Bands I've seen live

1. My Bloody Valentine
2. The Rolling Stones
3. George Thorogood
4. Journey
5. Hall & Oates
6. Aldo Nova
7. Liz Phair
7a. Pavement (This is under debate)
8. Brian Wilson*
9. Psychedelic Furs*
10. B-52s
11. George Clinton P/Funk
12. Robyn Hitchcock*
13. New Model Army
14. Damned
15. Monkees
16. Stephen Malkmus
17. Grateful Dead*
18. NRBQ*
19. Jonathan Richmond*
20. White Stripes
21. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
22. Neil Young
23. Patty Griffin
24. Dar Williams*
25. Lucinda Williams*
26. Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians
27. Traffic
28. Cracker
29. Camper Van Beethoven
30. Wallflowers
31. Ramones*
32. G. love & The Special Sauce
33. Decemberists
34. Andrew Bird
35. Albert Collins*
36. John Lee Hooker
37. Fabulous T-Birds
38. Jack Johnson
39. Sheryl Crow
40. Foreigner
41. Queen
42. Joe Walsh
43. Roger Waters
44. Aereosmith
45. ZZ Top
46. Lynyrd Skynyrd
47. Steppenwolf
48. Radiohead
49. Beck*
50. Manu Chao
51. B.B. King
52. Lou Reed
53. Nine Inch Nails
54. Carey Bell
55. Drink Small
56. Agent Orange
57. Dashboard Confessional
58. Half Japanese
59. Our Lady Peace
60. Bob Mould
61. The Clarks
62. Blue Oyster Cult
63. Dirty Dozen Brass Band
64. Cassandra Wilson
65. Santanna
66. Cowboy Mouth
67. Bobby Blue Blan d
68. EU
69. Trouble Funk
70. Dale Watson
71. Bruce Springsteen*
72. Kiss
73. Paul McCartney
74. Thelonius Monster
75. Soul Asylum
76. David Lindley
77. Cashmere Jungle Lords
78. All Mighty Senators*
79. Bezerk*
80. Government Issue
81. Sky Cries Mary
82. Bob Dylan*
83. Willie Nelson
84. Joni Mitchell
85. John Prine*
86. Stranglers
87. Sleater-Kinney*
88. Yo Le Tango
89. Old Crow Medicine Show
90. John Fogerty
91. Godspeed You Black Emporeor
92. Magnetic Fields
93. Gang of Four
94. Pixies
95. Frank Black
96. Misfits
97. Christine Lavin
98. They Might be Giants
99. Joe Strummer
100. Wilco*
101. Southern Culture on the Skids
102. Material Issue
103. Agnostic Front
104. The Strokes
105. David Bowie
106. Allman Brothers
107. La India
108. Iggy Pop
109. Ian Hunter
110. Alice Cooper
111. Train
112, Combusytable Edison
113, Modest Mouse
114. The Stars
115. Black Keys
116. kd lang
117. Zappa plays Zappa
118. Porter Wagner
119. Bauhaus
120. Pretenders
121. Cheap Trick*
122. Kevin Kinny/Peter Buck
123. Stereo Lab
124. Jesus Lizard
125. Sonic Youth
126. John Doe/Sadies
127. Evan dando
128. Meat Puppers
129. Chickasaw Mud Puppies

My Life According To...Karlheinz Stockhausen

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, answer these questions. Pass it on to others. You can't use the band/artist I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think! Re-post as "my life according to (band name)"

Pick your Artist: Karlheinz Stockhausen

Are you a male or female: Mikrophonie II

Describe yourself: Spiral (for a soloist with short-wave receiver and live electronics with sound director)

How do you feel: Trans (for orchestra and tape)

Describe where you currently live? Vibra-Elufa

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Ypsilon, for a melody instrument with microtones

Your favorite form of transportation: Etude, musique concrète, Nr. 1/5

Your best friend is: Dr. K-Sextett

You and your best friends are: Treffpunkt

What's the weather like: Fresco

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: Mixtur, for orchestra, 4 sinewave generators, and 4 ring-modulators

What is life to you: Licht-Ruf

Your relationship: Spiel

Your fear: Klavierstücke

What is the best advice you have to give: Refrain, for piano (+ 3 woodblocks), vibraphone (+ 3 alpine cowbells and keyboard glockenspiel), and celesta (+ 3 antique cymbals)

Thought for the day: Helikopter-Streichquartett, for string quartet and 4 helicopters

How I would like to die: Klang

My soul's present condition: Sonatine, for violine and piano

My motto: Für kommende Zeiten, 17 texts for intuitive music, Nr. 3

Five albums That Shaped Me...

(More Facebook cross-posting)....

1. Monkees, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones LTD: Taught me at a wee age that albums could be more than just a group of songs and that going slightly off-center can produce best results (blip.fm/~3dc11).

2. Pink Floyd, Animals: Albums could adhere to a single, coherent narrative, with music & lyrics reinforcing each other. Also, spare the frippery: Not a wasted note or word here. Sum: Dark, menacing, & still enjoyable on the right night after 30 years (blip.fm/~3dc9o)

3. Brian Eno, Another Green Word: Music could create its own space, and could follow its own internal logic. Also Multi-layering: This is pleasing to hear in the background and charmingly alien at close listen (blip.fm/~3dck6).

4. D.J. Shadow, Endtroducing: Another dark one, but in which songs were built (sampled from other songs) rather than "played." For me, it pointed to new ways of doing things (compositing, recontextualization) and revealed the secret loneliness of kitsch. (blip.fm/~3dd93)

5. "Rolling Stones, "Let It Bleed": I picked this more as a representative sample of everything the Stones did from 68-71. Even the boots. Especially the boots.

There have been songs that rocked harder than these, but none have pulsed as deeply or as richly. Filled w/ humor, melody, beauty, horror, evil, honesty and insincerity, these songs are guttural and luminescent all at the same time. They taught me that art is subtle and that life always offers more than what first appears to the eye, if you just dig at it a bit. (blip.fm/~3de3c).

My 10 Desert Island songs

1. "It's a Long Way to the Top (if You Want to Rock n Roll)"—AC/DC
2. "In The Heat of Venus"—Steve Roach
3. "The Hexx" (live BBC version) -- Pavement
4. "That's the Way the World Goes Round"—John Prine
5. "Nadine"—Chuck Berry
6. "It's All Right Mama, I'm only Bleeding"—Bob Dylan
7. "Streets of Baltimore," -- Gram Parsons version
8. "Time" -- Pink Floyd
9. "Saturday Gigs"—Mott the Hoople
10. "This Land is Your Land," – Pete Seeger

The 10 Worst Albums I've Ever Heard....

Can you name the 10 albums that offended you the most? Here's a handful for me. I loved a few of these for their awfulness, but the rest just let me down.


1. "Scarlet Love" (Palmer Rockey): Around 1979, so the story goes, a mysterious and charismatic man showed up in the upwardly wealthy social circles of Dallas. He claimed he was Hollywood hotshot and that he was making a movie. Through artful mingling, he got more than a few of the well-to-do wives to act out a role or two for the project (as well as nudge their husbands to contribute some financial assistance). Needing a soundtrack, Mr. Rockey recorded this album with some anonymous pick-up studio musicians. A slapdash endeavor, it sounded like it took about a day to record, and trucked in all the muzak styles of the period—light funk, light rock n' roll, light country, light blue-eyed soul. Palmer crooned, badly and obliviously to the players behind him. At one point, he even cops Elvis' Shakespearean spiel about life-being-a-stage-and-we're- all-players-especially-you-&-me-babe. Sleaziness: Maximum!

btw: The movie was shown once at some local theater. All reports made it to be worst ever seen. Rocky made a quick exit, vanishing from Dallas forever. So the story goes.


2. "Tonight" (David Bowie) --This is the album that ended Bowie's 15 year run as someone whose latest album you needed to hear. Half the songs are Iggy Pop covers, and the remaining original songs fall apart from their own forced cleverness. Or at least they did for me. If there was a concept--something Bowie up until that time tags albums with better than just about any of his peers--it was lost on everybody. Even the title was undescriptive. This, just after "Let's Dance." How did things go so bad, so quickly? (See also: Stones: "Emotional Rescue")


3. "Live 93" (The Orb). The sound of the ecstasy wearing off. Even the whoops of enthusiasm from the audience sound soaked of weariness. To amuse the numbed attendees, the Orb race the sound of a motorcycle back and forth between the speakers. For 4 minutes, or maybe more. And though the Orb kept their beats to a minimum, this is a 2 CD(!) package.


4. "Midnight to Midnight" (Psychedelic Furs): It's like a friend, with whom you bonded in the fully-flaming glory of youth, suddenly assuming the role of a stereo salesman, 24/7.

5. "The Magician's Birthday" (Uriah Heep): Almost everyone has a theory about who the real band was that inspired "Spinal Tap." Uriah Heep is my vote. Having decided that their former epic "Demons & Wizards" might have been too highbrow (or frightening) to their intended audience (who was, my guess, the younger brothers of the stoner boys listening to Yes and Deep Purple), these Brits opted for crafting a 12 minute opus to a card-carrying trickster. Smell the leather. (See also: Emerson Lake & Palmer's "Brain Salad Surgery").

6. "Full Circle" (The Doors): As much as I wanted to believe at the age of 15 that the Doors really really really were more than just Jim Morrison's backing band, their first post-Mr.-Mojo-Rising album just couldn't sell the idea. But at least they were trying. This is the second post-Jimbo album! I suspect they were just hoping not to get sued by their record label. (See also: Mott's "Drive On," Billion Dollar Babies' "Battle Axe")

7."Saved" (Bob Dylan): Dylan has changed the course of my life. Twice, at least. But not with this album. At least, Dylan's first gospel album had fire and brimstone. I can't remember a single song from this. I think this was the bottom for him, and the power of having God on your side did not impress me, either.


8. "The Beauty of the Rain" (Dar Williams): Once there was a fairly-talented folk songstress who wrote witty, sharply-observed vignettes about the funny little moments that happen in life, you know those passing, off-hand events that later take on momentous heaps of emotional significance? She was great. But perhaps she saw more money in the alternative adult contemporary market (I think that's what they call the genre) and so started writing songs that play well on such radio stations—namely vague and meandering but lightly-soulful pop songs about clouds and your ambitions and all that.

9. "Bilious Paths" (M-Ziq): I love me some noise and found-audio-collage as much as the next pretentious music snob, but this Musique concrète (synthétique) offends me on so many levels, I'd actually prefer silence. (See also Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music," anything by Aphex Twin, Throbbing Gristle, Negativland, Einstürzende Neubauten et al. O.k., Maybe I don't love noise that much)

10. "The Madcap Laughs" (Syd Barrett): Sitting a musician in front of live recorder before he or her has their mental shit fully-together is a deeply, deeply sadistic act. And Mr. Gilmour, no matter how many millions you made with Pink Floyd, this deception of your former (and illing) mate will always haunt you. Deeply, I hope.

My favorite 10 songs of 2008

...According to my iTunes playcount, which is based on SCIENCE!! Jazz/Classical factored out. Mind you: I cheated--these are songs that I *liked* in 2008--they could have been recorded anytime.

1. Strapped for Cash (Fountains of Wayne)
2. Soldier Jane (Beck)
3. Dallas (Flatlanders)
4. Wilder than Her (Dar Williams)
5. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (Carole King)
6. Coconut (Nilsson)
7. Out of Touch (Lucinda Williams--Live at the Fillmore version)
8. Who am I (What's My Name) (Snoop Doggy Dog)
9. Love is All (The Checkmates)
10. Shapeshifting (Bark Psychosis)

Embarrassingly enough, Fountains of Wayne tops my list again this year. What can I say, as I get into my mid-40s, I dig literary articulation. The rest is further proof I'm turning into a 13 year old girl.


(this was last year's: people.tribe.net/aa4b2238-...b6b062539.

Rock-Starring it....

From the Smoking Gun:

"It has taken nearly a decade of searching, but our hunt for the most famous
backstage concert rider in rock and roll history has finally hit pay dirt. Yes,
we're referring to Van Halen and the band's irrational fear of those tasty
brown M&M's:"

www.thesmokinggun.com/archive...en1.html

Some bitching about CDDB entries

I've been ripping a fair number of CDs in iTunes, and when the software fetches the track info, many of them come back as marked in the "Alternative-Punk" genre! Gar! Gar! Alternative-Punk is NOT a genre. These are two different musical genres, from two different time periods of rock.

Something is either "alternative" or it can be "punk," bot not both! Clash: punk; Nirvana, alternative. The Sex Pistols: punk; Good Charlotte: alternative. Got it?

True, there are few confounding specimens: Green Day and the Offspring come to mind as alt-punk (as are many bands that started punk, but then as their musical skills and/or ambitions for radioplay grew went alternative--Wire, The Damned, etc...). But this small number of genre-straddlers do not warrant throwing at least 40 percent of today's youth-music into some not-very-well defined bucket.

So every time one of these CDs come back as Alternative-Punk, I have to go and change it, to either "alternative" or "punk" (or "new wave" but that's another rant) CDDB went as far as to remove "alternative" category altogether. It takes up all of my valuable time.

I suspect this evil amalgamation came Real's Rhapsody music service, which bunched the two genres together (alternative-punk) in its own limited list of music categories. It snowballed from there.

Also, while I'm railing against CDDB contributors, I should also point out the "compilation" is not a greatest hits or best-of album by one artist. It's is compendium of multiple artists. That's why iTunes files it under the compilation folder, so you have all the various artists albums in one handy folder.

Placing albums by a single artist (even with guest musicians) in a compilation folder means they are not filed with the other albums by that artist. When one slips in, I have to go and fish it out of the compilations folder and place it in the artist's folder, and then delete and then re-import the tunes back into iTunes. Double-plus ungood.

My Favorite Dog-the-Bounty-Hunter quotes!!

I'm stuck in a hotel room this week, so I got the chance to see, for the first time EVER, the Dog-the Bounty Hunter show. Wow, Dog wears some very complicated clothing. And what's up with his old lady's breasts? Plus, the stuff that he says sometimes sounds exactly like Jack Handey, except he's serious!

[Describing his disappointment at not catching a criminal his posse spent all day tracking]:
"It's like Christmas when you are expecting to get a bicycle, but when you open the big box it turns out not to be a bicycle at all, but a Christmas tree."

[On finding a hiding place to wait for a suspect]:
"Can you see through the peephole? ... Is there a peephole?"

"In our life, there is one man running the show and his name has three letters. And those three letters are G-O-D."