Still going after all these years.
Rolling Stone says that Beck, Beth Orton, Grandaddy, and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes are confirmed for a memorial concert for Elliott Smith on November 3rd in LA (assuming the city is still standing at that point).
Update: Beck and his band posted remembrances of Elliott on his official site.
I was quick-surfing this morning when I caught it out of the corner of my eye on Scary Go Round. “Elliott Smith 1969-2003: I am very sad to hear about the death of one of my favourite musicians, Elliott Smith. A hugely gifted man, but also someone who seemed very fragile. What a waste.” I thought, Oh no. There was nothing in my aggregator, though, and I began hoping it was a rumor.
The Feedster search showed otherwise: along with the eight pages of eulogies, primarily on LiveJournal, were the news stories and encomiums. Elliott Smith, brilliant singer-songwriter whose work spanned guitar rock, orchestral pop, and despairing lyrics; who had five albums including three really brilliant ones; whose work spoke of loneliness and drugs; who apparently stabbed himself with a knife in his LA apartment on Tuesday.
I didn’t listen to Elliott’s music until I was in grad school, but the combination of the sweeping melodies and dark lyrics hit buttons for me then. If the rumors of suicide are true, I’m sadly unsurprised. And angry. Damn it, what a stupid waste of a brilliant mind and voice. But I’ll be listening today and thinking.
Got bitten fingernails and a head full of the past
And everybody’s gone at last
A sweet sweet smile that’s fading fast
Cause everybody’s gone at last
And you don’t get upset about it
No not anymore
There’s nothing wrong
That wasn’t wrong before
Had a second alone with a chance let pass
And everybody’s gone at last
Well i hope you’re not waiting
Waiting around for me
Because i’m not going anywhere
Obviously
Got a broken heart and your name on my cast
And everybody’s gone at last
Everybody’s gone at last
I appear to have been too eager last night when I posted the list of artists whose songs weren’t showing up in the iTunes Music Store. Though I was unable to follow the links I posted to get to actual music from home before 8 am, by the time I got to work they all worked and sent me reliably to fully populated albums. So 4AD, Beggars Banquet, and Too Pure (otherwise known as the Beggars Group) appear to have climbed aboard; I hope this means more Dead Can Dance, Mojave 3, Breeders, and Badly Drawn Boy tracks soon.
A number of 4AD, Too Pure, and Beggars Banquet releases, including the Pixies, Love and Rockets, Bauhaus, David J, Peter Murphy, Kristin Hersh, Mclusky, Tindersticks, Throwing Muses, This Mortal Coil, and others are showing up in the Just Added lists at the iTunes store, but when you click on the albums there are no songs there. Another Sigur Rós/Radiohead fiasco? Or have they just not quite finished adding the albums yet?
I posted three new mixes over at the Art of the Mix last month that I neglected to point to, partly because I was trying to keep them a secret from the birthday girl. Now that she’s had them for about a month, no reason to hide them any longer. For those who received these mixes on CD from me, here are the missing band names (sorry):
Arbitrage=the art of buying low and selling high with no risk. If one could sell online music at the same rates as the iTunes music store, there would be real arbitrage opportunities this week.
To wit: eMusic is shutting the doors on its unlimited downloads policy at the end of the month, but until then it’s all you can download (meaning, there are a ton of people including myself doing just that right now). Meanwhile, the iTunes Music Store seems to be adding a bunch of labels that were formerly found only on eMusic, including Matador (Cat Power, Pizzicato Five, Mark Eitzel, Pavement, Yo La Tengo) and Fantasy/Prestige/Riverside (John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Bill Evans, Joe Henderson, and other brilliant 1950s jazz sessions), and Lakeshore (Granddaddy). Alas, no arbitrage. Otherwise I could download all the albums for free on eMusic, resell them on iTunes, and make a killing. I’ll have to settle for just downloading the albums for free.
In compensation for the lack of arbitrage, the iTunes Music Store has added a few artists and albums that never made it to eMusic, like the White Stripes and Pop Will Eat Itself’s 1989 album featuring the insanely brilliant “Can U Dig It?”. If music keeps getting added like this, I’ll forget all about my disappointment with eMusic. Eventually.
I wondered the other day how it was that eMusic, or its artists, made money on the $14.99 a month unlimited download plan. I generally, when I remember to do so, find about four or five albums that I want to listen to for that $14.99, and that happens about every two weeks.
So this morning’s email that eMusic was being acquired by “Dimensional Associates LLC,” and changing their pricing model to eliminate all-you-can-download, came as no real surprise. The two tiers in the new pricing scheme: 40 songs a month for $9.99, or 300 songs for $50 a month.
Neither tier is really tempting, but I suppose I’ll stick with the basic pricing scheme just in case I discover another band I should have been listening to all along—like Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Red House Painters, or Cat Power—through the service. And between now and October 30, when the new pricing scheme takes effect, I’ll be pretty busy, especially in the Prestige/Riverside jazz part of the eMusic store.
Of course, the fine What Do I Know beat me to this post this morning…
I was hoping to go for a whole week with album covers that consisted of black and white portraits of two men, but didn’t quite make it. Still, I continue to be slightly creeped out by the Kruder and Dorfmeister cover, which is like a bizarro version of the Bookends cover. And is the pose on the cover of Songs From the Big Chair coincidence? I don’t think so. Check out the Past Listening page for the whole picture.
A ton of Library of Congress, Rounder Records, and Alan Lomax recordings have arrived in the iTunes Music Store, including Lomax’s Southern Journey series, the LOC recordings of LeadBelly and Jelly Roll Morton, Lomax’s recordings of world music from Italian peasant songs to Irish reels to Caribbean songs, Rounder collections of zydeco and Cajun and cowboy music… Oh man. Not enough hours in the day.
Seen on Boing-Boing: Paul’s Boutique samples and references list, a collaborative guide listing all samples and cultural references on the seminal 1989 Beastie Boys album. Kind of understated: for “Shadrach,” the commentators note that “Sly & the Family Stone’s ‘Loose Booty’ comprises most of the song.” Yeah, like just about all of the non-rapped contributions, including the “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego” chant.
NY Times, CNN, BlogCritics, Plastic, and others: Johnny Cash passes on, from respiratory failure (stemming from a complication of diabetes), and Shy-Drager syndrome, and probably some lingering after effects of his bout with pneumonia. It took all that to bring down the Man in Black.
I’m sad but unsurprised; Johnny has been preparing for death for years, since his diagnosis of Shy-Drager syndrome, and his last album (Cash IV: When the Man Comes Around) sounded like it was recorded from the other side. Still, I somehow thought he’d outlive all of us, until June Carter Cash passed. Then I knew, with his rock gone, it would only be a matter of time.
And they were so in love. This, I think, is part of the enduring greatness of Johnny Cash: that as much as he was a great outlaw (giving the finger to the music business, abusing himself and his associates), so much was he in love with his unlikely savior and lifelong soulmate, June. And so much was he steeped in conversation with his God.
And I think that his eternal struggle, his eternal toughness, his refusal to wear the rhinestones of Nashville even as his songs plumbed the deepest depths of this country’s psyche, explain his universal appeal. I’ll never forget sitting across from a gay friend of mine in a Dupont Circle bar one evening: when “Folsom Prison Blues” came on, we both started singing along:
I hear that train a-comin’, it’s rollin’ round the bend
And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when
I’m stuck in Folsom Prison, and time keeps draggin’ on
But that train keeps a-movin’ on down to San Antone.
Johnny Cash’s train has come and taken him away. Hallelujah, amen.
I might finally have a chance to see the Pixies live, if this MTV.com news item is correct. God, I hope so. Of course, there’s always the chance that the band’s members, after years of toiling in obscurity (or drugged out exile) will turn in a Spinal Tap-esque parody of their glory days, but there’s a big part of me—the part that can sing along with all of Doolittle AND Trompe Le Monde—that hopes not.
John “In the Morning” Richards thinks so too, if this morning’s playlist (one of the few things about being in the car after 9 am) is any indication.
On the sad side: Warren Zevon passed away Sunday, losing his battle with cancer just two weeks after shipping his last album. Rest in peace.
On the happier side: New Talking Heads box set, Once in a Lifetime. Deltas from their prior two-disc best of collection: “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town (Alternate Version),” “New Feeling (Alternate Version),” “Pulled Up,” “Artists Only,” “Tentative Decisions,” “Stay Hungry,” “I’m Not In Love,” “The Book I Read,” “Thank You for Sending Me An Angel,” “Found a Job,” “A Clean Break (Live),” “The Big Country,” “Cities (Alternate Version),” “Life During Wartime” (album version), “Air,” “Drugs (Alternate Version),” “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” “Listening Wind,” “Houses in Motion,” “Making Flippy Floppy,” “Girlfriend Is Better” (the best-of had the live version), “Slippery People,” “Creatures of Love,” “The Lady Don’t Mind,” “Love for Sale,” “People Like Us,” “Puzzlin’ Evidence,” “The Democratic Circus,” “In Asking Land (Alternate Take).” That’s 28 tracks difference. No word on price.
At Waxy.org: Double Dee and Steinski’s “The Lesson.” Masterworks of sampling from the early 80s, done by Doug DeFranco (Double Dee, a sound engineer in a commercial studio) and Steinski (Steve Stein, a TV producer who worked for an ad agency). The article helpfully points not only to a Village Voice article from 1986 about the pair, but also MP3s of all three classic “Lessons,” which are notorious for being basically one sample from beginning to end and therefore having no chance of being released legally. The pair were so influential that there are Lessons 4, 5, and 6, recorded by DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, and Jurassic 5.
I think I remember hearing Lesson 2 or Lesson 3 in middle school on the bus—they certainly punch some buttons in my memory. But mostly the lessons are just jaw droppingly amazing, including Lesson 3’s transition from Mae West’s injunction to “pucker up and blow” into the Human Beat Box. Go get ’em before they disappear…
After Jeff and Wilco had left the stage, we waited anxiously for the set to change over. While I was waiting, I heard the teenage girl behind me saying, “I’m going to call my mom as soon as a song comes on that she’ll recognize. I remember hearing her play all those albums when I was growing up. I hope it’s a greatest hits type show.” I turned around and said, “Actually, I heard they’ll be playing all the songs off their new album.” “Oh,” she said; “well, that’d be cool too.”
Soon the stage was full. Michael Stipe, wearing a jean jacket over a pink polo shirt and wraparound sunglasses, bounded out followed by the rest of R.E.M. in 2003: Peter Buck, Mike Mills (with a white cloud of hair), and guests Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows and the Minus Five, Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, and Barrett Martin on drums. The band wasted no time, jumping right into “Begin the Begin” (from Life’s Rich Pageant) as though the song were written yesterday. Michael was all over the place, tilting the mic stand to the floor like Joe Strummer, doing the spastic dance that earned him derision and a thousand spastic teenage imitators in the late 80s (including, of course, myself and my one-time roommate), shedding the jacket and then the polo to reveal a t-shirt that read, “I am vibrating at the speed of light.” The band moved immediately into “Finest Worksong,” and then, improbably, “Maps and Legends.”
While Peter Buck and Mike Mills were workmanlike (though Mike grinned from ear to ear during most of the numbers), Michael was chatty (he introduced the band by saying, “Except for me and Mike Mills, the whole band tonight is from Seattle, either native or transplanted”), grinning like crazy, joking around (he told a long story about performing “I Got You, Babe” as a joke at a charity gig headlined by U2’s Bono (“because you never pronounce his name Boh-noh”) and having “fucking Cher!” walk on half way through to do a duet), and of course dancing. In between the jokes and posing, the band worked through a tight set of old and new songs, including “Animal” and “Bad Day,” from the forthcoming greatest hits album (oh yeah—that’s what I meant when I told the teenager about the set list. Hope she forgives me someday), “Fall On Me,” “Drive,” “Exhuming McCarthy” (!), “Electrolite,” “New Test Leper,” “Imitation of Life,” “I’ve Been High,” “Losing My Religion,” “The One I Love,” “At My Most Beautiful,” “Daysleeper,” “Nightswimming,” “She Just Wants to Be,” “Walk Unafraid,” and “Man on the Moon.”
Through it all, Michael joked, danced, did dramatic interpretation, saluted, marched, and generally had a blast, but it was increasingly clear that the real musical leaders of the band were Mike and especially Peter, who without saying a word to the crowd managed the many changes of instruments, songs, and keys, and rocked hard doing it. Many of the later songs benefitted enormously from live performance, particularly “Imitation of Life” and “Walk Unafraid,” which transformed into a rocking affirmation.
With the crowd screaming itself raw, the band returned and played “Everybody Hurts,” “World Leader Pretend” (with Michael starting by saying, “This will be the second time we’ve played this since 1989; the last time, I blew a few lyrics, so I’m going to have to read it” before glancing once at the music stand and doing the rest from memory), “Get Up,” and closing with “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” I slipped out of the crowd during “Get Up,” not wanting to wait for hours in the parking lot, and as “End of the World” floated over the stadium walls I watched young and old kids dancing on the sidewalk.
R.E.M. may have fans that grew up listening to their songs as well as those of us who first heard them in middle school, but their live performances are as vital and inspiring as ever, and all the better for Michael’s loose, joking spontaneity. I hope another studio album follows In Time, because the band still rocks too hard to fade away.