Celebrate! Record Store Day

Add to the list of spring high holy days (NCAA Final Four, Easter, Masters, Earth Day) a music event: National Record Store Day is tomorrow, April 20. It has become a crossroads between old vinyl (collections sold in the few remaining stores) and new vinyl (pressings of new recordings and remasters from famous artists).
In one of my earliest posts on January 26, 20111 I offered my thoughts about (http://vinylstats.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html) the joys of time spent flipping through cardboard sleeves and listening to music in your neighborhood record store. While the stores continue to disappear from the landscape they assume an almost iconic status in our musical culture. They are where dreams of fame and fortune (High Fidelity) are nourished or where musicians are discovered (Alabama Shakes found their drummer, Steve Johnson, working in a record store). And they become the metaphor for the conflict between the good old days and the steamroller of progress (Michael Chabon’s, Telegraph Avenue).

I discovered Record Store Day thanks to an article by David Lindquist in The Indianapolis Star profiling some vinyl collectors in Indianapolis. http://www.indystar.com/article/20130416/THINGSTODO02/304160101/Record-Store-Day-caters-collectors-who-deep-groove
Lindquist offers a nice look at Dr. Spin: The World’s Only All Vinyl DJ, aka, Doug Babb, who claims his trove of 200 albums featuring the Moog synthesizer is the world’s largest. It must also be something of a record for Indianapolis to have three record stores, Indy CD & Vinyl, Luna Music and Vibes Music.

The stores have jumped on this bandwagon with live concerts and exclusive sales of new releases sold on the big day. Check out their website (recordstoryday.com) for an amusing video of Jack White taking you on a tour of a vinyl pressing plant or new releases from Billy Bragg, MGMT and the Doors, plus a screening schedule for the film, Last Shop Standing.

The Washington Post reports these special issue vinyl albums are proving a mixed blessing for the stores because their orders are not returnable and if the owners don’t guess right about what the fans want this year, they are stuck with the unsold records.

Even if record stores are not here to stay, it appears that vinyl records are. The Recording Industry of America reports that sales have jumped from just over 1 million to just over 7 million in the past five years. That’s only two percent of recordings sold but at least you can’t pirate vinyl.

Steve Jobs Rock Star

Just as our grandparents could remember life before airplanes, we can remember listening to music before it became portable (unless you had a car wrapped around an AM radio). Today being able to listen to any kind of music, anywhere, for hours on end seems as natural as breathing.

Such a cultural change kind of creeps up on us (or rather steamrollers us) in the microchip/internet/social media age. Still, it struck me as time flying when I learned that Apple’s I-Tunes Store will be ten years old this month.

How that came to happen is another fascinating chapter in the Steve Jobs saga as retold by Walter Issacson in his biography of the Apple legend. The story has all the elements of a Gordon Gecko movie with corporate intrigue, personal ambition, millions of dollars at stake and the superhero doing battle against all odds.

Of course the saga began with the arrival of the I-Pod: the slick, shiny cigarette box that Jobs unveiled in October of 2001, saying, “This little device holds a thousand songs and it goes right in my pocket.” In musical parlance, it was an overnight sensation.

Apple’s digital system…I-Pod, I-Tunes and computer… worked fine for taking music you owned and going portable with it. But the music industry was being buffeted by big changes. Napster and its followers were making it easy to copy and distribute songs for free and the big corporate players, Warner Music (AOL), Sony and others were watching CD sales drop. At first they tried lawsuits and then they went into partnerships to offer subscription services, but neither was successful.

In rides Jobs on his white horse with a couple of simple concepts. First, he believed that people wanted to “own” music not rent it. Second, he was opposed to theft of creative content. “It’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character.”

Jobs then proceeded to write the rules of the new game: 99 cents a song, sold individually (not as albums), 70 cents to record companies. Then the super salesman turned on the charm to convince AOL Time Warner to get on board, then Universal, and finally Jimmy Iovine of Interscope-Geffen-A&M.

The biggest stumbling block was Sony whose chief then, Andrew Lack, wanted a cut on sales of I-Pods. Jobs refused and played his coalition off against Sony’s fractious divisions. Then he courted individual artists like Bono, Jagger and Sheryl Crow. One artist who became convinced of the symbiosis of I-Tunes to I-Pod, was Dr. Dre, who said “Man somebody finally got it right.”



In less than a year, Jobs had brought the I-Tunes Store to reality, opening its digital doors with 200,000 tracks in April 2003. The store manager had predicted the service would sell a million songs in six months. It sold that many in six days.

Two years later Apple sold its one millionth I-Pod and by 2012, Apple reported sales of I-Pods worldwide had reached 350 million units.

You say you want a revolution? Steve Jobs proved there was more than one way to become a rock star.

Phil Ramone & Paul Williams: Makers of Rock History

In reading the recent obituaries of Phil Ramone and Paul Williams I was struck by how the rock producer and the rock writer were connected by only degree of separation: Paul Simon.
In the first issue of Crawdaddy(named for a London Club where the Stones played), Williams reviewed Simon & Garfunkel’s new release, "Sounds of Silence", which he had to buy himself. A copy of that seminal, mimeographed issue in 1966 made it to Paul Simon, who called Williams in his dormitory at Swarthmore to thank him for the review. Crawdaddy predates Rolling Stone and Creem but was eventually overwhelmed by the glitzier magazines. Still, Williams, who also wrote a trilogy on Bob Dylan, set the bar pretty high for writers like Jon Landau and Peter Guralnick, both Crawdaddy alums.

In writing about rock music, my intention was not to judge the records (like a critic) or report on the scene (like a journalist) but to explore as an essayist, the experience eof listening to certain records and feeling the whole world through them.



Phil Ramone crossed paths with Paul Simon a few years latter, producing “There Goes Rhymin Simon” and then helping win three Grammys for “Still Crazy After All These Years.” Reading the list of artists he worked with, first as an engineer then producer, one can’t help but consider him as a giant of late 20th century music. It began with John Coltrane and Count Basie and came full circle with a Grammy for Ray Charles’ duets: "Genius Loves Company." In between, besides Simon, were Dusty Springfield, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Madonna, Billy Joel and Tony Bennett and many others.

For several decades, in the music business, Phil Ramone was the answer to the question: Who you gonna call? No doubt, one key to his success was his willingness to let the artist have the spotlight. As reported in the NY Times, he wrote that a record producer’s role was much like that of a film director: to bring out the best performance.

But unlike a director (who is visible and often a celebrity in his own right), the record producer toils in anonymity. We ply our craft deep into the night, behind locked doors. And with few exceptions, the fruit of our labor is seldom launched with the glitzy fanfare of a Hollywood premiere.

For a guy who spent his life working with rock stars, he says his personal highlight came from a gig with a Hollywood screen legend. He was running sound when Marilyn Monroe cooed Happy Birthday Mr. President in 1962.

A Fan's Notes: Bob Dylan to Mumford & Sons

Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Killing time in a bookstore recently (not as easy as it once was) I thumbed through the latest Rolling Stone effort to make a few bucks off rock nostalgia, “Bob Dylan’s 100 Greatest Songs,” before putting it back on the rack. It was mostly old interviews and vintage photos of Bob when he was young and handsome. And the jury picking songs was all male.
Before I could pat myself on the back for resisting temptation, my daughter arrived with her delayed Christmas present. You guessed it: A book of photos by Daniel Kramer of Bob Dylan. It was a souvenir from the 2012 Paris show, Bob Dylan Rock Explosion, which tracked his career from 1961-66. Kramer spent a year on the road with Dylan from which he produced many of the iconic photos that fueled the Dylan marketing machine and mystique and you have seen them in magazines and on album covers. For more on Kramer’s story, here’s a link. lightbox.time.com/2012/03/19/a-year-and-a-day-with-bob-dylan/#1

The gift got me thinking about fandom and how once it sets its hook, you are stuck for life whether it is reliving youth when listening or thanking friends and relatives for their gifts. And while I resisted Life’s 96-page paean to Bob, Forever Young: Fifty Years of Song, I did indulge myself in one Dylan 70th birthday souvenir. The clock pictured above was purchased from a shop dedicated to the music, clothing and lifestyles of 60's called IMAGINE in Mystic, Connecticut (www.imaginemystic.com).

Whenever I start to chastise myself for such foolishness, I run across other examples of fan fanaticism like this passage from Walter Issacson’s biography, Steve Jobs.
Jobs and his pal Steve Wozniak spent a summer tracking down bootleg tapes of Dylan concerts. “I had more than a hundred hours, including every concert on the ’65 and ’66 tour, the one where Dylan went electric," Jobs boasted. “I bought a pair of awesome headphones and would just lie in my bed and listen to that stuff for hours.”

Then of course there is the 60’s counterpart to the Justin Bieber phenomenon, The Beatles. My sister was one swept up by that cyclone, covering the walls and ceiling of her bedroom with photos cut from magazines (something Dad would never let me do). She and her friends each had a favorite but I am not sure whether they drew straws or arm wrestled to get the one they wanted.

More recently, I have empathized with Governor Chris Christie’s uncontrollable fanatic behavior toward Bruce Springsteen. We’ve all been there and are likely to be stuck there as long as someone needs to get us something for a birthday.

News Note from Britain: An obituary of Bruce Reynolds who masterminded the Great Train Robbery in 1963 on the Glasgow to London mail train, noted that his son, Nick Reynolds was a member of the band Alabama 3. Their song, “Woke Up This Morning,” had the good fortune of being the Sopranos theme song. Wonder whether father or son got the bigger haul.


Program Note: Showtime cable will be rerunning next week its music documentary, The Big Easy Express. It features Mumford & Sons, Old Crow Medicine Show and Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros training from California to New Orleans. It is a high end production that won a Grammy with some fun moments (“we’ve come 2800 miles in a week and a half and had the time of our lives”) and none of the amateurish production issues noted in my last post on the Mellencamp doc. However, after watching the fans enjoy trackside concerts I was left wondering why people would rather make I-phone videos than listen to the music.

John Mellencamp: Better Heard Than Seen

Years and years ago, before MTV and before CDs, my friend Tom Cochrun told me about this young rock and roll singer from Seymour, Indiana who was about to go on a national tour. He thought I should get a video camera and follow John Mellencamp around the country. For a lot of reasons (no money, no market for a film and fear of ending the tour in rehab), I instead headed to Washington, D.C. and became a bureaucrat for a while.

As John’s career took off into the super star stratosphere, I often wondered what if I had gambled on the film. That is, until now when I watched a Showtime release of a movie completed in 2010 by Kurt Markus and his son, Ian, “John Mellencamp: It’s About You.” The title is a play on John’s challenging Ian, saying this won’t be about me, it will be about you (the filmmaker).

Markus was an old friend from John’s New York days who John invited to film the tour of historical venues and concert gigs with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson (neither of whom appear). The result proves that best intentions often lead to unwatchable results. The film includes endless trucking shots through the countryside, some live concerts and some studio sessions. All of it is so grainy that it looks as if Final Cut Pro has come up with a Georges Seurat-Pointilist Filter effect. At first I thought it was a matter of low light problems using Super 8 film but it was still there when they were shooting outdoor audience shots before a live concert. I have seen better docs about Mellencamp when he actually talks about his career, his painting, and his music but this fly-on-the wall approach made you felt that at the end of each scene, you were going to be swatted (and in San Antonio they closed the curtains and the film went to black in mid recording session). Markus laments his difficulty in making this work when he says he had “no screenplay, no plot, no control.” Sounds like the definition of a home movie.

The off-putting visual look and the frenetic editing obscure some nice moments as Mellencamp and T. Bone Burnett use old RCA mikes and 1950’s Ampex mono recorders to try to recreate a classic sound in places like a Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia or the hotel room in San Antonio where Robert Johnson made his iconic album in 1936. (“It’s weird being here.”)

And even through the graininess, it was nice to see the interiors of the Sun Studios in Memphis where longtime session players like David Roe are still turning out the hits.

Despite some snippets here and there (“This is my least favorite song on the whole f---ing album.”) we never get much insight into the music making process, which is too bad. From what clips I did hear for the album, John is still going strong--searching for soulful musical roots rather than the pop hooks and youthful anthems that have sold 40 million albums and led to 22 top forty hits.

Even though Markus did not travel on the tour bus, there are some revealing moments. After the session at the Baptist Church, John and then wife Elaine don white robes and are baptized in the full immersion tank (with no explanation). And John still chain smokes, even when he is recording in the historic studios. And T-Bone Burnett, when given the screen time, can still play.

Despite the shaggy dog nature of the film, I did hear enough to want to get the CD they produced from this tour, No Better Than This.

John must have liked this film better than I did. I read where he played it at the start of each concert for the next tour. I hope it was an edited portion because paying customers deserved better.

At one point, Markus narrates: “the simple way to look at this film is to recognize that all it takes is the arm strength to lift the camera to my eye and finger strength to pull the trigger…” Recording images does not make a film, much less a documentary.

Tom Waits Hall of Famer

Some of my favorite artists often get lost in the library because their names start at the end of the alphabet and I don’t browse far enough to find them. Something similar is happening on my DVR: music programs get archived and gather digital dust. That’s why the other day I was wondering why I had saved the induction ceremony for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2012. (It was not for Alice Cooper). Then I came across Tom Waits and a video bio in which a interviewer asks: “How does a guy with a voice like yours decide to be a singer…and succeed?” Cigarette in hand, Tom replies:
“Well it was a choice between entertainment or a career in air conditiong and refrigeration.”

Ever since my friend Tom introduced me to Waits back in the seventies, I have been a fan of his ability as a wordsmith as he rapped, skatted, and poetry slammed his way through some pathbreaking songs and developed his persona as a beat poet, jazz singer and creature of the night that made more from movie roles and sound track credits than album sales.

As a singer, he makes Mr. Dylan sound mellifluous but as a song writer and music maker, he is a true Hall of Famer. And a lot of his contemporaries would toast his induction with thanks for giving them hit songs like “Old 55” (Eagles, Ian Matthews), "Downtown Train" (Rod Stewart), "Blind Love" (Bob Seger) and "Heart of Saturday Night" (Dion).

The video led me back to the vinyl and I was rewarded by his early work. Closing Time seemed to confirm my First Album is The Best Album Theory. But Heart Attack and Vine gave Mr. Springsteen one of his anthems with “Jersey Girl.” Tucked on that side is an amazing organ solo on a cut called “In Shades” and the song “Downtown” offers this quintessential Waits turn of phrase: Drinking Chivas Regal in a four-dollar room, just another dead soldier in a powder blue night.
Here is one more good one from “New Coat of Paint:”
Our love needs a transfusion
So let’s shoot it full of wine
Fishin for a good time starts with throwin in your line.

His send-up of television ads, radio come-ons and the commercial society on “Step Right Up” from Small Change is as laugh out loud funny as it was when he recorded it in 1976.
For the lyrics, he invited you to “send a photo of yourself, two creepie charlies and a self-addresed, stamped envelope to the Tropicana Motor Hotel, Hollywood, California.” Ironically, Waits won a $2.5 million settlement from Frit-o-Lay for using “Step Right Up” as the concept for a radio jingle.

Waits’ signature humor came through in his acceptance speech. “They say that I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with and they say that like it’s a bad thing.” (Cut to a shot of presenter Neil Young laughing.)

He asked if he could get a key chain version of his trophy, “So I could keep it with me just in case I hear someone say, ‘Pete take the cuffs off, I think he’s a Hall of Famer.’”

He touched a chord with his peers in the audience when he noted, “Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.” And finally, “We all love music, but we really want music to love us.”

Madonna, Cher and Billie H: Women Who Rock

On Capitol Hill last week, the media was reporting how a record number of women had been elected to the new Congress. A few miles down New York Avenue, there was an exhibit dedicated to the women who made records and it was a fascinating catalog of nine decades of music history.

"Women Who Rock" filled the second floor of the National Museum for Women in the Arts as part of its 25th anniversary celebration in a co-production with Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Part fashion show, part tribute and part history lesson it brought back a lot of memories of women who have sung the stories of young love, tangled webs and lost opportunities.

While the exhibit ended with the costumes and instruments of Brittany and Taylor, Madonna other top pop phenoms, it began more touchingly with a tribute to Mother Maybelle Carter with her story and her Gibson L5 guitar. She played it from 1927 until the early 50's when June and Johnny Cash decided it ought to be in a museum so they bought her this replacement. The only guitar that could match it for playing time was Odetta's, circa 1951.

As good keepers of the flame, the Cleveland curators devoted solo exhibits to the early blues and jazz greats. There was a fox fur stole worn by Billie Holiday as well as a poster for two shows in 1948 at Carnegie Hall. Prices started at $1.20 and topped out at $3.60. It was her first appearance after being released from prison and both sold out.

Next was Bessie Smith's case complete with 78 records and session cards for her 1925 hit, "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate." I learned that the first person to record "C.C. Rider" (See See Rider) was Ma Rainey in 1925.

From there, the exhibit paired women which proved interesting. Wanda Jackson and Ruth Brown, Lavern Baker and Brenda Lee (1964 telegram from Dusty Springfield: "I know you'll be a smash"), Bonnie Raitt and Loretta Lynn, the Ronettes and the Shirelles, Mavis Staples and Odetta.

Laura Nyro was with Joni Mitchell along with their lyrics in notebooks. Laura's "And When I Die" was neatly hand lettered with only two words crossed out. Joni's song ended with this dedication: "For Barry in memory of those bread and butter days. No Gravy, just bread and butter."

It was great to see song writers honored in addition to Carole King like Cynthia Weil ("Kicks," "On Broadway," "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'") and Ellie Greenwich ("River Deep, Mountain High,""Leader of the Pack" "Do Wah Diddy," and "Be My Baby").

As with any compilation...someone has to get short shrift and to cram Heart, Donna Summer, Cher, Joan Jett, Stevie Nicks and Pat Benatar into the same display case seemed a little crazy. On the other side was Cyndi Lauper,Janet Jackson, Madonna, Sheena E, Gwen Stefani, Britany Spears and Shakira. Linda Ronstadt was an afterthought.

Despite those problems it was still fun to see Cher's Indian feather dress and Madonna's get up.

Then there was Queen Latifah's high school year book photo (1987) and a piano that Lady Gaga's grandparents bought her when she was a baby. Do you think they thought it would lead to a meat costume for the MTV awards? That was on display also but it was hard to tell if it had become beef jerky or red leatherette.

Recognition of the roles women play in rock history is long overdue and one hopes this exhibit will be traveling elsewhere. In the Rolling Stone anthology, "The 100 Greatest Artists," there are only six women and two female groups. Only Aretha, Madonna, Janis and Patti Smith cracked the top fifty and the others were Joni Mitchell, Tina Turner, the Shirelles and Diana Ross & The Supremes. Of course of the 55 "Voters", only two were women. Here in Washington, we're familiar with that kind of balloting.