Boomboxes provided the soundtrack to my life for much of the late 1970s and 80s. The streets of New York City, uptown, downtown, east side and west, were alive with the sound of music and everyone who had a blaster was a walking deejay. Unlike the anti-social Walkman, the boombox was all about sharing your mix. The bigger the blaster, the better.

 

 
Alexis Madrigal shares this interesting bit of info on the humble but mighty boom box via The Atlantic Monthly:

When we think about the great consumer electronics technologies of our time, the cellular phone probably springs to mind. If we go farther back, perhaps we’d pick the color television or the digital camera. But none of those products were adopted as fast by the American people as the boom box.

... Tarique Hossain included data from the Consumer Electronics Manufacturing Association on the “observed penetration rate at the end of the 7th year” for all the technologies listed above. Hossain’s data didn’t include the starting years for these seven-year periods, but I’m assuming they mark the introduction of the boom box in the mid-1970s. That would mean that by the early 1980s, more than 60 percent of American households owned some kind of portable cassette player with speakers attached to it.

It’s worth noting that all five of the fastest-adopted technologies were for the consumption of entertainment not communication or production of media.”

Here’s a fun documentary on the history of the boombox. For a more detailed history of ghetto blasters check out The Boombox Museum here. It’s amazingly comprehensive with tons of photos.
 

 
It’s a lovely song but…

This is sort of like the sonic equivalent of watching an aquarium full of tropical fish for hours. I wonder what kind of effect playing this for days might have in a greenhouse. Would flowers bloom more fully and plants grow taller and greener or would they just die a slow and melancholic death?

Photo: Mirgun Akyavas

Uncut magazine’s 2011 New Artist of the Year, Jonathan Wilson, is already making a pretty big name for himself in Europe. Coming into SXSW in support of his critically acclaimed Gentle Spirit album (#4 in Mojo’s Top 50 albums of 2011), Wilson and his band performed some of the standout shows of the festival, including a blistering set at the Hotel San Jose and the Bella Union showcase at the Continental Club, where one attendee was over-heard describing an onstage guitar duel as “Like being at the Fillmore East in 1969 and I was there!”

Wilson has been referred to as “the new king of Laurel Canyon,” although he now lives and works in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles. Prior to his almost instantaneous critical acclain in England when Gentle Spirit came out last Fall, Wilson was a much in-demand perfectionist music producer. Old-timers like David Crosby, Jackson Browne, Robbie Robertson, Elvis Costello and Graham Nash all want to buddy up to Wilson, hoping some of his magic rubs off on them. 

I’ve raved about Jonathan Wilson’s music here in the past:
If you haven’t heard of Jonathan Wilson yet, you will .

Buy Gentle Spirit on Amazon.

In the video below, Jonathan Wilson and Omar Velasco perform “Ballad of the Pines,” “Can We Really Party Today” and “Rolling Universe” during SXSW.
 

 
Wilson and his band take the stage and launch into their first number at the Hotel San Jose last Saturday in Austin. They were so shit-hot I felt like I was levitating. The best crew of “musicians’ musicians” I’ve seen on a stage in the past decade, other than, say, Joe Jackson’s band or Roger Waters’ touring band. The musicianship is incredibly high here. Bill Murray was in the audience, too.

Video shot by Dangerous Minds’ Marc Campbell.
 

 
Although I did attend a few of hardcore shows in Boston once when I ran away from home for a couple of weeks in 1982 (and stayed around the corner from The Rat, one of the main Beantown punk clubs of the era) I can’t claim to really know all that much about the scene there, other than it seemed especially violent and—surprise, surprise it being Boston—that there was a heavy “jock” contingent attending the shows I saw there.

xxx ALL AGES xxx, an upcoming documentary aiming to uncover the hidden history of Boston’s hardcore punk underground will be premiering on April 27th at the 2012 Boston Independent Film Festival:

“xxx ALL AGES xxx” The Boston Hardcore Film is a documentary film that explores the early Boston Hardcore music scene from the years 1981 thru 1984. Unlike earlier films that were centered on the members of the bands, this film delves into the social and communal aspects of that particular era. The community, culture, straight edge and DIY (Do it yourself) ethic of the time are all explored in the film. Never before seen archival footage, photographs, interviews and dramatizations make up the body of the film.

 
Here’s a brilliantly funny personal account of Ameera Chowdhury’s phone conversation with “Mister Pop” which won the LA Moth StorySlam. I can certainly see why. Enjoy!
 

 
Via BB Submitterator

 
Most refrigerators only go to ten, but apparently this one goes to eleven. The new Marshall Fridge isn’t too crazy-expensive either, it’s retailing for $299.00 (not sure if that includes shipping).

Whatever the cost, I can see this pretty puppy being used in a lot of band practice spaces, gear rental businesses and recording studios.
 

 
Via Copyranter

 
David Bowie’s classic 1972 concept album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars will be getting the 40th anniversary box set treatment this summer, getting reissued on CD and a vinyl/DVD package.

In a Feb 1974 issue of Rolling Stone Bowie explained the Ziggy plot-line to author William Burroughs:

Burroughs: Could you explain this Ziggy Stardust image of yours? From what I can see it has to do with the world being on the eve of destruction within five years.

Bowie: The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There’s no electricity to play it. Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, ‘cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. ‘All the young dudes’ is a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite.

Burroughs: Where did this Ziggy idea come from, and this five-year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters.

Bowie: Exactly. This does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage.

Burroughs: Yes, a black hole on stage would be an incredible expense. And it would be a continuing performance, first eating up Shaftesbury Avenue.

Bowie: Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox.

Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible. It is a science fiction fantasy of today and this is what literally blew my head off when I read Nova Express, which was written in 1961. Maybe we are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the seventies, Bill!

“Ah yes, the old transubstantiation con,” you can almost hear WSB mutter…

The label claims to have some “previously unheard” material from the Ziggy era in store for fans, but considering the sheer amount of bootlegged Bowie recordings that have slipped out over the decades into my collection alone, I can’t imagine what this might be. Also, no word on if the new release will include the little-known 5.1 surround remix of Ziggy Stardust done by Ken Pitt and Paul Hicks at Abbey Road Studios in 2003 and only released as an SACD. To my ears, Ziggy Stardust always sounded really weak and tinny. Compare Bowie’s vocals on the album to any other record of his and his voice sounds shrill and lacking the deep-throated nuances he’s obviously capable of, almost as if he’s straining his vocal cords throughout. The 2003 remix sounded muscular and bold, with the bottom added back into the mix, Mick Ronson’s guitar sounding much, much hairier that it ever has previously and the vocals sweetened nicely with more depth. It actually sounds like a different album and I’d rank it far, far, superior to the original vinyl or subsequent CD releases. It’s THE version to own, hands down, let’s just hope that it get included in this new box set.

Below, David Bowie performs “Starman” on TOTP in 1972, the very moment when the greater British public became very aware of who he was. His grinning confidence here is palpable. The guy knew he was going to be a big, big star and he acted like one.
 

 
Thank you Paul Gallagher!

Painting by the amazing Dimitri Drjuchin

Fear Fun is the seventh full-length album from J. Tillman, the singer-songwriter also known for being the former drummer of Fleet Foxes, the popular Seattle, WA-based folk rockers.

Tillman’s music has proven to be somewhat self-referential in the past, but for this outing he’s recording under the moniker of “Father John Misty.” It’s as much a character—or singular voice—that both the songwriter and performer inhabit for the project, as it is a signal that this album is a rather abrupt departure from the stern folk blues released by Tillman under his own name since 2004.

If Tillman’s previous music might have seemed like it was created by Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven—had he been a troubadour and not a gunslinger—then “Father John Misty” is a character who you might think of as Neil Young, if he were to be reborn as a trickster god, like Loki.

“Misty is a drunk, shamanic drifter character offering you a cup of his home-brewed ayahuasca tea,” is how Tillman describes his musical alter-ego, a persona that has decidedly more in common with Charles Bukowski than Ziggy Stardust. “There is nothing naive or sentimental about him. He’s a loner who doesn’t see the world as being worth saving. ‘Father John Misty’ is not really even meant to be taken as a literal person, more like an avatar of mischief. He likes to needle people a little and freak ‘em out. But I could’ve called him ‘Steve.’”

“I spent eight months living in my van on the coastline, sitting in trees, writing a novel and soaking up the mythos of the Pacific Northwest, California and the Laurel Canyon sound. I was reading a lot of Richard Brautigan, Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund and Joseph Campbell. Ultimately I got pissed off with that, the idea that I was following in anyone else’s footsteps, or recapitulating their myth. I wanted to create my own myth as an artist and songwriter.”

Along with Devendra Banhart, Mercury Prize nominee Laura Marling and last year’s breakout artist, Jonathan Wilson, who produced the album, Tillman is clearly no longer in thrall to his Laurel Canyon fore-bearers of some four decades ago.

“What does Laurel Canyon even represent anymore in 2012? Yuppies? I resent the idea of being the ‘new’ anyone, even an artist I might happen to revere. I had no idea where I’d end up when I left Seattle, let alone a spider-filled tree-house in Laurel Canyon!”

Fear Fun was produced and recorded at Five Star Studios in Laurel Canyon by Jonathan Wilson and mixed by Phil Ek. Musically, the album’s DNA consists of such disparate elements as Waylon Jennings, Nilsson, Nick Drake and Physical Graffiti, often within the same song. Tillman’s voice sounds like Roy Orbison at his most joyous, while the music maintains a dark, mysterious and yet conversely playful, almost Dionysian quality.

Fear Fun comes out in May on Sub Pop Records. It’s already my favorite album of 2012. I can’t see how anything else could top it. It’s a complex album, both lyrically and musically, the kind of song cycle you need to listen to all the way through. Repeatedly.
 

 
More Father John Misty mischief after the jump…

 
Rock and roll electrotherapy.

From Open Culture:
 

You can create music with Tesla coils if you know how to modulate their “break rate” with MIDI data and a control unit. Case in point. Here we have two solid state musical Tesla coils, using a combined 24KW of power, to play a version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 classic “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Sweet Ohm Alabama.
 

 
Via Open Culture

 
A blast from DM’s past:

Babs Johnson and Edie The Egg Lady get psychedelicized.

Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.”

Mr. Vader: “Do you believe in God?”
Babs Johnson: “I AM GOD!”