On September 26, 1956 Elvis returned to his birthplace Tupelo, Mississippi to perform a homecoming gig at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. The Tupelo Daily Journal reported…
[...] the fair this year has the strongest grandstand lineup in years. It has Elvis Presley, the current biggest drawing card on the American entertainment scene; and it has an outstanding lineup of livestock and agricultural exhibits.”
During the show a teenage girl rushed the stage and practically knocked Elvis off his feet. Later, when she was asked why she’d stormed him, she replied, ‘I want him and I need him and I love him.’
Brief clips from the Tupleo show have floated around the internet for awhile. But they’ve been silent or dubbed with audio from other sources. Here’s the longest version I’ve seen and the first that has sound from the actual performance. It’s a great piece of rock and roll history.
If you haven’t been able to tell from all of the Monkees posts I’ve been doing recently, I’m going through a bit of a Monkees “phase” right now and probably annoying the hell out of Tara with it. It started when I was listening to “Sunny Girlfriend” from Headquarters. I must have played that song fifty times last week. I couldn’t get enough of it. It’s so catchy!
Then I moved on to other of their hits featuring Mike Nesmith. Pretty much 100% of the songs he wrote and sang (and even the material he sang but did not write, for that matter) with the Monkees are total winners. And distinctively his.
After Nesmith bought himself out of this Monkees contract in 1970, he formed a country-rock group called Michael Nesmith and The First National Band. Nesmith and the group released two albums in 1970, Loose Salute and Magnetic South. If you like the sound of his Monkees contributions, you’ll find no surprises with the First (and later “Second”) National Band material. Clearly it’s the same songwriter and voice we all know so well, but with a more mature style that compares favorably with The Flying Burrito Brothers. And the songs are still as catchy as hell. The guy’s an absolutely ace songwriter.
The reason Michael Nesmith doesn’t get as much credit for birthing the country-rock genre as he should is simple: the stigma of being involved with such a commercial proposition as the Monkees tapped his street cred. That’s too bad, because from the vantage point of 2010, Loose Salute and Magnetic South seem like criminally overlooked classics overripe to be critically reassessed.
Here’s a sampling of three of my favorite tracks from Michael Nesmith and the First National Band:
“Silver Moon” (dig the pedal steel guitar solo from longtime Nesmith collaborator, Red Rhodes):
“Joanne”
“Tumbling Tumbleweeds” (from the 1935 Gene Autry movie of the same title)
Jim DeRogatis’ book, Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic is a book that you either devour in one sitting or else you’d never pick it up in the first place. Me, I sucked it down like it was oxygen. Lester Bangs was one of my heros and I loved him to pieces. To read such a meticulously researched and well-written bio of the man was like a dream come true for me.
In the book, DeRogatis tells the tale of his own visit with Lester Bangs at his messy apartment on Sixth Ave and 14th St, in New York. DeRogatis was still in high school at the time and was there interviewing the writer for a class assignment. Two weeks later, Bangs was dead from an accidental drug overdose. As a nice digital coda to Let It Blurt, DeRogatis gave the complete interview to the Perfect Sound Forever website. Here’s an excerpt:
Jim DeRogatis: That makes it easier. I’m kind of turning the tables on you now.
I’m not a hard interview.
How did you get your start writing about rock ‘n’ roll?
They used to have a little box, believe it or not, in the pages of Rolling Stone in like 1968 that said, “Do you write, draw, take pictures? Send us your stuff.” So I started sending them reviews. The first four reviews I sent, let’s see, I said that Anthem of the Sun by the Grateful Dead and Sailor by Steve Miller were pieces of shit and White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground and Nico’s The Marble Index were masterpieces, and White Light/White Heat was the best album of 1968. I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t printing any of these things. Then this MC5 album, Kick Out the Jams, came out, and they had this big article in there saying the MC5 were the greatest band in the world and all this, so I went out and bought it. Just like anybody, you buy something you don’t like and you feel like you bought a hype. And I wrote this really like, blaaah!, scathing sort of review. And I sent a letter with it and said, “Look, fuckheads, I’m as good as any writer you’ve got in there. You better print this or give me the reason why.” And they did, they printed it, and that was the beginning.
How long were you with Rolling Stone?
I was never on the staff at Rolling Stone. I freelanced for them from that point, which was like March of 1969, until about ‘73, I guess, when Jann Wenner threw me out for being, quote, “Disrespectful to musicians,” end quote. I wrote a review of Canned Heat, an album called New Age, that said, “Why do we love Canned Heat? Let us count the ways. We love them because they did the longest boogie ever put on record. We love them because…” I mean it was making fun of them. I guess you’re not supposed to do that. Well, obviously not in that magazine.
Did that change your opinion of Rolling Stone?
No. I knew it was a piece of shit. The reviews I did for them really stuck out like sore thumbs. And I never did get along with Jann, because he really likes the suck-up type of writing. He doesn’t like people that are stylists unless it’s somebody he wants to suck up to himself, like Norman Mailer or Truman Capote or someone like that. And Jon Landau, my editor there at the time, did not go to bat for me, which Paul Nelson did later. When Paul Nelson got the job of record review editor, he told Wenner, “There’s certain people I want to write for the magazine.” And he said, “Like who?” And Nelson said, “Well, like Lester Bangs.” And Wenner said, “No way.” Nelson said, “Well if you don’t take him, you can’t have me.” That’s what kind of a friend Nelson is. He has integrity, which Landau didn’t have. Landau was saying things at the time like every Glenn Campbell album, every Jerry Vale album, every Helen Reddy album, every Ann Murray album was a distinct piece of art which should not be looked at as a piece of product.
That’s definitely against your theory, right? Rock is not art.
Oh, I don’t know. I double back on myself so much. There’s the trash aesthetic and all that. The way I’ve written about the Velvet Underground and Van Morrison, of course it’s art.
A mashup of imagery from 1970s Hungarian Sci-fi TV series Tales of Pirx the Pilot (based on Stanislaw Lem’s book) and soundscapes from electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack, this video pays tribute to the roots of digital pop culture.
[...] specifically focuses on tracks using Haack’s self-made vocoder, which he named “Farad.” This was the one of the first truly musical vocoders, and first to be used on a pop album, pre-dating Kraftwerk’s Autobahn by several years.
In his music and lyrics, Haack explored the interface between humans and machines in the beginning decades of cybernetics. Releasing groundbreaking experimental records as early as 1962 using synthesizers, early proto-types of the vocoder, rhythm machines and the touch sensitive Dermatron, Haack’s visionary sound still seems fresh.
If you love Patti Smith and like antique French porcelain, then you’re certainly going to dig the Patti Smith plate from Etsy seller Beat Up Creations.
This plate can be used for dining. I recommend washing by hand to preserve gold. Great display item as well. Wonderful alternative to traditional framed art.
The plate measures 6” in diameter and sells for $42.00.
Designed by Roger Linn and released by the Japanese company Akai in 1989, the MIDI Production Center or MPC has proven to be the backbone of hip-hop production. Its 16-pad interface allows for 64 continuous sample tracks, and has provided producers with some of the intense sound-granulating control that you’ve heard in the genre’s last 20 years.
The MPC has been around for pretty much all of Providence, R.I.’s Abraham Orellana’s life. So it makes almost cosmic sense that Orellana—who does business under the puzzlingly given name of AraabMuzik—has a masterful way of pounding the pads. He came to most peoples’ attention as the man who produced this summer’s “Salute,” the reunion track for Harlem’s Dipset crew (after the jump). Personally I think the kid’s talent far outclasses Dipset’s extreme-swagger stance, but whatever.
Here he is in raw form in the studio with his buddy the MPC-5000…a visual treatment of his virtuosity to follow…
Better yet, keep your Italo disco. Here’s some actual Krautrock. Yes, It’s the Sauerkraut synthesizer, the work of one Gordon Monahan.
Gordon Monahan’s Sauerkraut Synthesizer is an experimental synth, built around fruits, vegetables, and a jar of sauerkraut as voltage controllers for a software synthesizer, built with ppooll-max/msp and an Arduino interface.
The video captures a live performance on the Sauerkraut Synthesizer at the Subtle Technologies Festival, on board a cruise ship in Toronto Harbour, June 5, 2010.
The Sauerkraut Synthesizer is based on a technical prototype using lemons (The Lemon Synthesizer), developed as a collaboration between Gordon Monahan, Akemi Takeya, and Noid, in Vienna, March, 2009.
Witness the majesty of the Lemon Synthesizer after the jump…
Vivien Vee was discovered by Italian keyboard player Claudio Simonetti in 1978 when she 18 years old. Simonetti who composed the monolithic electronic score for George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead and played in the legendary Italian cult band Goblin achieved his biggest commercial success with Ms. Vee. The chemistry was cooking.
In my opinion Simonetti is every bit as good as Giorgio Moroder and in the soundtrack work he did for Dario Argento created something far darker, more atmospheric and to me more satisfying than Moroder. But I like the gothic stuff.
“Higher” is straight ahead Italo disco. But the zombies-on-meth head-jerking of the back up dancers (the only way to stop them is to shoot them in the head) propels the video into the realm of the ridiculously sublime. “Blue Disease,” which appears after the jump has an edgier Goblinesque feel that will probably resonate with German rock enthusiasts.
Last night Richard and I watched the Awfully Good TV special hosted by Little Britain’s David Walliams. It’s one of those clip shows of “so bad that it’s good” TV moments that normally aren’t that great, but this one actually was hilarious. I nearly peed myself when this clip came on. A kid named Matthew wrote in to the Jim’ll Fix It TV show and asked the host (Jimmy Saville) if he could “fix it” so that Matthew could drive around in Gary Numan’s “Down in the Park” car. And Jim came through! Watch as young Matthew, in crap shades, takes a little ride as Numan croons “Music for Chameleons.”
Matthew actually chimed in on the YouTube comments, writing:
All I can say is…HAHAHAHAHA…can’t stop laughing because that miserable kid is me! Blame the BBC for making me put those stupid glasses on just before filming…I hated them but they thought they looked futuristic. *ahem*
Apart from that had an ace day.
They wanted me to look spooky…but my grumpy face was just me being mardy and also scared. The jacket is too small for me these days, not that I’d ever wear it out for fear of damaging it.
Could this be the worst celebrity guest star appearance in television history? Methinks so. Watch the cringe-worthy trailer below. Also, take note on how Boy George delivers his line “Totally awesome, Hannibal.” It’s sheer brilliance.
You can watch the entire episode titled “Cowboy George” over at Hulu. Thank God!
is a book that you either devour in one sitting or else you’d never pick it up in the first place. Me, I sucked it down like it was oxygen. Lester Bangs was one of my heros and I loved him to pieces. To read such a meticulously researched and well-written bio of the man was like a dream come true for me.
