Tagged: music

Rock and Roll and Comic Books and Our Future, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • February 18, 2008

 

There’s a website called Electronista that blames the precipitous drop in music sales on iTunes and the iPod, quoting NBC News’ Peter Alexander as saying “with 120 million iPods sold since 2001, digital downloads of individual songs are through the roof, soaring 500% in the last three years. In that same period, CD’s sales of declined dramatically, as listeners prefer hits over to entire albums.”
 
This type of sloppy reporting would have gotten me thrown out of Journalism school. I’m sure his numbers are right, but mp3s and mp3 players existed well before the iPod, and iTunes is not a bootlegging service: you pay for your music. Presumably, if the record companies aren’t ripping off the artists (which, ahem, has been known to happen), the artists are getting their fair share of the pie.
 
I know I’m going to get a ton of e-mails from Suits trying to redefine the argument in terms of bootlegging and that’s what is bringing music to its doom. To which I quote Sherman Potter: Horse hockey.
 
People always bootlegged music, ever since the inexpensive cassette recorder debuted in the late 1960s. You’d buy a record, you’d knock off a copy for your friends. People shared more in those days. This practice is so prevalent that some countries charge a bootlegging tax on blank media, the revenue from which going to a common fund for creators. It was no big deal then, and it’s no big deal today.

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Across the Midnight Express Universe, by Ric Meyers

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  • February 3, 2008
 
This week I watched two DVDs that considered the same turbulent period, but from two wildly divergent vantage points. 
 
First, the divider. Reviewers were almost totally at odds over Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor’s “homage” to The Beatles. Homage is in quotation marks because half the critics thought its liberties and excesses were trumped by its imagination, while the other half thought it was simply, cringingly, awful. 
 
I doubt the 2-Disc Deluxe Edition that’s showing up next Tuesday will do anything to dispel the opposites. It’s obvious that Taymor – best known as the director of Broadway’s The Lion King — was aiming for the same sort of cinematic success as The Who’s Tommy or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but the nay-sayers pushed it toward 1978’s campy bomb, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band starring the Bee Gees. 
 
The talented Taymor dodged that bullet, but couldn’t Matrix them all. The Beatles are a creative touchstone, all right, but not always for the best. Just as it’s more difficult to adapt a great book to film (The Kite Runner, Love in the Time of Cholera, etc.) than it is a pulpy one (Jaws, Psycho, The Godfather), it’s also extremely problematic to create a new musical from iconic music. And there’s hardly anything more iconic than The Beatles. The new, obviously far less talented, interpreters will always come out the short end.
 
To her credit, Taymor doesn’t try to overwhelm the music with vocal gymnastics (save for one exception) or distract audiences with stunt casting (save for the welcome inclusion of Bono and Joe Cocker in the supporting cast). But, apparently she can’t resist hurling buckets of creative energy all over the Frankenstein-stitched, wedged-in soundtrack. There are two kinds of directors: those who say “I” and those who say “you”: you’ll feel this, you’ll think this. Guess which one Taymor is.
 

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Happy 72nd birthday, Elvis!

  • News
  • January 8, 2008

Today in 1935, a king was born. In East Tupelo.

Apparently, so great was/is his majesty that Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia have made today, "Elvis Presley Day." The king had a twin, Jesse, who was stillborn– no room in this world for two kings of music.

Incidentally, he also sued for divorce from Priscilla on his birthday, too. That’s one big birthday.

So everybody– sing! Because Elvis is everywhere!

Leftovers/Third Helpings, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • December 30, 2007

 

Ah, holidays: a time to get together with family and friends … and watch all the DVDs you missed during the year. In my case, it’s with my teen and preteen nieces, so sooner or later they get control of the remote, and they call the shots. So it was in this cozy, tinsel-lined environment that we settled in to watch the special features on two of the second sequels that so galvanized marketing types a few weeks ago.
 
First up: Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End, which more than half of the nation’s critics found loud and confusing. But I, a market share of one, have always felt that they missed the point. Lurching, unfocused, overstuffed, yes. But this effort was nothing short than a largely successful attempt to dismantle, then refashion, what it means to be a “Disney Film," a seeming attempt that successfully continued with Ratatouille and Enchanted. 
 
This, after all, is a film that starts with the death by hanging of a ten … year … old … boy, then continues with piles of corpses, cutthroats staring up Keira Knightley’s dress, extended existential sequences in the land of death itself, and a central appearance by the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. The extras on the Two-Disc Collector’s Edition don’t rip the wrapping paper off this concept and slap it in your face, but there’s enough hints in the giddy declarations of director Gore Verbinski and writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio that something was up their sleeves besides arm hair.
 
Basically all of them contend that they were given the freedom to have fun and entertain themselves. Even so, none were absolutely sure that this independence (and the more than 200 million which bought it) wouldn’t come back to bite them. At one point, coming from the bright-eyed, sheet-eating grinning face of one writer was the passive/aggressive statement that the boy-hanging opening was his idea … except it might not have been, depending on the then-up-coming audience reaction. 
 

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A blog war during Christmas

  • News
  • December 23, 2007

Science fiction writer John Scalzi started it. He tried to make our heads explode with a particular music video.

I’ve grown rather attached to my head over the years, and so I returned fire on my own weblog with this find.

Within ten minutes, he parried with this retort.

Oh, it is on, bucko. Of course you realize, in the words of the great philospohers, this means war.

Ball’s in your court, fella.

Rock Posters Rule!

ComicMix Radio jumps right into this week’s pile of new comics and DVDs that are screaming to be added to your gift list… plus:

• There was a day when every good (or bad) rock & roll concert had a distinctive poster attached. There’s a list of the Top 25 All Time Rock Posters – and even a few surprises for comic fans (Nancy, a word to the wise. Avoid this Alternate Universe Sluggo)

• If you like Street Fighter, this is your week

• Spike awards the Top Video Games but where was Guitar Hero?

• This week’s Sold Out score: DC 2 and Marvel 1

• The Fresh Prince puts his music career aside for a while

Please Press The Button – our pal Sluggo is getting scary!

And Now for Something Completely Honky-Tonk, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • November 25, 2007

Some recent installments of this so-called Forgotten Horrors feature – the title suggests a resurrection of obscurities more so than it proclaims any particular shivers – have established the music-making imperative as essential to the standing of Robert Crumb as a Great American Cartoonist. Other such pieces have touched upon the kinship that I have perceived over the long haul amongst comics, movies, and music. This inclusive bias was cinched as early as the moment I noticed, as a grammar-school kid during the 1950s, that a honky-tonking musician neighbor named “Honest Jess” Williams was (unlike most other grown-ups in my orbit) a comic-book enthusiast.

The connection was reinforced around this same time, when I met Fats Domino backstage on a Texas engagement and learned that the great New Orleans pianist included in his traveling gear plenty of issues of Little Lulu, Archie, and Tales from the Crypt. Later on, as a junior high-schooler, I discovered that a stack of newsstand-fresh funnybooks always seemed to exert their thrall more effectively with a hefty stack of 45-r.p.m. phonograph records on the changer. (“Flash of Two Worlds” plus Charlie Blackwell’s Warners-label recording of “None of ’Em Glow like You,” augmented with a wad of Bazooka-brand bubblegum, add up to undiluted pleasure – well, the combination worked for me, anyhow.)

This latest unearthed obscurity has more to do with music – and a peculiar strain of indigenous Texas music, at that – than with any other influence. But the parallel tracks of American roots music, comics, and motion pictures tend to cross spontaneously. There is only one Show Business, and if not for the early revelation that such a fine Western swing guitarist as Jess Williams followed the comic books avidly (his favorites were Tomahawk and Blackhawk, the comics’ great “hawks” after Will Eisner’s Hawk of the Seas), I doubt that conclusion would have struck home with me. (more…)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction cycle persists

  • News
  • September 30, 2007

irish-rogues-earnie-7442174Continued from last week…

An Arlington, Texas-based songwriting and guitar-building partner of mine named Greg Jackson tells of the time when, as a schoolboy intent upon advancing his family’s music-making traditions, he brought home a just-learned story-song called “Five Nights Drunk” and demonstrated it to his folk-singing father as a fresh revelation. Manny Jackson listened long enough for the verses to open the floodgates of memory, then burst out laughing: “Why, I learned that song back when I was just a boy, and it was old even then! Here: Let me show you how it really goes!”

I suspect that that communal dream-stream, rippling with the waves and the undertow of ancient Ideas That Wouldn’t, and Will Not, Stay Dead (like the Man Who Wouldn’t Stay Dead of my Grandmother Lillian’s cycle of folk-tales) is the truer basis of the fabled Unbroken Circle of Southern non-sectarian gospel-singing tradition. Our shared notions and perceptions bind our generations, one to another – more so, even, than blood kinship – if only we will bother to heed the interests in common and build upon them. The past is ever-present.

Greg Jackson and I, both natives of the Texas Panhandle with immigrant and native-tribal ancestral ties to Kansas and Oklahoma and points eastward, have enjoyed the good fortune to be involved since around 1980 with a music-making and storytelling ensemble called the Salt Lick Foundation. East Texan by origin but long based in Dallas and Fort Worth, Salt Lick is ostensibly a bluegrass band that nonetheless reserves the right to indulge in blues and honky-tonk forms, with the occasional forays into rock ’n’ roll, Latinate and Cajun idioms, and free-form jazz.

An immersion in folklore is a foregone conclusion with Salt Lick – from fiddler Earnie Taft’s (above) devotion to Irish traditionalism, to bassist Ron Green’s eerie ability to channel the presence of some 19th-century circuit-riding revivalist preacher. We deepened the connections in a stroke when we teamed in 1984 with the Wimberley-based novelist and playwright Elithe Hamilton Kirkland (1907–1992) to develop a musical stage revue called Precious Memories.

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Price Performs At Ammons Benefit

  • News
  • September 17, 2007

ammons-poster-2007-jpg-3048585If you happen to be in Chicago this coming Saturday (September 22nd), you can watch and hear musician and ComicMix writer Michael H. Price along with a legion of music stalwarts in tribute to Albert Ammons, one of the very best boogie-woogie pianists.  But I’ll let his granddaughter Lila give you the low-down:

"Albert Ammons was a gifted musician who helped spark the boogie-woogie craze and whose music has influenced such greats as Dr. John, Axel Zwingenberger, Hadda Brooks, and Dave Alexander. He was also my grandfather. This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Please join me, and a constellation of stellar performers, as we celebrate the life and music of this extraordinary artist." The event is being held at the Chicago Temple at 4:00 PM Saturday. Quite frankly, the $25.00 ticket price is worth it just to appreciate the venue’s awesome architecture. And it ‘s in the heart of the Chicago Loop overlooking Daley Plaza, site of the penultimate scene from The Blues Brothers – the one where the cops scale the County Building walls.

If you’re a blue, jazz, roots and/or rock fan, this is the place for you. For more information, check out their website. It’s gonna be kickin’.

Happy birthday, MTV!

  • News
  • August 1, 2007

Twenty six years ago this very second, with the launching of a space rocket and a moon landing with a funky flag, MTV launched into the homes of a half million cable subscribers. (For the youngsters in the audience, MTV stood for "Music Television" and they would actually play music videos 24 hours a day.)

So… ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll:

And of course, the first music video played on MTV. C’mon, sing along– you know the words:

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