More than 5 Things, November 11th

November 11, 2019 by 3 Comments

It’s been a busy time recently, but Five Things returns this week with hopefully interesting items from far and wide. Trade Description Act requires that we are renamed this week as More Than 5 Things From the Past Couple of Months…

{ONE} I DON’T BELIEVE IN YESTERDAY
We finally saw Yesterday, a film lacking in so many things – charisma and coherence being the main ones. I mean, I didn’t not enjoy it, in a lazy wet-Thursday-night kind of way, but the incongruities in the end suffocated any joy in the small moments. I excerpted a few bits from Rob Sheffield’s withering review for Rolling Stone when it came out, but here’s the link to the whole thing (if you can bear the appalling amounts of adverts that the RS site has…) “It’s not like a musical,” director Danny Boyle said. “You’re not just covering the Beatles’ songs but recovering them from the dustbin of memory and re-presenting them to the world.” Imagine: An adult in 2019 thinking it’s necessary to rescue the Beatles from “the dustbin of memory.”

{TWO} IF YOU EVER WONDERED…
what the Doctor Who theme would sound like if Ennio Morricone had arranged it, wonder no longer…

{THREE} IN AUCTION NEWS
The Auction World™ has gone beserk lately – you can’t move for music-historical items from houses to trousers being dangled before the world’s eyes. Here’s a few noteworthy items…
ONE “A vintage green cardigan sweater worn by Kurt Cobain during Nirvana’s appearance on MTV Unplugged in 1993. The Manhattan brand sweater is a blend of acrylic, mohair and Lycra with five-button closure (one button absent) with two exterior pockets, a burn hole and discolouration near left pocket and discolouration on right pocket. Size medium”. It made $334,000 at auction Saturday, establishing a new record for the most expensive sweater ever sold at auction. I’m not joking. For $6,000 more, you could have bought Cobain’s Fender hybrid Jag/stang guitar, which you could at least play.

TWO Bill Pagel admits that buying rock and roll property [in his case Dylan’s childhood home in Hibbing] is a twist with unusual challenges: “With a guitar, you can move it around. A house is just sort of stuck there. It’s not a portable collectible.” But neither he nor Lee Bacon (owner of Kurt Cobain’s family house), has plans to move in. Instead, they’re in the process of restoring their respective purchases to as much of their original conditions as possible. The country world has already entered this territory – one can tour Loretta Lynn’s or Johnny Cash’s childhood houses, for instance – and Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s boyhood homes in Liverpool are tourist attractions. But plans for the Dylan and Cobain residences could mark the start of a similar initiative here in the States to turn the homes of classic rock acts into tourist attractions. – from Rolling Stone.

THREE Lot #1 at Gotta Have Rock and Roll’s Auctions in a few days time: Michael Jackson’s socks… as the site says, “Motown 25” Stage-Worn for first-ever Moonwalk, Bill Whitten Custom Crystal socks, gifted to manager Frank DiLeo.” Pre-sale estimate? $1-$2million.

FOUR The things I’d have bought? A poster (with the Jackson Five way down at the bottom of the bill) for what looks like a cracking show – isn’t Sad Sam just the best name for a M.C. ever? And a page from Dan Kramer’s Dylan photo book, 1968.

{FOUR} FEDS v EM
Having rapped about Trumps Donald and Ivanka, Eminem had a visit from the FBI. From Buzzfeed, after they filed a Freedom of Information Act request: The interview took place a month later, on the afternoon of Jan. 16, 2018, with Eminem and his legal team. Two pages of documents summarising the discussion were entirely redacted but it centred around Eminem’s BET freestyle rap and the lyrics in “Framed”. During the interview with Secret Service, when agents began to read the lyrics of his freestyle rap, “Mathers was familiar with the song and began to rap along with the interviewers as the verse was read”, according to the documents.

{FIVE} AND ON TV…
We’re happy that the second series of End of the F***ing World has arrived. A knowing Natural Born Killers relocated to Great Yarmouth, the off-kilter, genre-neutral first series was fascinatingly skewed – shot as though the hinterlands of Britain’s suburbia were as looming and empty as the Arizona desert, with a sensational soundtrack. The actual soundtrack was by Graham Coxon of Blur, but the episodes found space for thrilling Fifties’ psychobilly, those weird midnight Country torch songs, doo-wop, Solomon Burke covering Tom T. Hall (“That’s How I got to Memphis”) and Hayes Carll’s dynamite “KMAG YOYO”. Way to F***ing go.

{SIX} PERILS OF AUTOMATIC CAPTION SOFTWARESES
I like the note (here on an article about bad original band names).

{SEVEN} CONDÉ NAS?
Bizarre analogy from an extraordinary piece in New York magazine by Reeves Wiedeman, about the changes at magazine behemoth Condé Nast. Following a war-room meeting about hard commercial realities, Reeves writes: “When I brought up that meeting to Pam Drucker Mann, Condé Nast’s chief revenue officer, who had been there, she insisted it wasn’t different from meetings pressing other magazines on their commercial prospects. She used an analogy for thinking about the old Vanity Fair versus the new: “There’s a song Bill Withers may have written and sung that people of his time are like, ‘This is the best,’ and then Drake might remake it, and the people that love Drake will be like, ‘This song is amazing.’ ” I took the point, then asked if there actually was a Drake remix of a Bill Withers song that I had missed; she said it was a hypothetical but would get back to me with a real example. An hour later, a Condé Nast spokesperson emailed me Drucker Mann’s revised answer: “Old Town Road,” original by Billy Ray Cyrus. Remix by Lil Nas X.

{EIGHT} COOL MUSIC FOR JOHNNY
From Rolling Stone: After composing the score for the documentary Elvis Presley: The Searcher in 2018, Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready has directed his attention to the Man in Black, reuniting with director Thom Zimny to create the soundtrack for The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash. A new doc about the mercurial country singer, the YouTube Originals production (premiering November 11th) looks at Cash’s tortured past — the accidental death of his older brother; his own damaging affair with drugs — and subsequent redemption through spirituality and his marriage to June Carter. To best depict those lows and highs, McCready retreated to his home studio in Seattle to watch the film and come up with appropriately moody, but reverential, sounds. “I would watch the scenes and try to feel what the scenes meant to me, the emotion of what Johnny was talking about or the situation he was in,” McCready says.

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Tuesday, July 2nd

July 2, 2019 by 4 Comments

{ONE} CARTOON
I took this cartoon from a batch submitted by Ray Lowry in about 1983, when I worked at The Listener. I don’t know whether it’s tragic or incredible that you could run it in Private Eye this week and it would still work…

{TWO} PIECES ON WORKING WITH MAC
Two interesting and heartfelt pieces on Dr John. First, in Rolling Stone, by Jonathan Bernstein, about the album that he was making before his death:
The resulting album is anchored largely in traditional country music. “These were people he grew up on, a lot of people didn’t know that,” says guitarist and producer Shane Theriot. Dr. John had idolized Hank Williams Sr. since he was a teenager, and according to jazz vets like John Scofield, he had been talking about recording a country-tinged piano record a la Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music since at least the Eighties. The album features several country classics like “Old Time Religion” (a duet with Willie Nelson), Johnny Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away,” as well as several Williams covers like “Ramblin’ Man.”

“There’s a version of [Hank Williams’ 1949 song] “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that’ll make you cry when you hear Mac sing it,” says Theriot. “As this record took shape, it wasn’t intentional, but the common thread is that the songs all deal with time and looking back. When you hear Mac sing, it’s somebody that’s lived a really full life. He sounds great, but he sounds exposed.” “The lyrical content” is country, keyboardist David Torkanowsky says of the record, “but it was completely Rebennack’ed out.”

And this, by Chris Rose on myneworleans.com.
In a career marked by many strange phone calls – an occupational hazard for a newspaperman – one I got in the fall of 2005 was a true corker. The voice on the other end of the line was unmistakable. At the time, he was living in New York City and had been taking in the news of Hurricane Katrina from afar, from friends and family and TV. And, it turned out, my stories in the Times-Picayune.

“You da’ only one who gets it,” he told me. And thus, we actually became friends. He called me every now and then to talk, to vent, to spleen. And then one day he called with a favor to ask. He was coming to New Orleans for the first time since the flood, and he asked if I would show him around. Me? Give a disaster tour for Dr John? What ya’ gonna do? And so time passed. Mac and I fell out of touch for a while. He was writing and recording new music. I was going insane, getting divorced and getting addicted. And then came another call from Mac, out of the blue, this one even stranger than the first one. He said he was working on a new record that would be called “City That Care Forgot,” by far the most political and angry record of his career. He told me that a couple of unfinished songs were inspired or based on some of my newspaper stories. And then he asked me if I would write them with him, polish them off for him. Whoa. Giving Dr John a disaster tour was one thing. Now he wants me to write songs with him? What the hell do you say to that? Sure, I said. And then: Umm, how do you write songs?

{THREE} QUOTES FROM ROB SHEFFIELD’S TAKEDOWN OF “YESTERDAY” IN ROLLING STONE
“Jack’s only likeable quality is that he’s into the Pixies (he has their poster on his wall) and wears a Fratellis T-shirt. Honestly, the idea of a world where nobody knows the Beatles is nowhere near as surreal as a world where people remember the Fratellis. (Note: I love the Fratellis, and could sing their 2006 U.K. hit “Chelsea Dagger” for you right now.)”
“It continues the weirdest and most noxious trend in the nouveau breed of rock flicks, like A Star Is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Dirt: there is never the slightest suggestion that female musicians exist. The idea just never comes up. (In A Star Is Born, when Gaga sleeps under a Carole King album cover, it’s a shock because Carole is the only other female presence in the movie who listens to music, much less performs it.)
“But nothing about Jack’s rise to fame makes sense, really. He plays “Back in the U.S.S.R.” in Moscow without changing a word. (Fun fact: Ukraine and Russia are no longer the same country! Thousands of people have been killed fighting over this!)”

{FOUR} LINES FROM A LOVE LETTER
From Len to M, sold recently for $21,250. “I put steel strings on my guitar, that’s like changing from underwear to armour, that’s New York City. Given up plans for sainthood, revolution, redemptive visions, music mastery, just the ageing man with a notebook.” [He was 33 at the time! – Ed.] “Walking through the city, insisting that no one follow, feeling either black or golden, dead to lust, tired of ambition, a lazy student of my own pain, happy about the occasional sun, thin and dressing very shabbily, hair out of control, feeling good tonight as I write my perfect friend… Isn’t it curious and warm to grow old in each other’s life?”

{FIVE} PEOPLE FAINTED WHEN MARADONA’S FREE-KICK WON A GAME AGAINST JUVENTUS…
… and two had heart attacks. After seeing the film, you can see why. At the start of Diego Maradona, the BBFC certificate warns, excellently, of nudity and bloody detail, and the film doesn’t disappoint. From Diego’s wide-eyed terror, to the crazed Napoli fans – the most impoverished football club in Italy buying the world’s most expensive footballer – the film uses the degraded videotape images as an immersive experience. It’s director Asif Kapadia’s signature of course – the no talking heads rule from Senna and Amy is maintained here – and it’s electric. The use of Foley, to amp up the sound of the ball as it’s passed, kicked and headed, and to intensify the crowd, is almost overwhelming. “That’s the most Italian thing ever”, says Gabe as Maradona is unveiled in chaos and clamour to a stadium full of Napoli fans. See how the weight of their expectations, followed by an inability to let Diego leave Napoli when he wanted to, causes – to mix metaphors – a car crash.

{EXTRAS} IF YOU’VE GOT SOME TIME TO SPARE
David Crosby as Rolling Stone’s Agony Aunt? It totally works…
Ken Burns tackles Country Music over eight episodes for PBS – there’s a trailer here.
A fabulous piece on Dylan by Steven Heller, New York design guru, in Design Observer.
In the New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich’s Lil Nas X Is the Sound of the Internet, Somehow is terrific, and has an Einstein quote to die for.

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