Archive for Tulip Frenzy

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Do The Rolling Stones Finally Get It?

Posted in Music with tags , , on October 9, 2009 by johnbuckley100

On November 3rd, not quite but approximately the 40th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ epic three-night Thanksgiving Weekend stint at Madison Square Garden in New York, the former “greatest rock’n’roll band in the world” is releasing a big box set commemorating the occasion.  What’s notable is that, for the first time, the Stones are digging into the vault and releasing live material we haven’t heard before.*

Yes, they pad the box set with a CD of Ike and Tina Turner and BB King’s performances as warm-up acts — where’s Terry Reid? — but the big news is this box set has the Stones performing “Under My Thumb” and “I’m Free,” as well as “You Gotta Move” and “Prodigal Son.”  Seems like a mighty big effort, and a big expense, just to get one’s paws on those four songs, but it’s the precedent that matters.  Other than on the great bootleg Liver Than You’ll Ever Be, and in snippets from Gimme Shelter, we haven’t heard these songs from this tour (‘less you were there.)

My theory on why the Stones have never dipped into their back live catalogue — most especially the soundtrack to the 1972 tour’s concert film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones — is because decades after the Stones have had anything memorable to say, and years after they were anywhere close to being “the greatest” anything other than maybe moneymakers, they don’t want people to compare their current performances to the old ones.  Let’s face it, the moment Mick Taylor walked out the door and Ron Wood stumbled in, it was over as far as the Stones’ greatness on stage was concerned.  So they suppress the back catalogue of live shows.

They are the opposite of Bob Dylan, in every way.  Dylan is as vital in this decade as as he was in the 1960s, and in my opinion, more vital than he was in the ’70s and ’80s.  He keeps giving us these gifts in The Bootleg Series of shows and sessions we never thought would see the light of day.  He operates with vitality in the present tense and astonishes us with these remnants.  The Stones are parsimonious with their back catalogue and are just going through the motions as a “band” today. (It’s Mick, Keith, and Charlie, affixed to Ron Wood, who I still wish could be traded back to The Faces for a plectrum and a drum kit to be named later.)

So breaking into the vault for the four songs from 1969, when the Stones shook the rust off and officially ended the ’60s playing Chuck Berry as well as the greatest rock songs of all time — “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Street Fighting Man,” and a list too long to mention here– to audiences that couldn’t believe their good fortune, is a real occasion.

It’s a good move.   Please, sir, may I have more?

* Yeah, I know they put out a “rarities” album a year or two back, which did include the version of “Let It Rock” they played in the early ’70s, but we already had that from the Spanish version of Sticky Fingers as the substitute for the banned “Sister Morphine.”  All the other live songs came from the time following Moment It All Went Downhill — Ron Wood’s arrival.

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What’s Your Beatles Remasters Strategy?

Posted in Music with tags , on September 11, 2009 by johnbuckley100

Everything you’ve read about the remastered Beatles CDs is true, based on my limited sample set.  I bought, and have played, The Beatles and Abbey Road, and then Rubber Soul and Revolver.

In the case of The White Album (The Beatles), everything sounds warmer, brighter.  If you play the 1987 pressing and the new one sequentially, the former seems brittle and dull.  It is actually very noticeable.

The White Album and Abbey Road were meant to be listened to on a stereo. But when you play Rubber Soul and Revolver, you realize just how crude the stereo mix is. Bright and warm, yes, but the mix is decidedly 1965/66, whereas The White Album sounds like it could have been recorded last week.

So I broke down and bought the Mono Box.  Because all those great albums pre-’67 are meant to be listened to in mono.  Tulip Frenzy will conduct strenuous tests in the weeks ahead and report in.

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On Labor Day We Reflect: Now China’s Even Exporting Good Rock Bands

Posted in Music with tags , , on September 7, 2009 by johnbuckley100

If someone told you that there was an excellent band from Chinatown that sounded like a cross between Sonic Youth, the Cure, and Galaxy 500, you’d probably think it was a cool anomaly.  That The Car-Sick Cars sound exactly as described above, but hail from Beijing is somewhere between an exciting revelation and a threat.  Oh, so now they make good rock bands too?

I assure you, the threat is greater to the creeps in China’s authoritarian government than it is to Western alternarock bands.  Once the kids start rocking, good things happen to societies yearning for freedom.

How good are the Car-Sick Cars?  They’re a seriously fun band, with a big backbeat and loud and raunchy guitars.  On “Zhong Man Hai,” they even have this Eno/Roxy guitar freakout that shows no pussyfooting.

This is one $9.99 contribution to China’s trade surplus you can be happy to make this Labor Day.

BTW – where did Tulip Frenzy learn about Car-Sick Cars?  From a very cool new travel magazine called Afar.  The magazine’s so new they don’t really even have their website set up.  But if they can turn up bands this good from around the globe, we’ll subscribe for a long time to come. See here: Afar Magazine

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Today’s Best Rock’n’Roll Lets Its Freak Flag Fly

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , on September 7, 2009 by johnbuckley100

The greatest rock’n’roll band in America today is First Communion After Party. They’re too young to have drivers licenses — or maybe it’s that they need some gig money to afford a van — so they don’t travel from Minneapolis very much, but man, when they do, can’t wait to see ’em.  We anxiously await the follow up to Sorry For All The Mondays And To Those Who Can’t Sing, and on their MySpace page, there’s a tantalizing reference to an album launch party in November.  Aside from FCAP, where’s all the energy in music during these econolyptic days?  Way over there on the furry side o’ the dial.

Uncut Magazine just put out a new CD with the October issue entitled Seeing For Miles, and it’s the best compilation they’ve done in years.  It turned me on to three bands in particular that have brought plenty of joy to this Labor Day weekend.  Let’s go through ’em.

Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound has First Communion After Party’s reverence for Summer o’ Love era Airplane, including that boy/girl choir in between crunchy guitars, but they also work their way back to bluesy power riffs probably in the same manner that Black Mountain get there.  When Sweet Sleep Returned is an astonishment: great songwriting, the ability to rock hard or soft, John Cippolina guitar cantering down through the desert sage, with Radio Birdman piano twinkling every once in the while.  The only complaint I have is with the album’s production, which is muddy in the middle.  These guys are the real deal, and they come by their San Fran roots naturally, as they, um, come from there.  Recently the WashPost had a funny piece on the problems Ang Lee had finding genuinely skinny, non-buff, hair folk to cast as extras in Taking Woodstock.  Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound play with muscle, but here’s betting they don’t actually have any.

Abouretum hail from Baltimore, and immediately join Greg Kihn and David Byrne in that town’s Rock Hall of Fame.  The singer sounds like Richard Thompson, and come to think of it, some of the songs on Song of The Pearl sound like they could have been performed by Fairport Convention.  But then they’ll turn a corner and the guitars going spiraling off into shafts of light, and dust motes tickle our brains.  A little more of Rock band than others on the neo-psychedelic left bank.  Way listenable and cool nonetheless.

Okay, we’ve been hearing about Wooden Shjips for years without actually hearing them, but their highly caffeinated trance music on Dos is so good for listening to while exercising in the gym, I think I’m going to forever ruin my chances to be cast in an An Wang movie.  Uncut refers to Spaceman 3 when doing their liner notes on the cut WS add to the sampler, and I can see that.  It’s just there’s no way these guys are ever going to evolve into Spiritualized.  Too much propulsion, too much beat.

Ok, haven’t yet listened to Six Organs of Admittance, and the new White Denim isn’t out yet (though seems to be preceded by thunderous acclaim).  But these three bands are a start.  If you think about where the fun has been these last few years, The Warlocks, Black Mountain, Black Angels come to mind.  And then First Communion After Party vaulted way up their on the Coolo’Meter.  Add at least Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound to your play list, and let your freak flag fly.

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Blur : Midlife

Posted in Music with tags , on August 9, 2009 by johnbuckley100

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There aren’t that many guitarists who qualify as geniuses, but Graham Coxon is one. When it came time for someone to put together a really intelligent Blur collection, lo and behold, it’s almost like they had showcasing Coxon in mind.  Granted, hard to do a Blur collection and avoid the guitarist, but thank Heaven whoever was in charge of this had the right sensibiity.  What a great band.

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the black ryder’s “Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride” Out In October

Posted in Music with tags , , on July 21, 2009 by johnbuckley100

The Morning After Girls’ progeny the black ryder (lower case, like ee cummings) sent out an email this week announcing a first album out this October entitled By The Ticket, Take The Ride.  Importantly, they also have posted a song from it on their MySpace page (http://www.myspace.com/theblackryder).  All we can say is Wow.  “Burn and Ride” sounds like the glorious offspring of a marriage between Spacemen 3 and Luna, with Mazzy Star doing the officiating.

If, following Aimee Nash’s departure from The MAG, they went on to be a little too polished for their original fans, Ms. Nash gives us a reminder of what’s missing.

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Watch The Pixies’ “loudQUIETloud”Right Here

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on July 17, 2009 by johnbuckley100

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From our friends at SnagFilms.  Enjoy.

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The Morning After Girls “Alone” Is A Pretty Rock Classic

Posted in Music with tags , on July 14, 2009 by johnbuckley100

The thing I liked so much about The Morning After Girls’ first album, which had the rather utilitarian name of The Prelude EPs, 1 & 2, was the way it could be both raw and delicate at the same time.  Here was an Aussie band firmly in thrall to the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, and all their progenitors and spore.  But that was a long time ago, as Sacha Lucachenko and  Martin B. Sleeman shed and gained new band mates, moved, more or less permanently, to New York, and over the course of the last few years, methodically kept the flame alive.

We’re glad they did, because Alone is a beautiful bit of artisanal crafting, bespoke tailoring on a classic last.  There’s good news and bad news here.  The good news is that they write oft-times brilliant songs — I’ve been grokking on “Who Is They” for months, and the title track is as great a bit of mid-90’s Britpop as anything Noel Gallagher would have produced after a three-day binge.  I hear echos of the Stone Roses, the Charlatans UK, Luna, maybe even Spiritualized: good company.  The bad news is that some of the rawness has been sandpapered smooth.  Sacha and Martin sing very pretty harmonies, and one doesn’t often complain about good singing, but in this case it sometimes sounds pretty for the sake of it.

When they want to, they still can rock — “Death Processions,” for example, packs a wallop.  The show I saw in January at the Mercury Lounge was ear-splitting and occasionally thrilling.  And they have the classicist’s memory of how bands like the Beatles and the Stones really stuck in your mind — it wasn’t just the hooks, the chorus, the solos, it was those tantalizing outros, making you hark your ear toward the speaker as the song fades away.  Oasis knew this from the start, but not many other bands do, nor do they have producers who understand the vaudevillian’s mantra of always leave them wanting something more.

It’s been a long time coming, a long strip tease, as some of these songs have for months been streamable on their web site.  This is a band that, with the proper management and a little luck, could be huge.  Based on the pleasures they offer, they deserve to be huge.  I just hope they don’t forget where they come from.  I don’t mean Australia, I mean raw and thrilling.  Bands too pretty leave me cold.

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Wilco (The Album), And A Ghost Is Born

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on July 1, 2009 by johnbuckley100

What are we to make of the fact that Wilco has released a fine eponymous album within a week of former member Jay Bennett’s death from an overdose of painkillers? Bennett’s departure from the band after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot removed a destabilizing, if creative, element from the band, and judging from what they’ve produced with the new, by now five-year old lineup — not to mention Jeff Tweedy’s sobriety and seriousness of purpose — the band is better off for his absence.  And yet Bennett’s role as a ghost in the machine has now reached spectral dimensions, RIP.

The album showcases all that’s been good and not so good since A Ghost Is Born.  The guitar interplay between Tweedy and Nels Cline is spectacular.  Not all of the songs thrill, and instead of Southern three-chord rock,  the dynamic stems from subtle guitar squalls rising over placid oceans.  And then there are songs like “Bull Black Nova,” which make you want to shout out loud as the band moves with the liquidity of  mercury through the boogie pop slalom — “96 Tears” as played by Television.  The title song — its title taking PIL’s genericism one step further by being entitled “Wilco” — gets the album off at a thrilling tempo, and it seems perfectly clear to me that Tweedy must have been playing the live version of Derek & The Dominos “Got To Get Better In A Little While” on that long flight to New Zealand, where Wilco went to record Wilco.   (Listen to the two songs back to back…)

There was a time when I was ambivalent about Wilco’s greatness, but everything they’ve done in this decade makes a claim for greatness.  I no longer have the beef that Tweedy seems to glorify heroin.  What he and Nels Cline do on guitars is as great as Verlaine and Lloyd, Moore and Renaldo, Hitchcock and Rew.  Sometimes the songs are pretty for pretty’s sake, and yeah, without Jay Bennett they’ve lost a certain edge.  No matter.  They’re a great band, and following hard on the spectacular Sky Blue Sky, Wilco (the album), delivers the goods.

Note, and plug for a friend: The great drummer — and great guy — Brendan Canty has filmed a wonderful documentary on Wilco entitled Ashes of American Flags.  Don’t wait for it to be available on SnagFilms.com — go buy it at the iTunes story.

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Sonic Youth’s “The Eternal”

Posted in Music with tags , , on June 10, 2009 by johnbuckley100

When Sonic Youth’s Rather Ripped came out a couple of years ago, wouldn’t you know there were objections to its conventional structure, as in: no songs that noodled.  That it was accessible was a sign of something: if not selling out, then maybe slowing down, as if the Western Massachusetts air was mellowing Kim and Thurston.  Or maybe it was just a sign that Sonic Youth, like many their age, knew what to do and were playing for keeps. Now comes The Eternal, which shoots for the basket and makes it without so much as touching the net, a three-pointer of coherent songwriting, no noodling, and pulsating bass lines.  Don’t worry, chords are off kilter, and tuned to the usual Sonic Youth algorithm, and seriously, have the ever sounded better?

I’ve dutifully bought my 67 Sonic Youth albums, but lost the thrill sometime after “Expressway To Your Skull.”  There were signs of life post-Goo, but The Eternal isn’t just good late SY, it stands up with anything they’ve done since, well, “Death Valley ’69.”  There are traces of Elastica in “Anti-Orgasm,” and genuflections to Fugazi in “Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso).”  This will be scored by the cognoscenti as a bummer, but The Eternal would make a good entry point for those not in the know.

Since the early ’80s, Sonic Youth have had a remarkably stable lineup, and even as they’ve evolved from, well, youth to elder statesman status, they’ve not lost a step, nor a scintilla of hipness.  Twenty-eight years and 16 long-players on, they sound like they’re just warming up.  Eternal, indeed.  And thank Heavens for it.

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