Category Archives for Yahoo blog

“Is This Not Bonkers?: Wild New Pirate Music From New Orleans” by Gabe Soria (2007)

Is This Not Bonkers?: Wild New Pirate Music From New Orleans

by Gabe Soria

Originally posted Dec 3, 2007 on Yahoo’s Arthur blog

Friday, November 2nd, 2007, New Orleans: The Saturn Bar on St. Claude in New Orleans, a place you’ve probably heard of, even if you’ve never been to New Orleans. T-shirts bearing its stylized planetary logo and address are ubiquitous leisurewear among certain sorts of folks in cities worldwide. Its fame is well deserved–it’s a friendly and immaculately disheveled corner watering hole, kind of like the platonic ideal of Southern urban dive bar, complete with great signage. The stretch of real estate it’s on–St. Claude Avenue between the railroad tracks near and the bridge to the Lower Ninth Ward–is unapologetically spooky after dark. Gunshots in the distance: check.

But still, it’s inviting.

The occasion tonight is the record release party by the Valparaiso Men’s Chorus, a project of local musician Alex McMurray. The wife and I haven’t heard a note of music from the record yet, though McMurray’s former outfit, the Tom Waits-esque trio Royal Fingerbowl, are a favorite around the house.

We’ve just heard compelling code words: “sea shanties” and “beer” and “Saturn Bar” and decided that attendance is mandatory. Turns out, it’s the type of show that you realize you’re going to be telling people about until the end of your days. For real.

The car is parked on the neutral ground in the middle of the avenue, directly between the Saturn Bar and the Spellcaster Lodge across the street. Entering the Saturn Bar, the mood is instantly, irrepressibly ebullient. Folks are drinking Miller High Lifes like they’re going to stop brewing them at the stroke of midnight, and more than one person is dressed like a PIRATE. Actually, the crowd is liberally sprinkled with pirates. Friends greet us with grins; some people lounge casually in booths and others jockey for position at the bar in the Saturn’s ramshackle front room. I realize that it’s been a long time since I’ve felt such an unselfconscious BUZZ before a show, like people don’t know exactly what’s going to happen and are DIGGING it. It’s like they’re on really good, really happy drugs.

Finally, the needle tips, and folks start cramming themselves in front of the nonexistent stage, located under a balcony that runs the length of three sides the Saturn’s back room. The small venue feels like a time warp, like you’re attending a rocking show in the back of a second-tier bordello in 1915. The small band has assembled, looking well lubricated: McMurray on banjo; Chaz Leary and Matt Perrine, his band mates from his primary band, the Tin Men, on washboard and sousaphone, respectively, and the addition of Jannelle Perrine on pennywhistle, and Carlo Nuccio on bass drum. And then there’s the Valparaiso Men’s Chorus themselves: at least 20 strong, maybe more of them, weird moustaches, ruddy faces, big grins, a bunch of dudes and a smattering of ladies who serve as the crew on this ship.

McMurray takes a moment to instruct the audience on the chorus of the group’s first song, “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?” and the group barrels ahead. What follows is nothing short of extraordinary.

What could have come off as pure novelty (“Hey, guys! We’re going to sing a bunch of sailor’s and pirate songs!”) instead becomes a roaring thing of rough beauty. McMurray actually learned many of these songs while playing the character of Cap’n Sandy, a roving sailor minstrel at Tokyo Disney, but instead of covering the tunes, he seems to be channeling them from some alternate universe where Alejandro Jodorowsky and Werner Herzog asked him to do the soundtrack for their NC-17 version of the Pirates Of The Caribbean films. The band plays these old songs as if they were born to them, skipping reverence and piousness and going straight to their dirty hearts. It’s raw, nasty and funny; some lyrics have been changed, some have been added, but it’s all honest and kinda dirty. And the Chorus themselves… yikes. They’re howling and smiling, and the crowd picks up on their lyrics, singing and bellowing along with them. It’s the real old, weird America to paraphrase, right here in a bar in New Orleans. Strangers in the crowd link arms and sway back and forth; soon, it seems as if we’re all pitching back and forth in the hold of a ship about to go down. People are dropping beers, drinking multiple beers and forming a real (and really drunken) community around some blazing hot music. And everybody, by the time the shindig winds down, is exhausted and deliriously HAPPY.

You don’t see that too often at a show, not nowadays.

The wife and I are so happy and toasted, we forget to actually purchase Guano And Nitrates, the self-released CD from whoever’s selling them, so have to contact McMurray a couple of days later and drop by his place to purchase it directly from him on his porch. And the record itself… I’m reminded of something Jay-Z once said about R. Kelley: “Is that not bonkers?”

Recorded live at the end of 2004 at the now-shuttered Mermaid Lounge, nothing seems to have been lost in translation and the intervening years (the band itself has only played live three times). Nothing. It’s a raucous party record and folk archaeologist’s dream all at the same time. These are old songs done right. It’s the real folk sh*t: hard and hilarious and rousing. Man, it’s been awhile since I’ve heard and seen something so dirty and lovely and real.

Gabe Soria is a contributing editor to Arthur magazine.

“Things That Go Swing in the Night: The Rhythmic Gambits of Joanna Newsom & Jason Spaceman” by Peter Relic (2007)

Things That Go Swing in the Night: The Rhythmic Gambits of Joanna Newsom & Jason Spaceman

by Peter Relic

Posted Mon Nov 26, 2007 in Arthur’s Yahoo blog

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,” Ella Fitzgerald once sang, but in the half-century since then popular music has accorded meaning to a wide variety of rhythmic developments, swinging and otherwise. Two recent concerts however–one by Joanna Newsom at the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, and one by Spiritualized at L.A.’s ornate Vista movie theater–brought Irving Mills’ original lyric to mind. One swung, one didn’t. And what a difference it made.

I first saw Joanna Newsom perform in 2004 at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom (still my favorite venue in the U.S.). Accompanied only by her own harp, Newsom rendered the songs off her then-new The Milk-Eyed Mender LP faithfully, but with one profound difference: they swung like all heck. The technical excellence of Newsom’s harp-plucking became both more limber and more muscular in person, turning tunes like “The Book Of Right-On” into virtual funk workouts. She improved upon the recorded versions of her songs by realizing their additional rhythmic potential, thus evoking late great harpist Dorothy Ashby, whose albums Afro Harping and The Rubaiyat Of Dorothy Ashby are mystical jazz-funk classics.

So it was with great interest that I went to the Disney Hall performance this November 9th. Newsom performed songs from her complex-yet-accesible Van Dyke Parks-arranged album Ys backed by not only the L.A. Philharmonic but by three members of her Ys Street Band: a violinist, a banjo player, and a barefoot bowlcut drummer. Using both drumsticks and his hands, the drummer beat ultra-luddite 4/4 beats that had a twofold effect: first, he made V.U.’s Moe Tucker sound like Rashied Ali by comparison; second, he wrung all the rhythmic complexities out of Newsom’s music. When a member of the Philharmonic took to the vibraphone, it seemed like the whole thing might start to swing, but the vibes were inaudible. After the intermission, when Newsom performed sans-Philharmonic but with her quartet, the music retained its ethereal essence yet often seemed plodding. While it’s likely that my listening experience was affected by variable factors (an unbalanced soundmix, my upper tier seat), Newsom’s unaccompanied encore underscored the fact that strictly on-the-beat drumming inhibits the rhythmic possibilities of her songs.

Admittedly this is merely a matter of taste–the thudding drumming and approximately Appalachian style of her quartet set-up drew approving whoops from the crowd. But I’d love to hear her sometime backed by a nice little jazz combo.

A few days later I had the good fortune of seeing Spiritualized play on what could’ve been called their Acoustic Mainline Gospel-With-Strings tour. Leader Jason Spaceman, who has taken the sunglasses-at-night motif into the new millenium, rearranged his songs for a group that consisted of guitar, electric piano, two violins, viola, cello, and three female backing singers. No drummer, and no need for one–the absence of a drums created a huge space of rhythmic possibility, and the swell and ebb of the strings and voices realized the implicitly syncopated nature of that potential. Songs like “Going Down Slow,” “The Straight And The Narrow” and “Anything More” — slightly jazzy in recorded form–seemed to swing more than ever in their drum-free renderings.

I can’t help but think that the extraordinary uplift that I felt at the Spiritualized show–I’d go to church every week if it felt that good–had a direct correlation to the fact that the music swung. Which is not to say that the Joanna Newsom show didn’t mean a thing. It’s just that Spiritualized meant that much more.

Peter Relic is a contributing editor to Arthur Magazine

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT (Arthur Yahoo blog, 2007)

This was the first, introductory post for Arthur Magazine’s little-seen (and now erased) blog on the Yahoo Music site. Kind of a statement of purpose for Arthur circa 2007. It is a bit self-righteous/snide/grandiose, but geez, look at the dumbness that was going on. Different era now but maybe it has some resonance? I dunno. This was written for a general-ish audience (that didn’t really exist, haha) and it’s deliberately provocative. And it’s dated. But whatever. There it is. I was often exasperated by dumb stuff in the mainstream media, had trouble just ignoring it.

Hidden in Plain Sight

by Jay Babcock

I was recently asked by a newspaper reporter to comment on artists licensing their music for use in commercials. For a certain generation of fan, or music journalist, I guess, there is still some vestigial outrage over a musician playing for his supper. For these folks, selling your music to soundtrack an iTunes or VW ad is a big sell-out, a violation of some unspoken, unsigned compact between artist and fan regarding the purposes to which art can be rightly put. Few of us are surprised anymore by this casual betrayal—there’s all sorts of justifications for it, of course, and we all know it’s gonna happen anyway—but still, it stings to be reminded, once again, that nothing is sacred, not even our holy texts (cf. the Doors’ “Break On Through,” Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon”). We hate to learn that even our monastics have a price.

Get over it, says everyone under 35. Raised on the Market Knows Best principles promulgated through hip-hop, sports, celebrities, government, public education and other wings of corporate capitalism (the real winner after the failed counterculture revolution of the Sixties), most of Gen X and Gen 9-11 don’t blink once at all the formerly taboo-on-their-face money-makin’ practices that have become commonplace in today’s music industry. (There’s that word, “industry”: whenever something stops being a Mode of Expression or Field of Endeavor and becomes an Industry, you can be sure a steep decline in quality is around the corner.) For most of us, there’s simply no issue here. An artist, if they’re not a fool or some weirdo on a self-denial trip, will of course sign a deal with a record label owned by a sleazy transnational corporation, perform on tours sponsored by other sleazy corporations and the US military recruitment machine, and participate in whatever crypto-payola scams are going on right now (radio station “charity” wintertime acoustic concerts being possibly the most egregious offenders in this category) in the hopes of getting some airplay, some screentime, some press, some publicity, some tour sponsorship, some ringtone deal, some movie soundtrack deal, some videogame deal, some slot in Starbucks in-store programming and yes of course, the grand slam, at least for a “new”/”fresh”/”buzz”/”breaking” band: a TV AD DEAL. Those who fail to do so are unlucky, or unworthy, market failures, yanked offstage by the proverbial cane—held, of course, by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.

But isn’t there a larger question here?

What if we turn it around a bit, and ask WHY IS IT that the only way a young musician can get across to the general public these days (to the degree that one exists anymore, having been successfully niche-ized, atomized and banalified in pursuit of corporate profits, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post…) is as wallpaper for some other product? Why is it that we can’t hear new music on the radio, or see new music performed on television? In other words, why isn’t music on its own, given its own space in the still-powerful mass media? Isn’t music good enough? Or, could it be that it’s just not profitable enough? And if the latter is the case, shouldn’t we ask why the mass media system–and our planet’s airwaves, which belong to all of us–structured in such a way that our right to meaningful, rich, sensuous, full-of-life art is increasingly denied?

What I’m saying is: artists have not failed their obligation to their art by selling out to the system. Instead, the system itself has failed the artists, and by extension, the listening public. But even as music-as-itself has been deemed insufficiently profitable, people still want to hear it…and so our nation’s finest corporate super-brains have diligently supplied us with the most efficient, state-of-the-art music industry schemes available: Fox’s “American Idol”—a quasi-industrial training film disguised as a TV game show/soap opera, an idea borrowed from the Brits—and CBS’s corporate reality show “Rock Star,” which, in its initial season, featured actual humans competing on camera to replace the dead guy in INXS, the whole affair breathlessly chronicled by the co-hosting team of Brooke Burke and Dave Navarro.

Dave Navarro: now there’s a name to conjure with. Is there any other musician in recent memory who has so thoroughly–and publicly–squandered and betrayed all of his promise, talent, credibitlity and integrity? The man who who played guitar in Jane’s Addiction–a radical, somewhat-misunderstood band unfortunately overshadowed by the Lollapalooza colossus that its singer spawned–now spends his short time on the planet doing play-by-play for a fake band of rock careerists and hosting oh-so-dangerous-by-the-numbers premiere parties for insipid “torture porn” feature films. Dave has just launched “Spread Entertainment,” which is all about his deep desire to “to use the Internet to support artists and see things that are out there that other corporate structures aren’t allowing us to see. It seems with satellite TV, the Internet, magazines—there’s almost so many options, and we’re only seeing the same five things.” A rather breathtaking statement, asking us to somehow ignore Dave’s active participation in all the aforementioned craptaculars, as well as his “work” on the execrable Camp Freddy Radio program, broadcast Saturday nights in Los Angeles.

Which rather conveniently brings us back to where we started: one of the reasons musicians, especially young ones, license their music to all comers on the TV ad front, is because they can’t get substantial radio airtime anywhere, not even self-styled “indie”/”we can play whatever we want” shows like “Camp Freddy.” And so, everyone loses.

Case in point: on Saturday night, March 3, driving downtown to see Marnie Stern play at The Smell in her first-ever L.A. gig, my radio-scanning ended, naturally, when I heard Van Halen. Happiness! Until, at the song’s conclusion, it became apparent that I’d accidentally tuned in to the dread Camp Freddy. Now, this was in the week just after Eddie had announced that, unlike Amy Winehouse, he would go back to rehab, which in turn meant the summer’s Van Halen reunion tour with Diamond Dave Lee Roth and Eddie’s 15-year-old son Wolfgang on bass, was off—suckage!—which got non-Diamond Dave, that is Dave Navarro, talking about how Eddie’s signature fingertapping guitar style, once widely imitated, was now obsolete. Which was pretty laughable, given that within a half-hour of his making that comment, Marnie Stern was finger-tapping our faces off at the Smell. (Don’t believe me? Watch her and the equally remarkable free rock drummer Zach Hill in duo performance here.)

Now, if ever there was an artist worthy of mass media coverage, of being granted access to the airwaves, of being let through the gates to those of us who, in spite of everything, still have curious, engaged ears, it’s a once-in-a-decade (or more?) talent like Marnie Stern. You want finger tapping? Well, here you go! But she doesn’t even register with Navarro and the other gatekeepers, because they’ve all been paid off. Or are lazy. Or willfully ignorant. Or compliant. Doing what they’re told, letting in what the robots tell them to: drones for hire, de facto censors of consciousness. Bow down to the new kommisars: for-hire ad agencies and marketing firms, like Deutsch LA, whose boss told the Los Angeles Times last week that “Everyone has a cool friend that exposes them to new things—the idea is that a brand can become that kind of channel.” Word to the wise: a corporation doesn’t want to be your friend. It wants your money.

Opening up the gates, or rather, ignoring them altogether, is what Arthur—the print magazine, the website, the label, the festivals, and now this Yahoo!Music blog—is all about. Arthur isn’t for hire. (Arthur’s not even for sale—the magazine is free.) Arthur is a labor of love for those of us working here—it’s not a marketing initiative, not a quest for lucre. (Some things really are more important than money.) And so, when we’re given the opportunity to do what we want, we do what we love: we champion the musicians, the artists, the thinkers out there who are doing extraordinary work, who you might dig if only somebody hipped you to them—somebody who hasn’t been paid to do the job, somebody you could trust. That’s been our aim since we started Arthur in 2002: to be a learned, enthusiastic guide to the bustling, effervescent, mindblowing, and endlessly re-generating underground–the loamy place where everything good comes from. The place that denies entry to no one.

Not even Dave Navarro.

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