The Mats

by Damian | May 21, 2016 | Music | 0 comments

Just finished reading a great book about the band that changed my life, The Replacements.

Here’s the dust jacket blurb – it actually does the book justice:

TROUBLE BOYS IS A DEEPLY INTIMATE PORTRAIT, REVEALING THE PRIMAL FACTORS AND FORCES – ADDICTION, ABUSE, FEAR – THAT WOULD SHAPE ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT AND NOTORIOUSLY SELF-DESTRUCTIVE GROUPS OF ALL-TIME.

BASED ON A DECADE OF RESEARCH AND REPORTING, HUNDREDS OF INTERVIEWS (WITH FAMILY, FRIENDS, MANAGERS, PRODUCERS AND MUSICAL COLLEAGUES), AS WELL AS FULL ACCESS TO THE REPLACEMENTS’ ARCHIVES AT TWIN/TONE AND WARNER BROS. RECORDS, AUTHOR BOB MEHR HAS FASHIONED SOMETHING FAR MORE COMPELLING THAN A CONVENTIONAL BAND BIO. TROUBLE BOYS IS A HEARTBREAKINGLY TRAGIC, FREQUENTLY COMIC, AND, ULTIMATELY, TRIUMPHANT EPIC.

I knew quite a bit about the band before reading the book, but there were lots of great stories in it that I’d never heard before. It was amazing to me to read about how many times – and how many different ways – the band managed to shoot themselves in the foot. Sometimes the self-destruction was self-induced, via alcohol or drugs. But there were a few times when the fickle finger of fate killed any momentum they might be building. Like when their great song about teen suicide “The Ledge” was being pushed as a single at roughly the same time that four kids in New Jersey killed themselves in a suicide pact.

But fate and addiction probably had less to do with the ‘mats lack of success than their innate fear of success and mistrust of the system. Self-sabotage is a recurring theme in the book, and that’s a shame, because they were great.

They left a legacy of fantastic music… and the stories are pretty legendary too. And of course they created one of the greatest videos of all time:

No heart for Radiohead

by Damian | May 21, 2016 | Music | 0 comments

I’m an old man, but I have young ears. I like to listen to cutting edge indie rock/alternative/never-heard-of-them-before artists. I go to way more concerts by up-and-coming bands than a 51 year old should. Pitchfork would give me a 7.9. But I’ll go ahead and risk losing all my street cred with a single, solitary statement: I don’t really care for Radiohead. 

I know that’s considered blasphemy among the music snobs, but I don’t care. 95% of the Radiohead songs I’ve heard put me to sleep, including the ones from their brand new album. Sure, there are a few that I like… the usual suspects like “Creep” and “Karma Police”. But by and large, I find them to be supremely soporific. We have satellite radio in one of our cars (not the 2003 Honda minivan) and I listen to Sirius XMU, the hipster station. Sometimes when I’m driving and listening (in that order), if I hear a song that’s boring to me I’ll reach to change the station and realize that I’m changing from a Radiohead tune. Same goes for Thom Yorke solo stuff… actually I find that even more bland.

Music cognoscenti, including many of my music-head friends, will wax rhapsodic about how amazing, brilliant, mind-blowing and genius Radiohead is, but I’m not hearing it. And I’m certainly not feeling it.

(Yawn)

A music player that actually plays music

by Damian | Apr 30, 2016 | Music | 0 comments

NPR Music is a great source for new tunes as well as music news and reviews. I love their “First Listen” section where you can stream new albums, and their “Tiny Desk Concerts” are fun too. But until recently, the way you had to listen to the music — their proprietary music player — was a source of endless frustration. It’d crash constantly, and if you were halfway through listening to an album you’d have to start all over at the beginning. (Yes, I realize I’m complaining about free music.)

But now NPR updated their music player. It works much better than the old one, and you can even stream live radio, with some of my favorite stations like KEXP in Seattle, The Current in Minneapolis and WNKU in Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky.

Happy listening!

Big Mack Attack

by Damian | Apr 28, 2016 | Music | 0 comments

Lonnie Mack passed away on April 21st. Never heard of him? You’re certainly not alone. But you’ve most assuredly heard him, or at least his echoes, in the hundreds of rock and roll guitarists who were influenced by him. [Note: all indented paragraphs below are from the other sources that are linked in this post.]

“Lonnie Mack was one of the first white guys to really make a mark playing blues-infused guitar,” said record producer and blues historian Dick Shurman. “I think of him as a prototype of what later could be called Southern rock. His music was a blend — it wasn’t a conscious blend — he brought black and white styles together seamlessly.”

“I think there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that Lonnie is the first true blues-rock guitarist, and perhaps the first rock guitar hero,” says Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer, a Cincinnati native who first discovered Mack’s music as a teenager in the Queen City. “He’s the first guitarist that I know of to take elements of blues, country, and earlier rock, and bring them to what you could call a ‘rock and roll’ energy level. As a frontman, he was perhaps rock’s first virtuoso guitarist. Plus, I think it’s safe to say that he brought more elements of blues into rock guitar than anyone before him. He was both a groundbreaker and a brilliant musician.”

Lonnie was born near Cincinnati and his first studio gigs were as a session man (for the likes of James Brown) at King Records and the sister label Fraternity in Cincinnati. It was a Fraternity session that gave him his accidental big break…

And it was on a Fraternity session, recorded at King’s studios in 1962, that Mack stepped into history: His band was backing a female vocal group called the Charmaines when—according to one of several varying accounts—the session finished about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Mack used the balance of the time to cut two sides, among them a single-take, two-and-a-half-minute instrumental version of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” (shortened by Mack to “Memphis”).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJz9f0U7sRA

“Memphis” hit the charts the following year, and its follow-up single, another rocking instrumental called “Wham” also had a profound influence on the future of blues rock:

Down in Texas, “Wham!” had captured the imagination of a nine-year-old boy, as noted in this passage from “Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire,” by Joe Nick Patoski and Bill Crawford:

“Whether it was the maniacal, out-of-control attack, the raunchy, fuzzed-out distortion, or the lightning speed with which it was played, Mack’s 1963 instrumental did a number on Steve. He played “Wham!” over and over and over until the grooves began to wear off the 45. He slowed it down to 33 1/3 RPM to decipher the notes that blurred past at the speed of sound and the tricky turnarounds…

His single-minded determination not only annoyed his elder brother, it drove his father nuts. After hearing the song for what must have been the 726th time, Big Jim Vaughan burst into Steve’s room, yanked the record off the turntable, and smashed it to bits. Undeterred, Steve simply went out and bought another copy.”

My love for SRV was how I found out about Lonnie. Every time Stevie would play a concert in Cincinnati, I would attend, and SRV would always bring up Lonnie Mack to play a song or three. In the late 80s, I saw Lonnie Mack play a concert at a tiny Cincinnati bar, in an upstairs room that was usually home to a DJ playing dance tunes. Lonnie and his band absolutely tore it up, and I was thrilled to get a chance to talk to him after the gig and get his autograph.

But he wasn’t just an incendiary guitarist, he also had a very soulful voice.

Greil Marcus selected this track by Lonnie Mack as one of the great vocals in rock n roll and he detailed why in his 2009 lecture “The Songs Left Out of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. Greil described ‘Why?’ thus: “a soul ballad so torturous, so classically structured, that it can uncover wounds of your own. Mack’s scream at the end has never been matched, God help us if anyone ever tops it”.

I highly recommend that you read this great article about the life and times of Mr. Mack. 

In the meantime, there’s the issue of his legacy. Mack was criminally overlooked when Rolling Stone published its “100 Greatest Guitarist of All Time” cover story in the summer of 2003. He also remains excluded from induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And like so many artists the world over, he isn’t fond of the business machinations of the music industry.

“I ain’t got no regrets, but at the same time, it ain’t something that I would recommend to a young kid right now like I used to,” Mack says. “Because you have no control of anything anymore. The only way you can make any money is to do what everybody’s tellin’ me I need to go do: Go back out and tour and get the money at the door. That’s the only sure money there is.”

He pauses. And a second later, it seems he’s come full circle.

“I mean, you’d better love it,” he continues. “I mean, daggone! Why I got into it in the first place wasn’t about the money. I got into it because I loved it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3JQM3noYxk