One thing leads to another

I recently read A Romance on Three Legs, about Glenn Gould's search for the Right piano.  

In passing, it mentioned that Gould's favorite of his own recordings was 1971's A Consort of Musicke Bye William Byrde & Orlando Gibbons.   

OK, I'm game: it's for sale, and for only $2.88! (plus $2.98 shipping, but still...).

And - sure enough -  it really IS terrific. (I think it's my favorite new-to-me album of 2012.)

OK, time to scour my shelves for more of this stuff:  hey, how about that - this spring I found a Hyperion disc of David Moroney playing keyboard music of Wm. Byrd.  ($1 at a library sale...)

Turns out, Moroney has done a seven-CD set of the complete Byrd keyboard music.

On the one hand, I mourn the loss of Tower Records at Lincoln Center; but, on the other hand, it's pretty nice to be able to find this stuff while sitting on the couch. 

Stuff like this was basically never available locally - I always needed to drive to NYC or Boston to find things.

The Bach Box

Last October -- here, in fact --   I was musing about how much I had saved by holding out for the stripped Honda Civic, and what I should do with that money:

Now I'm trying to think of something interesting to do with the money I saved. (Something more interesting than buying fuel oil for the winter, anyway....)

(For those just joining a story in progress: Simply declining the dealer-installed CAR RADIO and putting an after-market radio into the car myself had saved me about $675.)

Well, this spring I figured it out:  the obvious way to spend the money I saved on a car radio would be to spend it on MUSIC.

Now, clearly, the Age of the Compact Disc is ending.  And - if you look around - it's possible to download about any music one can think of.  And while I don't much object to the idea of  downloading something that is otherwise NOT FOR SALE AT ANY PRICE,  I'm old-school enough to feel uncomfortable about stealing music.

In March, Warner Brothers re-issued the 1999 Teldec "Bach 2000" set.  When it first came out in 1999, it listed for  $1120 (say, $1500 in today's money - and I think Tower Records would sell it to you for something like $800?); either way, it was too expensive for a guy with three small children. But this year - updated and re-issued as "The Complete Bach Edition" - it now lists for a much more reasonable $400.

$268 had it delivered to my door.  153 CDs of JS Bach,  a full week's worth of music.
Very roughly, it's about one-fourth of the original price back at the turn of the century.

Various friends and family think it's insane; and yet nobody would bat an eye if I simply gone ahead and had spent that very same money on a stupid car radio....

Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

I can remember being 15, 16 years old, and my mother being distinctly unimpressed with my taste in music - her reaction to my first Frank Zappa records ("We're Only In It for the Money", "Hot Rats", "Weasels Ripped My Flesh", etc.) standing out in memory.

I have MLK Day off, so I'm here at home this morning at my leisure, having a cuppa coffee and listening to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (a recent library-sale find, the London Sinfonietta on London)...

...and my 15-year-old wakes up and comes down stairs.

And as the circle turns, now it's my daughter's turn to be distinctly unimpressed with my choice of music.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, That Was Horrible, II

(Epigraph:)
(To paraphrase Chekhov) “If there’s an accordion on stage when the curtain rises, it must be fired by the third act.”



I did college radio for six or seven years or so: the avant garde holds no particular terrors for me. Being in college radio, we went through the whole thing of musical one-upmanship: “Hey, I can listen to weirder shit than you can.” A couple of my best pals introduced me to all sorts of Difficult Music in those days.

cf. Laurie Anderson’s Language is a Virus, which certainly bears on this:

“Good evening. Welcome to “Difficult Listening Hour”: the spot on your the dial for that relentless and impenetrable sound of. Difficult. Music. So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair; button that top button; and get set for some Difficult Music."

(one version of this is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHg2jZelIYc)

This is actually pertinent - Laurie Anderson played The Egg here in Albany a week or two ago - and even SHE could not fill that 1200-seat hall.

This weekend was the grand opening of a new performance hall up at RPI. So I went, to check it out. What’s notable is that one of the highlights of the weekend was a concert of avant garde music - or rather, music that had once been avant garde, oh, fully a third of a century ago, back when I was doing college radio.

First, Cecil Taylor (...sans Unit...) came out and fought with a grand piano for half an hour or so. Much like this:



(His bio at Allmusic notes: “Suffice it to say that Cecil Taylor's music is not for everyone.“)

Then Pauline Oliveros came up the stairs to the stage from out of the audience, sat down, picked up her accordion, and let the bellows of her accordion breathe a bit, to force us to hear it. The performance was a lot like this one from last year:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdnXFXrUhE



People were leaving in the midst of her first number.


What’s interesting is that this was a high-prestige gig at the opening weekend of RPI’s new EMPAC. Nice building, nice hall.

(It's kind of comical that a purpose-built hall in the 21st century STILL has videography only as an afterthought: FOR THE OPENING GIG, they had five cameras BLOCKING THE AISLES. Somebody please explain to me why they didn't build niches for cameras to live, out of the way of the paying customers.)

Anyway: on a college campus of 6,000 students, a free concert could not fill the new 1200-seat house. The hall was scarcely half full. And people started leaving after 15 minutes or so. Whatever the artistic merits of the musical avant garde, it’s hard to convincingly assert that this metropolitan area can actually support such a venue. (Half-full? The premiere weekend?? For a free gig???)

(Now, me, I'm pretty inured to what Laurie Anderson calls "Difficult Listening Music". But, hilariously, I dragged along my long-suffering teenaged daughter. She’s still in shock.)

Footnotes to the previous post

In explaining Napalm Death to my children, I had to back up and explain John Peel, shortwave broadcasting, alternative music, etc. Peelie's autobiography is out, with the cover photo looking exactly like my college radio days:





(Maggie agrees: not only does Peel resemble our college-radio-pal John, but the woman in the back (presumably his wife Sheila) bears more than a passing resemblance to M.)


From the Wiki article on John Peel:

I've always imagined I'd die by driving into the back of a truck while trying to read the name on a cassette, and people would say, 'He would have wanted to go that way.' Well, I want them to know that I wouldn't.

Edited (8 April) to add: and someone on BookMooch was good enough to send me a copy. Of the hardcover first. Via Air Mail. From England. I guess I know what I'm reading next.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, that was horrible

Back when I was doing college radio, there was always a race going on to see who could find the most extreme music, in any number of dimensions: the best, the 'rockingest', the most obscure, the loudest, the most literary, the most atonal, the coolest, the noisiest. Whatever the dimension, there was always an endless series of one-upmanship going on: "You call that 'X'??? Here, listen to THIS, I'll show you 'X'. " (Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" was of course the trump card in any number of these discussions.)

Even after I left college radio behind, I still kept up: every week I would listen to the BBC's John Peel to find out what was new. (Of course, now Peelie has left us, and I'm now officially clueless. But I did play the game for a very long time. And I still miss Peelie.)

Around 1987, John Peel's World Service show brought us Napalm Death, and the entire genre they spawned of "grindcore".

Loud, fast, difficult to listen to. Which meant it was perfect, for what it was. St. Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of Grindcore: "Postulate the existence of a genre louder and faster than which no other music can be conceived. Such a genre must exist, and must be worshipped."

And after listening to 1987-vintage Napalm Death, it was hard to imagine how rock could get harder, louder, or faster. So for the last 20 years, Napalm Death has been my specimen example for the genus of "hard rock".

And twenty years later, Napalm Death finally played here. An all-new lineup, but, still, here they are. My long-suffering wife refused to go with me. My teenaged daughter adamently refused to accompany me. So I went all on my lonesome.


Northern Lights is just a club in a strip mall. (What's hilarious is that next door to Northern Lights is the Northway Church, the local advertise-on-television Mega-church: Saturday night, there's one set of worshippers, and Sunday morning a different set of worshippers fills the same parking lot. Because, ya know, we each worship in our own way.) I'd guess the crowd was about 300? Mostly young men, of course, but a very visible contingent of women. The dress code ran almost entirely to 'black'. I counted four mohawk hair-dos. And I was probably the only un-tattooed person in the place.

(It's probably a topic for a different post to discuss how charming it is that audiences self-select. I didn't know that there WERE 300 grindcore fans in the area - and yet, here they were, all conveniently assembled in one place.)

So I saw a couple of the warmup acts ('Straightline Stitch' and '36 Crazyfists', from Alaska), and the headliners ('Devil Driver'). Napalm Death was not quite as loud as Sonic Youth - still my reference standard for "LOUD" (and come to think of it, I don't know if my hearing has recovered from that, even yet....) - but it was not for lack of trying. I kept touching my earplugs to make sure that they were seated - and touching them would break the seal, and let me know that, yes, they had been seated - the noise was, yes, simply loud enough that I thought my earplugs must have failed.

During the stage patter, Barney Greenway, Napalm Death's current singer, talked about the band now being 27 years old, and referenced 1987's "Scum" - which I was holding in my hand, as I had brought it along in hope of an autograph. (I was chatting with one guy who pointed out that the album was older than HE was.) My moment of fame.

"Scum":

In your mind
Nothing but fear
You can't face life
Or believe death's near
A vision of life
On television screens
An existance created
From empty dreams
Hide behind T.V.
Hide behind life
You should be living
But you only survive
Life holds nothing
But pain and death
Don't look for love
There is none left

What's remarkable is how conservative the genre is: Napalm Death played stuff off their new album, AND material from 1987's premiere "Scum" - and it did NOT sound like there was 20-some years of progress between the two. And the headliners clearly owe their style to ND, but have not moved the goalposts very far past their progenitors.

Hearing "Scum" played live made me smile. They play Binghamton tonight, but I still can't talk my family* into going with me.


*Amended to add:

Well, the 11-year-old is game - she's always up for about any adventure, and agrees that Napalm Death is funny - but I don't think the club would let her in.


.

Which Dead Russian Composer Are You?

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Igor Stravinsky. Known as a true son of the new 20th Century, my music started out melodic and folky but slowly got more dissonant and bizzare as I aged. I am a traveler and a neat freak, and very much hated those rotten eggs thrown at me after the premiere of "The Rite of Spring." Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test

Life List

[Attention Conservation Notice: a long, boring post of interest only to me and some of my real-world friends]

CONCERT LIST
I went to RPI mostly to join the radio station and to be a rock'n'roll DJ. (Remember "free-form" radio?) One fringe benefit was meeting and interviewing and recording rock stars; that, AND getting comp’d into shows. Oh, and all the free records and payola and groupies, of course. (No coke, though, unless the Program Directors kept it all for themselves, AND kept Real Quiet about it.)

A hundred or so pop shows in 36 years:
a few score bands (here are about 70) come more-or-less readily to mind.
(There are other shows that I don’t actually recall 30 years later, but pals will still occassionally remind me that they were there with me.)

Bold = comp’d in; Bold ital = free show
* = a stand-out show, personally or musically memorable

Alphabetically:

76% Uncertain: Am.Legion Post, Albany.(And a couple even-lesser warmup acts...)
*America: SPAC; I was in HS, ok?
*Joan Armatrading: Proctors? and maybe at SPAC, too?
*B-52s: at JB Scotts
The Bangles: the second (bigger) JB’s, about 1986. I was too old by that point.
*The Bhundu Boys: Iron Horse, Northampton 1990 or 91, before most of them died
Blondie: Asbury Park (farthest traveled? With my college chum 'Thin' Lizzie)
Blotto: some Albany bar
Blue Öyster Cult : Columbia Day at SPAC (WRPI comps)Summer 74; again at ESP July 2006
Gordon Bok: Old Songs, Altamont
Billy Bragg Troy Music Hall
Jackson Browne: SPAC
Camper van Beethoven: QE2 (local club, not the Cunard liner)
Caravan: a late incarnation, at the Palace ca. 1974-5
Chieftains: Proctors. A very young Michael Flatley did step-dancing with them
Petula Clarke: State Fair 85? This literally came under the heading of “Yeah, I’d cross the street to see x”
*Lloyd Cole: Valentine’s Bar Nov 2000?
Elvis Costello & Clover: Siena College (not with the Attractions)
Iris DeMent: Schenectady's Central Park
Dead Kennedys: Danny says this was JB Scotts. Jello Biafra lectured at SUNY, years later
*Devo: Radio City Halloween of 79? With Russ and Danny and M.
*Diblo Dibala: Albany's Wash. Park with Alice and Mary, about July 2003
Fairport Convention WITH Sandy Denny (yay!) (but without RT, boo) Palace
Flo & Eddie: as warmup for Fleetwood Mac just before FM broke out big
The Foundations: My very first show. Jr. College of Albany gym, May of 1969?
*Gang of Four: QE2. Very late incarnation (new rhythm section). "My Date
with Sara Lee" (She lived in Woodstock, came up for the show, and I talked to her in the bar). G04 were great.
Good Rats: at the Hullaballoo? Maybe again as warmup for Van Morrison?
Ritchie Havens : town park July 25, 2002
Hoodoo Gurus: warmup for the Bangles, 1985 or 86
Bert Jansch: Siena College
Kanda Bongo Man: Sch’dy Cental Park
*Kitchens of Distinction: Hoboken (I was in NYC for work, had an evening to kill.)
Nils Lofgren: Palace. And again in the station, Studio A. SteveC interviewed him
Martha & the Muffins: Peppermint Lounge NYC with Danny
Ellen McIllwaine: McNeil Room. Worst show ever, largely thanks to UPAC Sound.
Van Morrison: Proctors
Maria Muldaur: warmup for America at SPAC?
The Nields: Sch’dy Cental Park
Phranc: Foxboro (warmup for the Smiths)
*Plasmatics: JB Scotts. What a great show.
Maddy Prior: Wash. Park, Albany ca.1998 (just a few songs, as I had the kids in tow)
Psychedelic Furs: (warmup for Talking Heads at the Palace 1980 )
Quicksilver MS: warmup at Live at Five, 7/07.(Let’s just say: disappointing)
Bonnie Raitt?: outdoors in the Berkshires - Tanglewood or Music Shed?
*Ramones: The Hullaballoo, Rensselaer. Hey ho, indeed.
*Steve Reich: and musicians. SUNYA PAC
Relativity: Old Songs, Altamont
*REM: The Skyway, Scotia Oct 1983 (I won comps. Beer w the bass player.)
The Roches: (Maggie and Terri and Scuzzy) ESP free show
Rollins Band (Henry, not Sonny): QE2
Todd Rundgren: Sch’dy Cental Park. Past his peak, but still.
Tom Rush: 8th Step Coffee House Lark Street
John Sebastian: at Tawasentha, my town park...
Michelle Shocked: Troy Music Hall late ‘80s. She was warmup for Billy Bragg
*Silly Wizard: Old Songs, Altamont. Their good-bye concert.
Siouxsie and the Banshees: at one of the early Lollapalooza tours, SPAC 1992?
*Patti Smith: Union College Chapel 1974?
*Smiths: Foxboro (farthest traveled?)
*Sonic Youth: QE2. Loudest show ever. Holy crap: I even had ear
protection, and they were STILL unbelievably loud.
Bill Spence & Fennig’s All-star String Band: Niskayuna HS (local folkies)
Star Spangled Washboard Band: McGovern Rally fall '72 (local heroes, pre-Blotto)
Starship: Live at Five, 2007. Not quite the same as Jefferson Airplane at SUNYA in 1969, but hey. With QMS.
Al Stewart: Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center. After his Big Hit.
Steve Stills: SPAC My excuse was that this was after CSNY broke up
Tibetan Monks: Troy Music Hall
The Tubes: Palace
U-2: JB Scotts. Before they became bigger than god.
UK: Madison Theater
Michael Urbaniak: (least distance traveled? from the Quad, over to the McNeill Room
Wolfe Tones etc: ESP convention center (Jimmy comp’d me in)
Yes: SPAC, high school

(That’s about 70 bands)

Spitzer inaugural, 2007: Judy Collins, James Taylor, Natalie (Attired) Merchant, etc.

Multi-band events:
- WRPI got tickets for some jazz festival in the rain in Vermont - and we spent most of it huddling for warmth, and the music is entirely blotted from my memory. Metheny?
- The rest of the Lollapalooza roster 1992 (nothing but Siouxsie sticks in my mind, I should look up and list the other forgettable bands...)
- Columbia Day at SPAC: BÖC + several other bands - Pavlov’s Dog!, Dave Sancious & Tone, etc.
- Fox Hollow Folk Festival (but today I can’t name a single act besides Robert
J. Lurtsema). Didn’t this have Jean Redpath? Wouldn't I remember that?

And the “I’d sure as hell see that again” list:
(Here are ~38 shows, a further 16 bands)
- 5 Grateful Dead shows: *Utica 3/73 / Syracuse 9/73 / Boston summer 76? / Field House in the 70s/ Knick 3/91
- 4 Richard Thompson: McNeil Room 2 August 1985 (a Friday...) / Bottom Line '86? /in-store, StuyvesantPlaza ~'94?/ Troy Music Hall Oct '96
- 3 *Bruce Springsteen: Union College Chapel Oct '74 (Wow!)/ Lenox July '75 / Palace Theater fall '75?
- 2 George Thorogood Palace (warmup for Bruce? or headlining?) / then at Cornell w M
- 2 Oregon: McNeil Room/ then at some club in Poughkeepsie (the Chance?)
- 2 *Be-Bop Deluxe Palace, for both the ‘Air Age’ and ‘Drastic Plastic’ tours
- 2 *Mekons Both QE2 (Hello to Mekons)
- 2 Talking Heads *Madison ’77 / Palace ’80. First show might have been comp’d.
- 2 10,000 Maniacs JB Scotts? Palace?
- 2 Suzanne Vega I helped roll the Ampex 351 over to the McNeil Rm to record her; and again shortly thereafter with M, but where? I think the ESP CC.
- 2 Laurie Anderson: Proctor’s May ’90, and an earlier show -- at the Palace?
- 2 Fleetwood Mac *Palace March 75? / SPAC a yr or so later because BoJo
gave me a ticket
- 2 NRBQ at some Albany bar / then as warmup for George Thorogood?
- 2 Dave Amram: Café Lena’s - the first show was so good that we went
back the 2nd night
- 2 Devilish Merry: Wobblie Joe’s Bar, Pittsburgh, successive years in the late 70s
- 2 PDQ Bach SPAC w Roxanne, Palace with Maggie

Seen twice, but more by accident than intentionally:
- 2 Renaissance I remember it as: Caravan was warmup; then Renaissance came back a month or two later with Fairport as warmup, and the Palace was empty. Hope they fired their booking manager.
- (Joan Armatrading?) I think twice, once at Proctor’s, once at SPAC
- (Chieftains?) I think I saw them twice, probably both at Proctor’s


Concerts that did NOT make a big impression:
(or just too light-weight to bother listing above...)

Did I see some incarnation of King Crimson? at the Madison? (or am I confusing this with UK?)
I have a faint (and possibly false) memory of seeing Steve Forbert someplace the year he premiered - at the pub in the student union? (or was he later at el Loco?)
Didn’t I see Utah Philips at Mothers Wine Emporium? Or is this another false memory?
Commander Cody played at RPI when I was there, right? outside? GM week,maybe?

A bunch of my college chums and I saw somebody at the Village Vanguard.
(Aaron suggests that this may have been McCoy Tyner; this was almost certainly on the Death Trip, when Peggy crashed the car in the snow - - which would explain why I don’t much recall this show ... mostly I was just being glad to be alive, and the VVanguard had a several-drink minimum.)
Nick F. Brignola (and one or more Mangione -- more likely Gap than Chuck -- but maybe both) played at my high school...does that count?
What was that local Latin/Cuban band that Rod and Aaron dragged me out to see in Nashville?

I’ve seen a whole bunch of local bands too tedious to recall... including half of the warmup bands for the above shows (Doug Sahm for the Grateful Dead; Lloyd Cole had a couple local guys do warmup...)
Some WRPI bands (Monolith, Banquo’s Ghost, Roger and Jimmy’s various projects, etc)
One stand-out:
The Matterbabies at Jimmy’s store,3rd St.Troy, early ’90s - Free, or nearly free: $3?
They were good enough that I bought their tape.

Some radio station appearances: Root Boy Slim, Rory Block(*sigh*), various hair bands

Some regional bands I saw around campus: Pearl Harbor & the Explosions, the Flashcubes, The Todd Hobin Band; Orleans played somewhere.

A bunch more free shows at Tawasentha, Schenectady's Central Park, Albany's Washington Park, out at the State Fair, downtown Albany, Larkfest, etc.

A few forgettable minor-league shows at local clubs where WRPI was on the guest list.
(What was that dreadful band Lou-the-Who & I interviewed at the Hullabaloo?)

I’ve been to forgettable pop shows at the Lenox Music Shed and at Tanglewood, but don’t recall exactly who - Bonnie Raitt seems to have been one of them? Judy
Collins?

And I can’t rightly include a few shows I heard from the outside:
most notably, Mahavishnu Orchestra across the street in the Armory when I was living in the Quad back in ought ’74 - - (this sounded like The End Of The World at fully 100 yds);
el Loco Mexican restaurant used to do live music (Odetta!) that we could basically watch/hear from our stoop across the street on Madison Avenue; arguably, this was a more intimate concert setting than, say, SPAC... but really, now, it's hard to claim....
Aaron & Anne’s apartment next to the jazz club, etc.

Concerts I missed:
this list is essentially an infinite set, but notable highlights include:
- The local ’60s shows I was too damn young to get to:
Steppenwolf, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin at The Aerodrome in Schenectady;
(Roxanne claimed to have gone to all of these shows...)
Jimi Hendrix at the RPI Armory (Easter 1968?)
The Doors at the RPI Fieldhouse (December 1967?),
Jefferson Airplane at SUNYA (I was in the 9th? 10th? grade - - I think Mr. Mastro went)
The Knickerbockers played St. Rose in the ’60s....
Genesis with Peter Gabriel, at the Palace 1972? ’73?
well, WOODSTOCK.

- Walking past the venue, but couldn’t change plans in time to get to the
show later:

The Gang of Four in Philadelphia 1992 (...I was pushing a baby in a
stroller...)
The B-52s at Max’s Kansas City, with a bunch of college chums

- Too far/too broke/too many obligations/ just couldn’t make the effort/and I still regret missing:
Steeleye Span in the Berkshires early summer of 1974?
Various Roxy Music gigs in NYC, 1975-2001
Gang of Four in New York circa 1981; and again in 2006
New Order in New York circa 1982 (just too damn broke...);
John Cippolina played at some Albany bar just a couple of years before he died.
Linda Thompson was singing at Ronnie Scott’s (London ’85), but we were too tired....
The Smiths did a NYC tour about 1983, before I even knew who they were.
Deacon Blue and a half-dozen other minor bands we liked were playing up near Oxford the day we got off the plane in London in June ’90, but we were too jet-lagged to jump in a rental car....

Any number of shows at the Chateau (that vanished little ’80s club they knocked down to build the Knick Arena (not a fair trade)) – but I couldn’t be bothered to cross the street: The Sick F*cks is at the top of this list, but there must have been 20 or 50 noteworthy shows there.

Shows that everybody in the Capital District would later claim that they
were at: The Police at JB Scotts; [even more obscure: The Police at the Hullabaloo at couple months before that. There were supposed to have been a dozen people in the audience, and I've heard this story from everybody in Albany.]

Note that the listing of ‘bands seen’ doesn’t line up perfectly with the listing of 'shows seen’, as some shows get counted twice when the warmup band was also memorable.

Someplace I have a shoebox full of ticket stubs that would answer a few of these hazy memories.

I saw Jelly Biafra and Henry Rollins as lecturers, too.

A quarter or so of the shows listed were free; most expensive was probably the Smiths?

Smallest venue: Cafe Lena’s in Saratoga. (Why did I never bother to see Christine Lavin when she worked there?) I've been to a half-dozen shows there, and the only one I can recall is Dave Amram. Seats what, 40?
Smallest house (as proportion of capacity): Fairport/Ren. at the Palace. There couldn't have been 200 people there, in a 1500? seat theater.

Largest venue: SPAC Runner-up: Foxboro
Largest indoor show: the Dead at the Knick

Note that once the scale popular rock shows moved from the Aerodrome/ Field House -sized venues up to arenas, the only venue big enough here for big-name bands was SPAC, until the Knick opened in about 1990.

Although Steve Reich is listed above as pop, there’s a separate (shorter) Life List for classical gigs:

Philadelphia Orchestra ~1966, Boston Symphony ~ 1967, a half-dozen Albany SO ca. 1977 season; the Northern Sinfonia/Iona Brown ca. 1986; some major string Quartet (Borodin?) at Union with Aaron ca. 1978; Troy Music Hall for Ma/Stern/Laredo/Ax ca. 1988; U Mass Lowell for Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique (farthest traveled?) Nov.1999;
ADD: Dutoit/Phillie/Ma SPAC July 31, 2002

...And then, starting in ’99, the score or so of gigs I recorded as Don's assistant, using Aaron’s hi-tech 'Calrec' Ambisonic mike: Kronos Quartet, Emerson Quartet, Takacs, Gil Shaham, Lang Lang, Edgar Meyer, Boston Camerata, the *BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Iggy rocks my world...), Kremerata Baltica, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, etc., etc.

The Emerson Quartet is now at 4 gigs on my Life List, which puts them ahead of Bruce -- plus two or three shows by their cellist, and yet another show by their violist. So David Finckel is probably my most-seen artist. And I’ve now seen Edgar Meyer twice, too: once solo, once in a quintet with the Emersons]

Danny, Aaron, anybody: anything I've missed?

It was 40 years ago today

June 1st (UK) or 2nd (US), 1967

"The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released.. . . . At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food — Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend — the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young."

- Langdon Winner (a Political Scientist (Berkeley '66, '67, '73) who, coincidentally, is now at RPI's Department of Science and Technology Studies (where I picked up a minor))

Danny's New! Improved! Album Quiz

Over on Making Light, as 2006 was winding down,
Bruce Adelsohn on Open Thread 77 introduced us to the terrors of the Planet Rock Album Quiz.


A few of us there (I see Tim Walters, Rikibeth, abi, otherdeb, and myself) kicked it around a while, but then the thread moved on to other topics, and then it died out, as all threads must.

Well, I told my old college-radio buddies about the Planet Rock Album Quiz.

And one of my friends ran with the idea:

All the people I work with got hooked on the Planet Rock album quiz, but they all had the same reaction: too much Heavy Metal, and not enough ’80s bands. I took this as a challenge, and so here's the 1980s (give or take a few years) version of the quiz. See how you do:

Danny’s New! Improved! Version of the 'Album Quiz'.


I found it to be even more maddening than the original.

Thank you, Lester Bangs

When I was but a beardless youth, I came across a copy of Creem. And in that distant land, it was hard to get your hands on information - this was a quarter-century before the internet, in a town without a bookstore. I treasured that copy, read it to death, damn near memorized the thing. It had a big influence on me.

And the heart of the issue was a long, rambling piece called James Taylor Marked for Death. (Twenty years later, I would learn that the piece was written by Lester F. Bangs.)

Now, whatever the virtues of the talented Mr. Taylor, the case against him was memorably made. He's done a few songs that will last - I can't drive the Mass Pike without thinking of him - but I remain to this very day somewhat averse to the charms of Sweet Baby James.

Back in November, the Dems swept state-wide elections here in New York. New Governor Spitzer is extremely smart (1590 SATs!) and, (depressingly), a couple of years younger than I am. But his politics are - despite his money - quite admirable.

And he threw a public inaugural, one that stood in stark contrast to the republican version. The day began with a run in the park, on to an open-air inauguration, on to throwing a public party in the ESP, then an open house at the residence - and culminating in a free concert in the Knick Arena.

Jimmy Fallon MC'd. Ben Vereen sang. Willie Colon played. Natalie Merchant performed.

And, the evening's headliner: James Taylor.

I sat through three numbers before I realized that it would be a betrayal of all I stand for me to sit through a performance by James Taylor. I could no more endure JT than I could voluntarily endure watching the Lawrence Welk Show.

So we got up and left.