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Straight to Video
Rock Art Rock
The Decemberists
September 19, 2009
Terminal 5, New York, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "The Decemberists played a special one night 'lottery show,' where the songs played were picked at random by a master of ceremonies, played by John Wesley Harding..."
Ra Ra Riot
April 4, 2009
Webster Hall, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "This show was, at the time, the biggest one Ra Ra Riot had sold out as headliners, and it was clear to me after watching it that the band is destined for even bigger and better things..."
Florence and the Machine
October 28, 2009
Bowery Ballroom, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "Florence Welsh and her backing band delighted and mesmerized a sold-out crowd at Bowery in her first official NY headlining show..."
Dirty Projectors
July 19, 2009
Williamsburg Waterfront (Brooklyn, NY)
By Amanda Hatfield "I was skeptical about how well Dirty Projectors' gorgeous, complex vocal harmonies would carry over outdoors, standing under hot sunshine..."
See more in the Rock Art Rock gallery.
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Search results for: the clash
Unlikely John Lydon Commercial Endorsement for British Butter
[via Clash]
Oddly enough, after recent news of the Sex Pistols suing an ice cream company for using their likeness, there now comes wind of John Lydon defending his recent, first-time TV endorsement for British butter firm Country Living from late last year/early this year. Apparently the TV spot helped the butter firm’s profits soar by 85 percent, while also aiding Lydon’s music endeavors. Of course, longtime fans of Lydon’s anti-establishment ways called him a “sell out.”
Lydon recently explained to Camden New Journal that without the TV spot, he wouldn’t have been able to go on tour with Public Image Ltd.
From the interview: “Why are they questioning me?” he said. “What manual am I supposed to adopt? I’m promoting a British product which I’m very proud of. Anything I can do to help British industry is fine by me and in return you’ve got PiL.”
Check out the TV commercial after the jump. read more
Alex Chilton: 1975-1981
In early 1979, Alex Chilton formed the Panther Burns with Tav Falco. Chilton was nearly a decade removed from his stint as lead singer in the Top 40 band the Box Tops and almost five years from his last recordings with Big Star, the pop band whose work had sparked a legion of dedicated followers. Over those five years, Chilton had begun his definitive move away from everything he’d done before. He made two solo records that had grown deliberately more simple and primal, crossing rockabilly with outrage, and he’d then moved himself behind the scenes to produce the first singles of the band the Cramps, rockabilly revolutionaries of an even more primitive sort. With his next project, the Panther Burns, Chilton found his least refined band to date and again pushed himself seemingly out of the spotlight, this time in the role of the guitar sideman. Yet he appeared to still have a great hand in the band’s direction. The Panther Burns had started almost as an art project, but a year later they had evolved into a rock ‘n’ roll dance band. They were like no other dance band around.
Jim Duckworth, a jazz guitarist who would soon join the band on drums, saw them for the first time in December 1980. “I’m walking down the street, I’m not even at the club yet,” Duckworth says, “and all I can hear—they’re on stage playing, and it’s in between numbers—but all I could hear was this shrieking, screaming feedback. Not your Jeff Beck-style feedback… more the guitar’s too close to an overpowered amp, shrieking feedback. It was that Metal Machine Music [Lou Reed’s 1975 experiment-in-noise record] on crack sort of thing… They had a synthesizer player. He had no conception of what they were doing. He played between tunes, during the tunes; it was all the same to him. They were doing this back-to-basics roots-rock thing and it was hilarious. It was the funniest fuckin’ show you ever saw. It was loose and it was raw and it really worked. When those guys were on, it was a beautiful thing.” read more
Black Sabbath Drummer Bill Ward Has Some Words of Advice
“If you know how to rock, you don’t have to shock.” Famous words from Marc Bolan and the T. Rex song “Shock Rock.”
Bill Ward, famed drummer of the best metal band on planet earth (yes, Black Sabbath), agrees with the above sentiment. In a interview for Clash Music, Ward gives his advice on how to survive being in a band. We can only assume that after coming out on the other side of numerous tours, drinking and drugs, that he knows a thing or two about how to last.
Number one Bill Ward rule is you don’t have to be cool; distance yourself from the distractions man.
Here’s an excerpt from the Clash Music article:
On being fit: “As a drummer I totally recommend looking after your bones and muscles. Years ago, there was a university that wanted to stick a load of sensors all over me to check what I was doing during a set. It turns out I was doing the equivalent to running 15 miles a night in a one and a half hour concert.” read more
Music and a Woman’s Right to Choose
1973 was one hell of a year for rock music. Debut LPs appeared from then-unknowns Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, and Queen, while more established acts gave us Raw Power, The Dark Side of the Moon, and Houses of the Holy. It was the year that a short-lived primordial punk trio called Neon Boys split up and reformed under the now-hallowed name of Television, the same year a ramshackle Bowery hole in the wall called CBGB & OMFUG first opened its doors. Beyond the world of rock, however, something hugely pivotal was also issued that year, which would affect both the public and private consciousnesses of the United States immeasurably (its women especially), and continues to do so today. It was a decision issued in January by the US Supreme Court declaring that a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy was protected by her right to privacy, which is one of the fundamental rights implicitly granted and protected by the US Constitution. This was the decision reached in the case of Roe v. Wade.
It wasn’t that the justices had warm, fuzzy feelings about abortion, or even that a person ought, on principle, to have control over one’s own body. They approached it as more of a clarification of the legal definition of “privacy,” of where the power of government ends and where personal privacy begins, and it has remained such a hot-button argument that even today, most people’s views remain exactly that—private. This goes doubly for those whose meal tickets depend on their general popularity, i.e. artists and entertainers. Most artists wouldn’t touch the fierily polarizing subject with a 10-foot pole, and those that do seem to do it with a direct correlation between their striven-for level of popularity and the forthrightness of their stance.
There aren’t many recorded examples of abortion rights in songs prior to Roe v. Wade. The second wave of the women’s movement did have its cultural wing, however, and from there we got the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band and its East Coast parallel, the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band. Together these comprised the agitprop (or “agit-rock,” as their liner notes proclaimed) arm of the Chicago and the New Haven Women’s Liberation Unions, and though they were absolutely not known for any semblance of expert rock musicianship, they can safely stake a claim on being the first real all-woman feminist rock bands.
Rock Art Rock: Issue 3.22c
.jpg "The Clash")
The Clash
Santa Barbara County Bowl, CA
June 1982
By L. Paul Mann
The Clash was my all time favorite band and the first time I got to photograph them was at the Santa Barbara County Bowl, in June 1982. By then, I was actually a credentialed journalist, which made shooting a lot easier. It was a daytime concert so I experimented with slide and color and black-and-white negatives. I used a Nikon FM camera body and a Nikon 135mm lens. The body had an automatic meter, but winding and focus were still manual. I liked the results of the Kodak Vericolor negative film, as it brought out detail in the bands schwag, and reproduced their pasty white skin tones faithfully.
Check out L. Paul Mann at his photography site
Mojo Nixon: Psycho Hillbilly After All These Years
As most of his die-hard fans already know, Mojo Nixon isn’t so much a rock ‘n’ roll wild man as he is some kind of backwoods Appalachia version of a Robert Crumb comic book character. The boisterous redneck has authored such hollerin’ underground hits as “Elvis Is Everywhere” and “I Hate Banks”, carved out a strange acting legacy by appearing in both the ill-fated 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie and a 1998 production entitled Buttcrack, and was even once appointed an honorary captain of the United States Olympic luge team. Through it all, Mojo has peppered his experiences with constant talk of “dingle berries,” “tallywackers,” and his disdain for “pantywaists” like Rick Astley.
Mojo tried to step away permanently from performing a few years ago, but the ol’ coot is occasionally coaxed out of his San Diego home for special events and gatherings. Most of the time, however, Nixon stays indoors, hosting a handful of radio programs for Sirius Radio, including “The Loon in the Afternoon” for the Outlaw Country channel and a political show for Raw Dog called “Lyin’ Cocksuckers.”
Time, age, and the dawn of Obama have not calmed Mojo Nixon down one bit, as Crawdaddy! discovered in this exclusive chat with the man who once claimed Debbie Gibson was pregnant with his two-headed love child. Read on and enjoy a bevy of crazed statements that could easily be turned into a new string of hits for the lunatic born Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr.
ABC: The Lexicon of Love
ABC
The Lexicon of Love
(Mercury, 1980)
When King David lamented “How are the mighty fallen” in the Second Book of Samuel, he had more on his mind than the demise of a once promising pop band, but the quote fits the amazing rise and fall of ABC. They were new wave/new romantic gold record-winning hit-makers one day, and flowers in the trash bin of pop history a few short months later. Seldom has a band released an album with so many great tunes that it was a virtual greatest hits collection, only to vanish and never return. Well, okay, they did return, but their albums after The Lexicon of Love were so paltry that even the band’s website sums up their post-The Lexicon of Love output in five sentences. They’re currently playing the new wave nostalgia circuit.
ABC wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder, they had five great ones, including four—”Poison Arrow”, “The Look of Love (Part One)”, “Tears Are Not Enough”, and “All of My Heart”—from The Lexicon of Love, but they were never able to duplicate the magic of their debut.
Quintron and Miss Pussycat at the Hemlock, San Francisco
.jpg "Courtesy of Quintron and Miss Pussycat")
Quintron and Miss Pussycat
August 4th at Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco
“What kind of LSD-infused, Play-Doh playground did I step onto?” I asked myself this question during Quintron and Miss Pussycat’s performance at the Hemlock on Tuesday night. With a black light puppet show, swamp boogie blues, and a befuddling haze of fog, Quintron and Miss Pussycat put on a late-night spectacle that one could only characterize as a “trip” through Gumby’s stomping ground.
I expected something out of the ordinary when I watched Miss Pussycat teeter around before the show in a purple mini dress complete with a blue, silver, and gold fringe sash and a matching blue and purple pom headband. I knew something out of the ordinary was about to happen when the venue’s staff cleared the crowd to haul a miniature puppet theater, upholstered with red and gold curtains and white down comforter façade, onto the stage. Quintron’s set-up tipped me off, too. His organ synth, with a Lincoln grill and “Quintron” license plate tacked onto its front, stood aside his Drum Buddy, a piece of equipment that looks straight out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and seems just as unfathomable as a race of Oompa Loompas. (The piece of machinery is an invention of Quintron’s own that plays like a drum machine and works through light oscillations, operating on the principles of an optical theremin). But I wasn’t prepared for a show that combined the satirical antics of Wonder Showzen with a soundtrack that fused the White Stripes’ rhythm and blues rock and Le Tigre’s dance-punk tracks. It was a spectacle, indeed.
Impending Dread from the Copyright Act of 1976, and Other News
by: Angela Zimmerman
Carrie Brownstein hosted a virtual roundtable discussion about record labels with reps from Matador, Saddle Creek, Merge, Kill Rock Stars, and Jagjaguwar. Interesting insight, from the people who know. (NPR)
Paul McCartney sure does write a damn good song, and the Library of Congress agrees, naming the former Beatle the third recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder are the other honorees. (NY Times)
Ready for the holidays? Well, no… are you ever? But here’s some news about Bob Dylan’s upcoming Christmas album, which will include some standard holiday favorites. (Sterogum)
An acute case of sciatica has forced Dan Deacon to cancel a string of shows. Deacon, known for his interactive live set, is suffering from back problems as a result of the condition. Bummer. (Pitchfork)
Read more news after the jump.
read more
by: Angela Zimmerman
published: November 16, 2009 in column: What Goes On
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