies, though, and he gets suspiciously quiet. Turns out he so impressed the headliners with his tenacity that he wound up managing them, too.
That band was The Ramones....

posted by Eric at 1:12 PM

 
Talk About Skinny
Check out these pics of the Talking Heads at CBGB’s from the ‘70s.
posted by Eric at 12:24 PM

 
Talking Heads
As we move on from the Ramones to the Talking Heads, our ever vigilant friend Jerry spotted this one.

"Dept of Hoopla: Heads Talking Again"by George Kalogerakis, New Yorker

Whatever alarming images the phrase "international voting body of about a thousand rock experts" might conjure, let's give that hoary community some credit. It accomplished, in a single ballot, what the four former members of Talking Heads couldn't-or wouldn't-in eighteen years: it got David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth to agree to reunite, however briefly, and perform onstage again as Talking Heads. They'll play at least two songs this week when they are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony at - not the Mudd Club or CBGB - the Waldorf-Astoria....

posted by Eric at 12:13 PM

 
Phil Spector and the Ramones
It is often forgotten, but Phil Spector produced one of the Ramones’ most popular albums, End of the Century. The enigmatic Spector, a Hall of Famer himself, wrote a farewell letter to Joey Ramone, delivered by Lenny Kaye at last year’s birthday bash. Here is Spector’s entry from
The Encyclopedia of Record Producers.

Phil Spector
Perhaps it should have occurred to someone that Phil Spector (born December 26, 1940 in the Bronx, NY) had a bit of Midas in him when the first song he ever wrote and produced, "To Know Him Is To Love Him" (No. 1) by his band, The Teddy Bears, sold over a million copies. His investment? Some studio time (at Hollywood’s Gold Star) and $40. It was 1958 and a 17-year-old Spector had just launched a career that would take him from the highest of highs in the early-'60s, to the lows of the late-'60s, and the shadows by the early-'70s.

Spector’s career began in ‘57 (his family had moved to Los Angeles in the early-’50s) as a member of the Sleepwalkers with future- Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, future-producer Kim Fowley and drummer Sandy Nelson. By ‘58 he was a producer. By the time he was 23, writer Tom Wolfe had dubbed him the "First Tycoon of Teen." By the time he was 34, he had been declared DOA after two car accidents - and survived - within three months of each other. He is the most referred-to name in this book, and his Wall of Sound is either held up as a paradigm to aspire to, or reviled as egomaniacal bombast.

Spector's legend is notorious, his influence profound, his credit list rightfully admired. Perhaps his career is best summed up by a quote attributed to him circa 1973: "I really believed in what was going on and I did try to change the music - I did try to change it and it was a painful experience, it was hard, basically, because there were not many people to do it with, there was not much help. It really rested on my ability to do things with my music and sounds. I don't know if I was consciously trying to change it, but musically I was definitely trying to do what I really felt was right."

What was right in Spector's ears apparently was right in a lot of other people's as well. Immediately after leaving Atlantic Records, where he was named head of A&R at age 20, Spector began to develop his Wall of Sound. Some of the musicians he used to produce that sound included drummer Hal Blaine, guitarist Larry Knechtel, bassist Carol Kaye, saxophonist Steve Douglas and percussionist Sonny Bono. That sound, which some say he "borrowed" from Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller [see entry], "sweetened" a track with larger-than-life strings, vocals and percussion instruments. The goal - from finding or writing the song, to hiring the musicians, to recording the song - was to make the song as far out and overwhelming as possible.

After the Teddy Bears and Atlantic, Spector worked with a number of producers including Lee Hazlewood, Lester Sill and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. In 1962, Spector took his show on the road and launched the Philles label, scoring over 20 hit records by such artists as the Crystals, Darlene Love, Bobb B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, The Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers. After his success in 1958, Spector's next No. 1 came in 1962, with the Crystals' "He's a Rebel." With classic Spector subterfuge, The Crystals didn't really sing, either on that top hit or on the No. 11 "He's Sure the Boy I Love,” because of touring conflicts; instead, it was the Blossoms with Darlene Love on lead who recorded them. The actual Crystals (Barbara Alston, LaLa Brooks, Dee Dee Kennibrew, Mary Thomas and Patricia Wright) scored four other Top 20 hits for Spector, including "There's No Other (Like My Baby)" which went to No. 20, "Uptown" (No. 13), "Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home)" (No. 3) and "Then He Kissed Me" (No. 6). Other artists Spector nurtured to Top 20 stardom include Ray Peterson ("Corinna Corinna" - No. 9), the Paris Sisters ("I Love How You Love Me" - No. 5), Curtis Lee ("Pretty Little Angel Eyes" - No. 7), and his songwriting compatriot on several projects, Gene Pitney ("Town Without Pity" - No. 3). Spector also produced perhaps the best rock’n’roll Christmas album of all time, A Christmas Gift For You (No. 6, later rereleased as Phil Spector’s Christmas Record) with timeless performances from Darlene Love, The Ronettes, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, and the Crystals.

Spector has said he views his work as "impressionistic sound productions," and virtually all of those impressionistic ‘60s hits were recorded at Gold Star - first on a three track, then a four-track - all in mono, with engineer Larry Levine. The Wall of Sound came from the studio’s echo chambers and the fact that Spector recorded platoons of musicians together - without isolation - in a small room with a high ceiling.

And while he and the acts on the Philles roster were rolling down the gold brick road in the mid-’60s, the wheels came off of the wagon in ‘66. Spector's (literally) largest production to date, Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High" was a commercial flop in the U.S. (reaching only No. 88, but in the U.K. it soared to No. 3); the hypersensitive Spector closed his label and, for all intents and purposes, stopped producing.

He came out of his self-imposed exile for a series of records in the ‘70s, including the Beatles' swan song Let It Be (No. 1), which he pieced together from live tracks. He also added a monstrous orchestral backing to Paul McCartney’s [see entry] “The Long and Winding Road” (No. 1). Keeping to former-Beatles, Spector lent his texture to George Harrison's finest, All Things Must Pass (No. 1), and worked with John Lennon on the classics Plastic Ono Band (No. 6) and Imagine (No. 1).

In retrospect, Leonard Cohen's Death of a Lady's Man from ‘77 is pricelessly charming. Spector wrote the music - in a classic late-50s/early-’60s pop style - for Cohen’s languid tales of torn romance, and Cohen responded with his best singing. Listening to it today, it’s great to hear Cohen outside of his usual spare settings.

Spector also produced the Ramones epic End of the Century - their best-selling studio album - and in keeping with the Spector tradition, one that fans of the band either love or hate. The album made explicit the connection between early-’60s pop rock and the punk band’s psyche, and holds up as both a Ramones and a Spector classic: Spector’s idiosyncrasies never overwhelm the roar of “Chinese Rock” or “Rock ‘N’ Roll High School,” and the Spectorish “Do You Remember Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio” rollicks with just the right retro touches. The band’s remake of the Ronette’s “Baby I Love You” is as touching as it is fun.

Spector has remained in seclusion for most of the last 20 years. In a ‘98 legal development, The Ronettes (Phil’s ex-wife Ronnie, now Greenfield; Estelle Bennett; Nedra Talley Ross) won the right to sue Spector for $12 million in back-royalties, claiming they haven’t been paid any since 1963. Darlene Love won a back-royalty judgment against Spector in ‘97.
-David John Farinella/Eric Olsen

posted by Eric at 12:01 PM

 
Craig Leon and the Ramones
Here is the great producer Craig Leon’s entry from
The Encyclopedia of Record Producers. He produced the classic first Ramones album and was integral to the NY punk scene of the ‘70s. He now lives and works in Europe.

Craig Leon was a visionary New York A&R man and producer in the ‘70s who discovered and/or recorded punk/new wave icons the Ramones (Ramones), Suicide (Suicide), Blondie (“X Offender”), Richard Hell and the Voidoids (Blank Generation EP), Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band (self-titled debut, Meanwhile..Back in the States), and Moon Martin (Shots From a Cold Nightmare, Escape From Domination), among many others. Leon also coproduced (with Kim King) one of the earliest documentations of New York’s new music scene, Live At CBGB’s, with classic performances from Mink DeVille, Tuff Darts (with Robert Gordon), and the Shirts.

In the early-‘80s Leon produced the Bangles (self-titled EP), The Beat Farmers (Van Go), Rodney Crowell (But What Will the Neighbors Think), and the Sir Douglas Quintet (Border Wave), before moving to England in the mid-’80s to produce Doctor and Medics (Laughing At the Pieces), the Pogues (Red Roses For Me), the Go-Betweens (Tallulah), Flesh For Lulu (Big Fun City), and many others.

Leon - who is also a composer and instrumental artist (with and without his wife, “electronic folk artist” Cassell Webb) - has kept going strong in the ‘90s, producing Jesus Jones (Liqiudizer), The Fall (Extricate, Shift-Work - No. 17 U.K., Code: Selfish), The Chills (Sunburnt), Eugenius (Mary Queen of Scots), and the much-anticipated Blondie reunion album.

Craig Leon was born July 1, 1952 in Miami, Florida. He endured 12 years of instruction in piano, composition, theory, harmony and musicology. His first musical memory is of listening repeatedly to an Angel recording of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony on his portable phonograph. Later in Leon’s childhood, late-night rock’n’roll and blues radio helped fill sleepless nights with dreams and visions. The first record Leon bought was Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning,” which sounded to him like a horror story (another of his childhood enthusiasms - maybe that’s why he didn’t sleep).

As a teen, Leon played in a succession of unknown bands and did some session work as a keyboardist. Eventually he built his own demo studio with the help of his friend, the late producer and engineer Alex Sadkin (Bob Marley, Thompson Twins), and recorded local bands (Southern Steel, in the early-’70s, was his first production).

Producer Richard Gottehrer [see entry] brought the Climax Blues Band in to Leon’s studio to do preproduction for their Sense of Direction (‘74) album. Gottehrer liked Leon’s studio and arranging skills so much that he persuaded Leon to sell his share of the studio and move to New York to work for Gottehrer’s (and co-owner Seymour Stein’s) Sire Records, where Leon quickly became an A&R man.

As a very junior A&R man (“I didn’t know if I was supposed to empty the trash cans or not”), Leon was suddenly thrust into the role of producer when Gottehrer abruptly left Sire in the middle of recording an album for the Canadian band Chilliwack in ‘75. Rockerbox became Leon’s first nationally-released production. Though only 22, Leon says he felt very comfortable in the studio, and that he was “doing something that I should do. I wasn’t quite engineering yet, but I was really fascinated with the different sonic textures you could get through processing and the like. It was all very new back then: if you had a digital delay, couple of compressors, and two echo plates you were very lucky.”

Working for Sire, Leon became involved with the percolating New York underground music scene. One summer night in ‘75 Leon went to CBGB’s looking for Patti Smith (see John Cale, Jimmy Iovine, Lenny Kaye entries), who was already signed to Arista. Owner Hilly Kristal suggested that Leon come back later that week to see a show with two bands named Talking Heads and the Ramones. “I went to that show and there were literally four people in the audience besides me, but the bands were phenomenal.

“With the Ramones, I scouted them and then I had to develop them. A lot of people didn’t even think they could make a record. There were weeks of preproduction on a very basic level: like when the songs started and when they ended. Their early sets were one long song until they ran out of steam or fought. You could see it as a performance art-type thing, where you had a 17-minute concise capsule of everything you ever knew about rock’n’roll. Or you could see it as 22 little songs. They had a very serious concept of what they wanted to do, but then we had to get the execution up to the point of actually being able to do it. It was the original drummer, Tommy [“Ramone” Erdelyi], who had the concept of what they should sound like, and what they should look like,” says Leon.

“After we worked out all of that stuff, we did the album very quickly in the studio. The studio, Plaza Sound, was great. Some early Blondie and Talking Heads stuff was recorded there too. It was the old NBC Symphony Orchestra rehearsal hall, and it had been turned into a studio. With the Ramones we had these three big rehearsal halls and we put their Marshall amps in separate rooms so they wouldn’t bleed. I remember the bass player [Dee Dee “Ramone” Colvin] and the guitar player [Johnny “Ramone” Cummings] standing in the hallway with their amps in separate rooms, and the drums in a booth way at the back of this immense studio. You could crank it up and still get isolation, which is why it sounds big and dry at the same time.”

The Ramones first album is a roaring minimalist icon, and is considered by many to be the first real American punk record. Layers and layers of accumulated bloat and sheen were stripped away to reveal the basic energy, drive, and primitive melodicism of rock’n’roll. The Ramones’ sound was blazing early-’60s surf music played through the overdriven distortion of Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath. Yet, according to Leon, the Ramones saw themselves as a pop band. “In our naiveté, we thought they were going to be bigger than the Beatles. They had even named themselves after Paul McCartney’s [see entry] early stage name, ‘Paul Ramone.’” In retrospect, it is almost miraculous that an album as radical as the first Ramones record - on a label, Sire, that was a small indie at the time (‘76) - charted at all (it reached No. 111).

“The whole New York music thing was seen as an extension of the art scene, so we thought we were doing something cultural. It might have been pretentious, but what the hell, we were having fun. We really thought we were doing something groundbreaking and new. A lot of that is missing today, although I still try to find artists like that to work with,” he says.

If the first Ramones album is the most important record Leon has made, the first album by the aggro-electronic duo Suicide (Alan Vega - vocals, Martin Rev - keyboards, percussion) is probably second. Recalls Leon, “They were one of the first bands I saw in New York. I figured any band that could drive the jaded crowd out of Max’s Kansas City must be doing something right. They were doing James Brown in this bizarre electronic way, with whips and chains directed at the audience. They saw it as an art experiment. Alan is a painter as well. I was fascinated by the German minimalist group Can at the time, and I was into the echoed vocals of dub that I had learned through working with Bob Marley and Lee Perry [see entry] on the Martha Velez record, so we applied those things to the production.

“We had about an hour of preproduction before we did the record at Ultima Studios,” he continues. “I think the guy who financed the record paid off the janitor to leave the door open for us, and we recorded it over the weekend. A lot of that went down live to tape, and then was manipulated in the mix.” The album is remarkably varied for just a keyboard player and a singer. Leon and Rev get a real percussive thump out on “Ghost Rider” and “Rocket U.S.A.” “Cheree” is a throbbing, beautiful love song. “Johnny” cops an old time rock ’n’ roll riff and makes it swing electronically. Vega alternately coos and shrieks his way through the epic “Frankie Teardrop.”

Suicide might be the single most influential album that never charted anywhere, for any length of time. It is certainly the progenitor of both the techno-pop of Human League, Depeche Mode and Erasure; and the jagged avant noise of the “no wave” bands like the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and eventually, Sonic Youth.

Leon then moved in a radically different musical direction, but a direction not so different regarding recording techniques. He produced country singer Rodney Crowell’s [see entry] second album. “That was one of my favorites. He had the Hot Band, which was essentially Elvis’ band at the time: Tony Brown [see entry], Emory Gordy Jr., Albert Lee. It was essentially a ‘live in the studio’ record, like a lot of the punk records. He wanted a very edgy, hard and dry sound compared to what he had been doing. His first album was very lush. It was one of the first really credible things I did that wasn’t New York punk,” he says.

“On a ‘live’ recording like that you have to do it until you get it right, until it sounds like a ‘record,’ but you have to know when its gone over the limit and is starting to get stale. Then you have to stop it and start it all over again. The Sir Douglas Quintet reunion was done like that. They brought in all of their original equipment from the ‘60s to Electric Lady and recorded 40 songs live in three days,” Leon notes. “The opposite of that is the modern pop or techno stuff that is constructed. You have a bunch of different parts in a computer and you move them around until it sounds right. My own stuff, or my wife’s, are constructed from a score,” he says.

Leon moved to L.A. in the early-’80s, and after a few years, he was tired of it. “There was still an indie scene over here [England], and I came over just to see what was happening. I talked to a few different record people about artists and a bunch of interesting projects came through in just one day. One of those was for my wife, who was in a bunch of Texas psychedelic bands in the ‘60s. One thing led to another and we just ended up staying. We’re very happy here because we get a bit of an outlet for our own music, which is harder to find in the States. Also, things are much faster here. I love working with really fresh, new bands that are just getting their ideas together and need someone to coordinate them. It’s a really fulfilling role for me to help them along.”
-Eric Olsen

posted by Eric at 11:25 AM

 
They Loved Joey
The great rock ‘n’ roll photographer Bob Gruen has a cool photo essay on last year’s Joey Ramone Birthday Bash Party/Tribute, including performances by Blondie, the Damned, Cheap Trick, and many others. The world’s most famous guitar playing mobster, Steven Van Zandt, was MC. More pics here. The Official Ramones site has all kinds of goodies as well, including the new posthumous Joey Ramone solo album.

Joey died of lymphatic cancer last April, a month short of his 50th birthday. There are good obits here, here, here, and here. It will really be something special when the Ramones are inducted tonight. Lot’s of artists are respected, admired, imitated, even revered. Joey and the Ramones are loved. There will be many tears shed by many tough-looking people.
posted by Eric at 10:53 AM

 
Marty and the Ramones
Our partner Marty Thau was the first person to record the Ramones. Here are his recollections of those exciting days and his tribute to the late, great Joey Ramone.

I first heard about the Ramones in 1975 from Johnny Thunders, who told me a new scene was developing at a little village bar called Mothers and a hot new band called the “Ramones” were causing all the excitement. "You should check them out," he said, "cause they're gonna stir some waves." So I did and thought, "here's a band I'd like to produce."

I wasn't recognized as a producer yet, but I had spent so much time in recording studios I figured I was up to the task. I was still managing the high-maintenance New York Dolls, who were in the early stages of their implosion, but I knew it was just a matter of time before they’d break up. I couldn't picture myself managing anymore - I wanted to produce records.

The Ramones were searching for a manager and were considering me. I made it clear I wasn't interested in managing anyone, but would like an opportunity to produce some demos with them to see what they could do in the studio. "Let's do it," they said, and a week later we were off to 914 Studios in Blauvelt, New York to record two songs: “Judy is a Punk” and “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.”

The Ramones knew exactly what they were looking for: a duplication of their live sound with no added frills or overdubs. Tommy, the band's original drummer, was somewhat familiar with the recording process and helped direct his bandmates through the sessions. Johnny and Dee Dee were tight-lipped; Joey was the butt of the other's jokes. A quiet and somewhat nervous type, Joey said little, delivered a near-perfect performance each take, and then quietly retreated into a corner as we listened back to the tape. I didn't exactly know what to make of him and concluded he must be extremely shy.

We completed the recordings in less than 4 hours - they were never mixed - and a few days later the rough cassette was sent to Craig Leon, a young A&R man at Sire Records, who played them for his boss Seymour Stein. Craig was a close friend - we'd hang out together at CBGBs almost every night. Weeks later, Sire signed the Ramones. My demos weren't the only reason they were signed, but they did play a role and proved without doubt that the Ramones could make credible records. Seventies punk had arrived.

Many of the so-called "knowledgeable" A&R men of the day enjoyed attending Ramones shows but weren't certain they were recordable. None of the New York punk scene acts had been signed to a label, and everyone was watching and waiting to see if the new movement had legs. One major A&R chieftan said, "If this punk garbage ever hits, I will leave the business." The music business really missed the boat on the Ramones; a lot of people who should have known better ended up looking rather pathetic when the world embraced the band.

Craig was assigned the task of producing the band and did an excellent job, which resulted in their classic self-titled first LP. I was naturally disappointed that I didn't get the production assignment but was glad the Ramones were in Craig's hands because I knew he loved the band and would know what to with them in the studio.

But that's not where my involvement with Joey ended - there's a bit more. As the next few years unfolded and the Ramones toured the world, recorded more LPs and became international favorites, I became friends with the now more sophisticated and confident Joey. We'd meet from time to time over a few drinks to discuss fame, fortune and rock 'n' roll. It was always fun hanging out with him and usually ended with the two of us stumbling out of the bar into the dark East Village streets at 4 AM, laughing and heading home. I found Joey to be a very perceptive and sensitive individual, a rare departure from typical music types.

When the Ramones split up, it was Joey who lent his name to the downtown music scene and assisted many young and aspiring musicians in their pursuit of a contract. When he died, I cried. The Ramones will go down in history for having reintroduced pure fiery energy and humor into rock ‘n’ roll - they inspire to this day. The Ramones truly deserve to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I just learned that New York City is considering renaming 2nd Street in the Bowery , the block where the early Ramones shared a loft, “Joey Ramone Place.” I hope it happens. His family can be very proud of Joey for the person he was. Everyone misses him.
Marty Thau

posted by Eric at 9:50 AM

 
Rock Hall Inductions Tonight!
Today is the day - Rock Hall Inductions tonight webcast live on Cleveland.com. Since the Induction ceremonies are almost always in New York, a few years ago the Rock Hall here in Cleveland came up with the idea of a consolation prize for the local masses: a live big screen simulcast of the ceremony. I hang out at the Rock Hall, do play-by-play of the events (check out last year’s here) taking place on the screen and at the Rock Hall itself. The activities are never anything less than interesting, and, unless you are in Cleveland or New York, the webcast is the only way to experience the Inductions live. An edited version of the broadcast will be shown on VH1 Wednesday night.

We hope you enjoyed the special episode of Cool Tunes Saturday night, Cleveland.com’s Johanna Hoadley and I combined the winners of the Cleveland.com’s reader’s poll with our choices of who deserves to eventually get into the Rock Hall. We had a great time and you can hear the show anytime from anywhere right here. Let us know what you think.

As far as this year’s class goes, it’s a new generation, a new chapter, with the Ramones and Talking Heads being the first of the punk/new wave era to be voted in. We will be adding profiles, bios, stories, links about this year’s inductees all day so keep coming back and tell the neighbors.
posted by Eric at 9:41 AM

 
Erin Wears a Bragh
Happy St. Patty’s Day. Unless you are actually Irish - and if so, a hearty best wishes to you - this is a holiday primarily for young adults, providing them with a conscience-assuaging excuse to get shitfaced and run around in circles.

On the one hand I get wistful thinking back on the days when I could dedicate a Sunday (or whichever day of the week) to communal drinking and the din of emerald-hued revelry. On the other hand I don’t mind the fact that these days the inevitable aftermath of pain, disorientation, and recrimination figures more prominently in my brain than the hours of inebriated celebration that precede it. I am fairly pleased by the fact that, other than my bachelor party almost 4 years ago and a bizarre lapse in Chicago several months ago, I haven’t ritualistically abused myself in about 13 years. What pleases more than simply seeing through the fun to the hangover, though, are the responsibilities that preclude me losing a day or so to intoxication, and the fact that I see those responsibilities as an asset to my life and not a burden.
posted by Eric at 2:24 PM

 
Golden Flash
I generally don’t get that wrapped up in the NCAA tournament (at least until the end); much of the frenzy seems to derive from the self-interest of office pools (“Brackets - where are my brackets? Gotta find my brackets. Did you do anything to my brackets?”), but I am jazzed about Kent State making it to the Sweet Sixteen. Not only is the school only about 15 minutes from my house, but I have taken classes there, and my brother Arne graduated from there. Also, there is a subtle pall that hangs over poor Kent, even 32 years later. Any source of cheer is welcome.
posted by Eric at 1:52 PM

 
Post Gig Wrap-up

I found some graffiti I had left the first time I played at the Phantasy (2/90). I'm not sure which is sadder, that it was still there after 12 years, or that I remembered where I had put it ;)

After soundcheck, the doorman needs to stamp my hand and attach the wristband, but he wants to see some ID -- I tell him "I'm 38, I wouldn't lie about something like that" he just shudders and questions me no further...

I survived the club's "stairs of death", yet another time (it's almost like a Stephen King story about a malevolent force that inhabits these stairs). Carrying 75lbs. racks didn't make me feel any safer.

As for the show itself -- it was fun jumping around on stage with a really nice light show and a smoke machine obscuring us for most of the set (a big plus for the audience). It was cool hearing these songs, which were done in a couple of small studios, being played on fairly big club system.

But, man, am I sore... time to unload the station wagon...

posted by tofu at 12:45 PM