On the Shoulders of Giants

Recently, I just bought a double-CD of REM's "best of the IRS sessions," meaning the label IRS under which their early albums were released. It was  a purchase in one of the many great CD/Vinyl shops in Brussels that I have come to respect. Since I have been spending more time in Brussels over the past few months than I have since living in Belgium, I am finding some very good specialty shops, primarily for music. If there is one very positive thing I can say about Brussels, you can find anything when it comes to music amongst the four shops or so that I know of there.

As such, I have been trying to convince my Irish friend that REM is not merely a commercially successful band as they have become, but they were seriously cutting edge for many, many years. Success may have blindsided them, but arguably they are one of the most influential American bands of all time. No, they are. Period.

I remember getting my first taste of REM from a cassette that my sister gave me that her friend Steve from Rice University had given me in 1983/4, just when Murmur came out, which was also when U2's War came out. On the A-side of that Memorex cassette (which I still have and cherish) was War, and the B-side was Murmur from a band nobody had heard of, especially in Amarillo, Texas.

I actually cannot believe that that cassette is still playable as I played the living hell out of it, over and over and over on my grey and black Walkman II. It is amazing that it is still in one celluloid band. That single cassette probably sent me into the world of "alternative" music at the same time keeping me rooted in the classic. From then on, I listened to anything and everything, from Bauhaus to George Strait. In addition, I had my dad's old LP's ranging from Marty Robbins to Captain Beefheart.

There was not much I did not try out with regards to music styles. Having recently also been watching "the making of..." with respect to classic albums, I have learned more about The Doors, RUSH, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Frank Zappa, Simply Red, and on and on. to the point I think my real calling was a radio DJ...

What stands out is that REM does stand on the shoulders of giants, despite leaving him cold as Michael Stipe sings in this video, "King of Birds," perhaps one of my favorite REM songs. But, kudos to them, they stood on the shoulders, then jumped off, forging a consciousness of their own in the smithy of their Georgian souls.

I am again listening to the origins of REM non-stop right now, and wanted to share an early song, way before (at least metaphorically) "Losing My Religion" jettisoned them to being the giants on whose shoulders others would stand.

Video Killed the Radio Star...

Well, here it goes.

I believe that when an artist has to explain his or her work, the work has failed...and worse, listening to the said artist explain is often painful to say the least, so I will keep this brief.

Recently in Bologna, at a cafe, this song came on, and the person I was talking to did not know the reference of this song.

The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" was the FIRST video that was played on the fledgling MTV station 1 1/2 years later in 1981.

I remember being a young lad in Amarillo, Texas, having just moved from Louisville, Kentucky, and not have many friends, found my best friend in MTV (and Thundercats, the original), and I was blown away. Now, there were only so many videos in circulation...Haircut 100, Mott the Hoople, Def Leopard, Herbie Hancock, Billy Ocean, Duran Duran and a few others, but the Buggles would come up daily.

So, here we are, some thirty years later, and Youtube and other -Tubes have basically made the video of MTV and VH1 obsolete...in a very short time. MySpace was somewhere in between, but no one would ever think of being on MTV first now, yet, when it replaced the radio, you were DEAD if you did not get on MTV. Alan Hunter (cameo in David Bowie's "Fashion", Kurt Loder, Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, the impish Martha Quinn and J.J. Jackson were the VJ's who had the Caesarian thumbs up or the thumbs down to make or break a band's career.

But, then, like the laity of the Church, again moving from the priestly to the flock, videos went from the vaulted to the garage band variety of Youtube, which is, momentarily where we find ourselves.

So, the Video, in all of its glory, actually was its own undoing...hence the title of this blog...sorry to be so didactic, but I realized I must have failed in my subtlety as most people have missed this reference, so there it is, and here are the Buggles...

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19cbz_the-buggles-video-killed-the-radio_music

Happy Birthday to Me...

Thinking of Birthday songs as this is indeed my Birthday, I can't help but choose The Sugarcubes. So, for those of you who didn't know, this is where Björk came from, and as you can see in this video, a very young Björk at that.

The Sugarcubes were the darling punk band from Iceland. I remember hearing about them from my friend Mark in college, then a couple years later, my sister was just in her nascent stage of a very successful career behind the camera in film, was at NYU for a film program. They used The Sugarcubes for one of the shorts, and it was just perfect. So, with that memory, I decided to dredge the up from the annals of history again.

Amazing that you can have The Sugarcubes and Sigur Ros from such an unexpected place. Music truly  is something that never ceases to amaze me.

Enjoy the very young Björk!

Bells of Division

There was a time in my life that you might say I was slightly “obsessed” with (The) Pink Floyd. Along with Rush and Led Zeppelin at the time, there was not much else I listened to, as well as reading interviews and trying to “figure out” certain lyrics. Forget the Stones and the Beatles, for me it was all about Pink Floyd who were really taking music to a different level of experimentation with such albums/soundtracks as Mettle, More, Obscured by the Clouds, Animals, Ummagumma, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and so on.

Pink Floyd did not really break onto the “public” scene until the LPs Wish you Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon, which led then to The Wall, which ultimately was their demise for some time due to the internal rift of the band. Though it had been brewing for years between Roger Waters and everyone else in the band, championed on the other side by David Gilmour, who had replaced Syd Barrett after his complete mental and physical breakdown. For one, as a result of coming in later into the band, for Waters, Gilmour remained the “new guy,” something he apparently never let him live down.

When I was first really into Floyd (around 8^th grade, easy to remember as our Vice Principal was named Floyd J. and he was wont to wear a pink blazer at times…too easy mark), I thought it was all about Waters and that the others were merely musicians who supported his genius. However, over the years, that began to change, slowly at first, then ultimately quite a turnaround.

The more interviews I read, then later saw during documentaries and whatnot, the more irritating Waters became and the better Gilmour came off as the “silent partner,” without whom Waters would not be such the genius. This is further apparent when you check out their respective solo careers when Pink Floyd first split. Aside from some brilliant work on The Final Cut, Waters has not really produced much of anything worth mentioning. However, Gilmour’s solo album is great and then when he re-formed the band without Waters, inviting back Nick Mason on drums and Rick Wright on keyboards (whom Waters had “fired” without the consent of the rest of the band), they produced some very good music. Meanwhile, Waters continued whining about how he was “Pink Floyd,” ironically bringing the warning of “Have a Cigar” to life about mistaking the fact that there is no “Pink” (not, of course, referring to the current Pink).

What for me, though, was the final cut was seeing Gilmour at the helm for the “Learning to Fly” tour in 1987-88. My friend Nevin and I were sitting in our dorm room and we heard the announcer on the radio (when people still listened just to the radio…) describing the scene about the Pink Floyd show downtown. He was literally at a loss of words to describe the tension and the stage set-up, and this was an hour before the show! So, Nevin and I looked at each other and basically not even having to say it, jumped up and ran to my car, not caring that we had no tickets and less than an hour to get through concert traffic in downtown Dallas. We were going to see Pink Floyd. (This scene was repeated some years later in Freiburg, Germany driving down to Bern, Switzerland within two hours to see them again.)

So, we are driving down and the traffic looks impossible, but we were so close, not turning back now. And, the scalpers then began to become desperate as the show was about to begin. One came up to us offering 4^th Row, Floor seats at an insanely low price. Was he swindling us? Not sure, didn’t care. We bought them, found a parking place five minutes before the show was to start, ran to the door, handing the Security our tickets, waiting to see if we would get in, or get busted for counterfeit tickets. He looked at them, and moved aside, saying “Enjoy the show…” We were in.

Those next 3 hours (yes, it was a 3-hour concert!) were mind-blowing and without a doubt to this day perhaps the most amazing spectacle I had ever seen. What also happened was that Gilmour won me over for good. It is difficult to describe, in fact, I won’t even try, a Pink Floyd concert, as the radio announcer also found out. It is the greatest assault on the senses that can be comparable to walking down a street in downtown Madurai.

And yet, there were Gilmour, Mason, and Wright with a very large supporting band, having the time of their lives. Gilmour was wearing a white t-shirt and jeans and was the most relaxed person in the arena, and he never stopped smiling, knowing that Pink Floyd was back as this was one of the first concerts in over a decade for them. When the spotlight went to Wright for the first time, the crowd went nuts. Nobody missed Waters, who throughout the entirety of the tour gave interview after interview saying that was not Pink Floyd. Well, he was not Pink...

Recently, a friend of mine said he saw a documentary on the making of Dark Side of the Moon, which I am pretty sure I saw the same one, and he commented on how annoying Waters is in comparison to Gilmour and the others. He does speak of them as if they really were quite inferior to him.

Now, the backstory. All of Pink Floyd members went to Cambridge University, which is where I am currently writing this post in a coffee shop called “Indigo.” As you may well know, Cambridge is one of the finest Universities in the world, so the fact that all of them went here, and knew each other at the time, makes it pretty hard to swallow Waters’ bitter pill that he had a leg up on the others. They were just more modest as it has come to pass.

The follow-up LP to A Momentary Lapse of Reason (the Learning to Fly tour impetus) is The Division Bell. Here, the gloves come off, and the three other Cambridge fellows give Waters the knock-out punch, even using a boxing metaphor in one song, and Rick Wright is given the spotlight again to basically tell Waters to go f**k himself. This was after nearly two decades of silence and it is quite hard to feeling sorry for Waters for all of the acid he had spewed over the years. The final song, “High Hopes,” co-written by Gilmour and his wife Polly Samson, goes back to the hallowed halls of Cambridge, with haunting lyrics and music, and suggests that perhaps here along the Backs and along the River Cam, this is where it all went wrong.

Though this was not in the first concert I saw, I did see this song live years later, and it literally gave me a chill up my spine, and solidified Gilmour as the final voice of Pink Floyd. He moved on. Waters did not. The fight was over.

Hungarian Lights

Leonad Cohen has been on my mind lately, not sure why, but I find myself keeping Time with his songs in my head and phrases have been brought to the fore, whether as snippets of memories or as expressions in the Present.

Once such memory is a trip I took to Buda-Pest some twenty years ago, almost to the day. I was traveling with my friend Max, who deserves a book all in itself, and we took a journey to the East of sorts while we were both students in a European Studies program here in Antwerp, the first time I lived here.

Eastern Europe was just opening its doors, as the Wall had just come down some years before, and I had been "lucky" enough to be in East Germany before that had happened, so I was able to see the dramatic difference of the before and after some years later.

Max and I headed out to Prague per overnight bus, which was nothing short of an ashtray on wheels. This was a time when there was no such thing as non-smoking, and between the Czechs going home and the Western Europeans going to visit, it was a nine-hour chain smoke. For someone who has never smoked, let's just say it was less than pleasant.

After a brief stint in Prague, we jumped on a musty, old railcar that was part of the Orient Express, and headed to Budapest, the former sister city of Vienna of the formidable Austro-Hungarian empire that supplied the world with so much art and architecture, and of course, music. The waltzes along the Danube are legendary in Classical music, and in thinking of Budapest, I then must have Cohen's "Take this Waltz" on the brain.

One of the most vivid memories I have of that trip was an old-fashioned coffee house on the Pest side of the river. There, the waiters wore iron-pressed long, white aprons. The ceilings held numerous large chandeliers, which had these yellowish globular lights that barely gave off more than a spectral aura, much less light. The walls were covered in large, Baroque mirrors and there was a long wooden bar, finished out in brass. Max and I were the only patrons having coffee, with a staff of 15 or so waiters, waiting for the masses to come. It was out of Time, and somewhat surreal.

That memory, for me, fits perfectly with Cohen's surreal waltz....

Stony Ground

As people who know me, know well that it is nearly impossible to pin down my “favorite” genre, musician, song, or type of music, and I try to expose myself to as many different types as possible. My biggest re-morse from India is not bringing back a bag full of Indian music, both Hindi and Tamil, but that will be for next time.

However, in the past week or so, this is my “favorite” new song that I heard on Radio 1 here in Belgium. It was one of the first times in a while that I sat in my car til the song was done.

I knew it was Richard Thompson, as I have been aware of him for 20 years or so, so I was not listening to hear who it was, but rather just to listen until the song had played its course.

As it is just out, there is no official video yet, so this may serve as a placeholder in the meantime. It is from Joe’s Pub in NYC from a few days ago. The album is called “Electric” and I have scanned it on iTunes and will most likely get the CD next time I am wandering the aisles of a music store, most likely next time I take a trip down to Brussels.

Not the best quality, but it gets the mood across.

Enjoy

Big Bang Bang Theory

Bang Bang Bang

I feel like I need some levity in my life, so I chose this video today. Now granted, the original “Alouette” song is far from pleasant, and is rather twisted for a kids’ song, bringing to mind the original Brothers' Grimm stories, but Mark Ronson, DJ of the well-heeled brings us a nice version here.

Ronson, literally born with a silver spoon in his mouth, became the DJ for the tony crowd.

But, this song make me smile, and after this week, that is all that matters right now.