On Halloween night 1992, a skinny, gravel-voiced man in a blue dress and horn-rim glasses took the stage at a tiny Atlanta dive bar/strip club along with his band, The Opal Foxx Quartet (which was not a four-piece; around a dozen people crowded the dark, low-ceilinged space).
This would be their final show, and it's a barn-burner.
[more inside]
posted by BoringPostcards
on Aug 17, 2012 -
20 comments
You're a Monk, I'm a Monk, We're All Monks is a short video introduction to The Monks, a band
founded in 1964 by five American soldiers in Germany. They put out only one album, the abrasive, noisy, minimalistic
Black Monk Time in 1965, that sounded like nothing else at the time. They also dressed in all-black, shaved monkish tonsures in their hair and wore bits of rope as neckties. In 1966 they appeared on German TV shows
Beat-Club and
Beat, Beat, Beat, and played three songs on each,
Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice,
Monk Chant,
Oh, How to Do Now,
Complication,
I Can't Get Over You and
Cuckoo. Aaron Poehler interviewed The Monks and
wrote about their history back in 1999. That same year
they got
back together to
play at the Cavestomp festival. And here
The Monks are being interviewed by a hand-puppet on public access television in Chicago.
[The Monks previously on MetaFilter]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 12, 2012 -
49 comments
At the end of November, 1979, this band was just a year and half old and had played fewer than 40 sets. They had a handful of embryonic songs influenced by Television and Magazine, and a 3-month old, 3-song EP with
two decent
songs. Then they went to London to play a bunch of gigs behind that EP, and in just 6 months, over 40 gigs, they exploded.
They watched in the studio during the January 1980 recording of “
Love Will Tear Us Apart,” wooing Joy Division’s producer Martin Hannett; appeared on TV that month with
a song they had only played 4 times, and released a
forgettable single at the end of February. Suddenly new songs poured out at a remarkable rate:
”Twilight”,
“Things to make and Do,” “
A Day Without Me”,
”Trevor” became
”Touch”,
”Silver Lining” transformed into
a second single (produced by Hannett). They signed a record contract in March, and immediately began recording a
stunning debut album. By the summer they had more songs: a
psychedelic/sexual horror tune, and a
hot new single.
It all became
bloated and sucky commercial and atmospheric soon after, but for a while there,
boy did
they rock. [more inside]
posted by msalt
on Jun 30, 2012 -
127 comments
In the wake of their grunge-y breakout hit
"Creep" and the success of sophomore record
The Bends, Thom Yorke and the rest of
Radiohead were under pressure to deliver once more.
So they shut themselves away inside the echoing halls of
a secluded 16th century manor and got to work.
What emerged from that crumbling Elizabethan castle fifteen years ago today was a shockingly ambitious masterpiece of progressive rock, a visionary concept album that explored
the "fridge buzz" of modernity -- alienation, social disconnection, existential dread,
the impersonal hum of technology -- through a mosaic of
challenging,
innovative,
eerily beautiful music unlike anything else at the time.
Tentatively called
Ones and Zeroes, then
Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments, the band finally settled on
OK Computer, an appropriately enigmatic title for this
acclaimed harbinger of millennial angst. For more, you can watch the retrospective
OK Computer: A Classic Album Under Review for a track-by-track rundown, or the unsettling documentary
Meeting People is Easy for a look at how the album's whirlwind tour nearly gave Yorke
a nervous breakdown. Or look inside for more details and cool interpretations of all the tracks -- including
an upcoming MeFi Music Challenge! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jun 16, 2012 -
66 comments
Pete Cosey dead at 68. Though he had a career as a session guitarist prior to and had some important appearances after, Cosey is most well known for his brief time playing with Miles Davis (1973 - 1975) during an era of Miles' that has at times confounded critics*. Cosey appeared on
Get Up with It, Dark Magus, Agharta and
Pangaea with Miles.
[more inside]
posted by safetyfork
on Jun 3, 2012 -
14 comments
Those of you who go in for gardening, specifically those with strawberry patches, may find this idea to be of benefit:
strawberry rocks. Might just keep those birds away!
posted by flapjax at midnite
on May 25, 2012 -
37 comments
With fans struggling to come to terms with David Bowie's musical hiatus and likely
retirement, any new Bowie-related material has been eagerly pursued. Last year, the leak of the unreleased album
Toy (
previously) slaked the thirst of those needing a Bowie fix. Last week, an unauthorized preview of another Bowie project emerged—
Bowie: Object. First announced in
2010, the book features 100 objects from Bowie's archive, with text written by the man himself.
posted by kimdog
on Apr 25, 2012 -
12 comments
If you want to hear the rock solidest, rock steadiest, rock of Gibralterist rock drumming that's ever been rocked in the history of rock, then you want to hear
this.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Apr 24, 2012 -
57 comments
We shrugged when friends told us Prince's Sign "O" the Times was the greatest rock concert movie ever. There are limits to how great a rock concert movie can be, and we figured Jonathan Demme's--and Talking Heads'--Stop Making Sense had stretched them as far as they were liable to go. But even though Sign "O" the Times was directed by the artiste, whose previous cinematic exploits haven't exactly put him in Demme's class, Prince has come up with a contender. Where Demme goes for a sinuous, almost elegant clarity, Prince's movie is all murk, scuzz, steam, and, oh yeah, sex. With all due respect, which one sounds more like a real rock concert to you? -
Robert Christgau [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Apr 20, 2012 -
31 comments
This weekend, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will induct
the Small Faces and the Faces. Though being inducted as a unit, they were very much two distinct bands—both of them central to British rock of the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, and whose influence on music, fashion, and pop culture is still felt today.
[more inside]
posted by scody
on Apr 11, 2012 -
37 comments
Bands often don't seem to be able to play on stage the way they did on their album; and we accept that for a lot of reasons having to do with the conditions, the production facilities and the sheer number of takes that were probably involved. But for a whole generation of hit music, there was often a more basic reason:
it wasn't them playing on the album in the first place.
For nearly a decade, if you were an L.A. producer and you wanted to record a hit single, you'd call in The Wrecking Crew. Members of The Byrds, The Beach Boys, and The Mamas and the Papas would step aside as The Wrecking Crew laid down the instrumental tracks. Then, the members of the main band would come back to add the vocals on top.
The above link goes to the OPB radio story I listened to this morning, with an embedded player.
Official site for the book.
posted by George_Spiggott
on Apr 2, 2012 -
64 comments
Before
hip-hop beefs, there were response records, also known as
answer songs, usually replies to well-known songs. There are a few key eras: blues and R&B recorded music in the 1930s through 1950s, including a number of responses to "
Work With Me, Annie" (1954), recorded by
Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, with answers including "
Annie had a Baby," and "
The Wallflower" by Etta James; and Big Mama Thornton's "
Hound Dog" (1953), with a quick response by
Louis Innis and Charlie Gore, made a mere week after the original was released, and
Rufus Thomas' "
Bear Cat" (1953),
Sun Records' first hit. Country, rock & roll, doo-wop and pop music picked up where the blues left off, with most activity in the 1950s to 60s. Two examples from this era are
"Are You Lonesome To-night" and "Who Put The Bomp," and responses to both. The most well known from the next decade was Lynyrd Skynyrd's "
Sweet Home Alabama" (1974), a response to Neil Young's "
Southern Man" (1970) and "
Alabama" (1972). Until the 2000s, no answer songs had charted as high as the original hits. That changed with
Frankee's "
F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back)" (2004), a response to
Eamon's "
Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)" (2003), which was the first answer song to reach number 1 in the UK. Six years later and across the pond, Katy Perry's "
California Gurls" was a response to "
Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z. It was the first answer song to reach No. 1 in the Billboard Hot 100. More Responses inside.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 31, 2012 -
53 comments
With Sonic Youth on
indefinite hiatus, the band members are keeping themselves busy with other projects. Thurston Moore is playing
solo shows centered around his latest solo album, the Beck-produced
Demolished Thoughts, with a band he jokingly(?) referred to this past Friday night as "
Dush Krew" in honor of his crush on actress Eliza Dushku. Kim Gordon recently
designed clothes for French brand Surface to Air, is currently playing shows with Bill Nace as part of the noise improvisation duo
Body/Head, and was kind enough recently to share
her favorite taco recipe. Lee Ranaldo is poised to release his first song-oriented
solo album on Matador Records; he debuted
the music video for the first single ("Off the Wall") today on his website. Steve Shelley played drums on Lee's new album, recently
collaborated with Pete Nolan of Magik Markers (Sonic Youth's most
interesting protégés) on Nolan's side-project Spectre Folk, and is currently drumming for Chicago's
Disappears whose
new album is out via Kranky records in March. Meanwhile, Jim O'Rourke is preparing to curate the All Tomorrow's Parties
I'll Be Your Mirror Festival in Tokyo this April, where he will also perform his 1999 album
Eureka in full with a 12-piece band.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Feb 7, 2012 -
53 comments
"We were so dumbfounded at the noise that was coming out of our instruments it took us a while to get a handle on what we were hearing, let alone thinking in terms of how any records would be structured." Music journalist Ned Raggett assembles the oral history of British experimental rock group
Disco Inferno's five EPs.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Jan 23, 2012 -
17 comments
Screaming Females are a 3-person self described "rock/rock/rock" band from New Jersey featuring Jarrett Dougherty on drums, King Mike Abbate on bass, and Marissa Paternoster on guitar and vocals. They're not incredibly famous and they're probably not on the cusp of a string of number 1 hits, but they put on a
mean show and they've got a
new album in a couple of months if rock/rock/rock should happen to be your thing.
[more inside]
posted by sandswipe
on Jan 17, 2012 -
33 comments
...there’s some desperation to this junk version of “Dancing in the Street,” with both parties trying to affirm their A-1 celebrity status. One of the more pernicious effects of the whole Live Aid/Farm Aid/Band Aid spectacle was to cement the hierarchy of the “legend” rock acts and a smaller tier of anointed successors from the slightly-younger generation (Tom Petty, Sting, Dire Straits, U2). It was the height of the Boomer Counter-Reformation. The late Eighties would see the over-publicized returns of everyone from Steve Winwood to the Monkees to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, to a revamped George Harrison to a MOR version of Pink Floyd to Robbie Robertson pretending that he was Peter Gabriel (a version of Gabriel who couldn’t sing) to an all-star Yes and a Zeppelin-sampling Robert Plant, culminating in the return of the “revitalized” Stones in 1989, the touring company now reincorporated into a gleaming multinational. As Marcello Carlin said back when Popular covered this single: “Suddenly we were once again reminded who in pop and rock mattered and who didn’t…With their massacre of “Dancing In The Street,” Bowie and Jagger seemed to relish rubbing it in.“
-
The Annotated Jagger/Bowie "Dancing in the Street"
posted by anazgnos
on Jan 17, 2012 -
180 comments
It Nova Scotian Rich Aucoin's video for "It" directed by Noah Pink. SLYT worth clicking on. You may recognize a few scenes.
posted by Ironmouth
on Jan 7, 2012 -
16 comments
After 30 years, Peter Frampton had been living without 2 critical pieces of his legacy: 1) his hair and 2) the Les Paul that he used in Humble Pie and on the (in)famous Frampton Comes Alive album. But now Frampton can rest easy, as one of those things
has been returned to him.
posted by spicynuts
on Jan 4, 2012 -
110 comments
New Year's Eve is fast approaching, and for lots of folks that means... drinking. Plenty of drinking. And since there's no shortage of singers and songwriters who've had a little something to say about that particular topic, maybe some of the following tunes can serve as an appropriate soundtrack to your own joyous (or not?) imbibing of spirits. For example, there's... Jimmy Liggins with his succinct rendition of
Drunk, and there's...
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 30, 2011 -
67 comments
Back in Town is a song by
Izia, a French rock band fronted by and named for Izïa Higelin. Even though she comes from a showbiz family, the band initially found little favor on French radio. But after a string of
blistering live performances all over France, the self-titled first album became a hit and won a couple of awards at the prestigious Victoire de la Musique ceremony, where Izia performed the song
Let Me Alone. There are a bunch of live performances online, including of
Life is Going Down, a cover of AC/DC's
Touch Too Much and a
duet with Iggy Pop. This past November, sophomore album So Much Trouble was released, featuring such songs as the
title track,
On Top of the World, and my favorite,
Baby.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 16, 2011 -
9 comments
On August 19, 1969, the (prime time ABC version of the) Dick Cavett show featured several popular musicians.
pt 1 -
pt 2 -
pt 3 -
pt 4 -
pt 5 The Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby and Stephen Stills had rushed back from a show they did at a festival. Jimi Hendrix couldn't get back in time, but
appeared later. The third guest, Joni Mitchell, skipped Woodstock to make sure she was on time for
this broadcast, but a month later she wrote
a cool song based on what she saw on TV and heard from friends.
[more inside]
posted by msalt
on Dec 7, 2011 -
16 comments
The most vivid figure in Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields's End of the Century was the least articulate and most archetypal of the Ramones: Johnny, the right-wing prole whose hard-ass sense of style the others nutballed and softened and accelerated and above all imitated. ... Exciting and absolutely right though their '70s sets always were, the film establishes that they kept the faith live till the end, lifted by Joey's goofy dedication and powered by the chords Johnny thrashed out like they were why he was alive. As unyielding in his aesthetic principles as he was in everything else, this reactionary was an avant-gardist in spite of himself. -
Robert Christgau
posted by Trurl
on Nov 9, 2011 -
17 comments
After 44 years, The Beach Boys'
SMiLE, the
most famous unreleased album of all time, has finally been released.
Even at its most remorselessly upbeat, the Beach Boys' music was marked by an ineffable sadness – you can hear it in the cascading tune played by the woodwind during Good Vibrations's verses – but on Smile, the sadness turned into something far weirder. All the talk of Wilson writing teenage symphonies to God – and indeed the sheer sumptuousness of the end results – tends to obscure what a thoroughly eerie album Smile is. Until LSD's psychological wreckage began washing up in rock via Skip Spence's Oar and Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs, artists tactfully ignored the dark side of the psychedelic experience. But it's there on Smile...
The first of a ten-part web series on the making of the album and the new reissue has been posted on youtube, featuring new interviews and rare archival footage. The full-length 2-CD version is
streaming at AOL.
posted by anazgnos
on Nov 1, 2011 -
162 comments
There's a new crop of Australian bands that take inspiration from old blues, but twist the music in a strange fashion. The trend may have started with
CW Stoneking (Jungle Blues,
Love Me Or Die), who channeled the old bluesmen despite being a
young man. Its continued on to Sydney's
Snowdroppers, who started out as a
house band for burlesque shows and kept that dirty sensibility up with songs like
Rosemary ,
Do The Stomp, and their signature tune
Good Drugs, Bad Women (lyrics NSW). Frequent Snowdroppers touring partners
Gay Paris add a Southern horror twist (
House Fire In the Origami District, My First Wife? She Was A Foxqueen! ) and an antic stage energy. Some of the bands relay on gimmicks, like Adelaide's
The Beards, who sing about how
you should consider having sex with a bearded man and point out that
if your dad doesn't have a beard, you've got two moms. The Beards recently performed at the
World Beard and Mustache Championships. Horror-country-rockers
Graveyard Train have picked up the torch dropped when Sydney psychobilly masters
Zombie Ghost Train (
Graveyard Queen) disbanded. Graveyard Train tunes like
Mummy,
Ballad for Beelzebub ,
Tall Shadow and
Dead Folk Dance combine cheerful Misfits horror theming with stompy country. Most of the singers from this loose scene are joining forces in Sydney this week to
pay tribute to Tom Waits.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn
on Oct 4, 2011 -
32 comments
