2011 in Review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 180,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 8 days for that many people to see it.
Geezer Butler – “Spiral Architect” (1973)
Sorcerers of madness
Selling me their time
Child of god sitting in the sun
Giving peace of mind
Fictional seduction
On a black-snow sky
Sadness kills the superman
Even fathers cry
Of all the things I value most of all
I look inside myself and see
My world and know that it is good
You know that I should
Superstitious century
Didn’t time go slow
Separating sanity
Watching children grow
Synchronated undertaker Read the rest of this entry »
Phil Spector – “The Philles Album Collection” (2011) / “The Essential Phil Spector” (2011)
This Oct. 25th review by Joe Marchese from the Second Disc website looks into two recent collections of vintage Phil Spector productions from the early 60s…
Whoa-oh, a-whoa-oh-oh-oh!
Think of The Ronettes’ wail, every bit as iconic a cry as a-whop-bop-a-loo-a-whop-bam-boom. Doesn’t rock and roll have a way of elevating onomatopoeia to poetry? And no label made sweeter poetry in the first half of the 1960s than Philles Records. The voices of Ronnie Spector, Darlene Love, La La Brooks, Barbara Alston and the rest spoke directly to America’s teenagers. These women, alternately vulnerable and defiant, were little more than girls when they began putting their voices to the “little symphonies” being crafted by producer Phil Spector and his house arrangers, most notably Jack Nitzsche. Tom Wolfe once famously deemed Spector “America’s first teen-age tycoon.” Why? Spector recognized the paradigm shift in the late 1950s, when teenagers began accruing disposable income and exercising newfound spending power. He tapped into uncharted territory. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin weren’t writing songs about teenagers. Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were. Like Spector, they were barely out of their teen years themselves. The songs they created at Philles remain both of a distinct time, and timeless. It’s those songs that are celebrated on Legacy Recordings’ 7-CD box set The Philles Album Collection (Phil Spector Records/Legacy 88697 92782-2).
So why an album collection, when the producer famously derided albums in favor of singles? These albums do little to dissuade the notion that Spector was a great, perhaps the great, singles producer. He reportedly paid little attention to the long-players bearing his imprint. But if an album is viewed as a collection of great songs, it’s impossible to argue with the success of these platters. There’s little doubt, too, that the producer’s ethos was Read the rest of this entry »
Saki Knafo – “Gabriel Roth: Soul Reviver” (2008)
A New York Times article from Dec. 5, 2008 about Gabriel Roth, co-owner of one of the coolest soul labels on the planet — Daptone Records…
In the early 1990s, while the cool kids in the New York University dorms were listening to Nirvana and Pavement and P. J. Harvey, Gabriel Roth, a Jewish teenager from California, sat in his dorm room, night after night, listening to one obscure James Brown record after another. He listened to “Dooley’s Junkyard Dogs,” a 45 that Brown cut in honor of a college-football team. He listened to Brown’s esoteric rock version of “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.” He listened to “Gettin’ Down to It,” a collaboration between Brown and, as Roth puts it, “these white jazz guys — but it was really actually a cool record.” Mostly he listened to Hot Pants, an album that largely consisted of just one chord. It was like “some kind of strange calculus,” Roth told me recently. “Everybody playing one little note or one little beat. But the whole thing worked together.” Roth and a friend would sit in his dorm room and listen to Hot Pants for hours on end. They’d listen to one side of the album several times in a row, and then they’d turn it over and listen to the other side. “We would smoke weed and listen to the album,” he told me, “or not smoke weed and listen to the album.”
Fifteen years later, Roth is a 34-year-old songwriter, bassist and sound engineer, as well as the somewhat-reluctant co-owner of Daptone Records, a small record label in Brooklyn. He is still a musical outsider: he says he strongly dislikes almost every pop song recorded since 1974, including one or two that bear his own imprint. What appeals to him — what consumes him — are dusty soul and funk records from the 1960s and early ’70s. By studiously emulating these recordings, he has gained a reputation as a devoted, even obsessive, musical purist. In an age of MP3s and computer-generated sounds, he has distinguished himself by making vinyl records featuring actual musicians manipulating real-life instruments. He has rejected the music industry, and in doing so, he has aroused its interest. Stars like Jay-Z and Kanye West and corporations like JP Morgan Chase have exploited his Read the rest of this entry »
The Beat Patrol 