Boing Boing: RIP, Joe Strummer. There are a few punk moments that will live forever, and the Clash was foremost in a lot of them. It’s too bad I’ll be ferrying family around in my car today. I desperately want to crank up “Know Your Rights.” Or at least “Wrong Em Boyo.”

Long time readers of this blog will recognize the Suspicious Cheese Lords from my sojourn in DC last January. For the uninitiated, this is the pick-up men’s Renaissance vocal ensemble that I sang with in Washington for some very cool gigs, including a Smithsonian Associates program on the music and times of Chaucer, my C-SPAN debut (at the signing of Carl Anthony’s book on Florence Harding), and many programs at the Franciscan Monastery in DC, among others.

For a while, their domain was dark, but now cheeselords.org is alive and well, and bearing news about an upcoming recording to be distributed through Amazon (and, to my, by a certain Sergeant-With-Arms). I’m tickled prouder than pink. I’ve heard bits and pieces of the master before it was mixed, and I have to say that the guys have attained a musical standard previously reached only by certain British choirs. That they attained it after my departure should be taken purely as coincidence.

I should note that I took the photo on the cover during Lisa’s and my trip to Italy; it’s the interior dome of the cathedral in Siena.

Update 12/31: No it isn’t! Details...

The Cascadian performance yesterday was too long to do a detailed movement by movement analysis, but here are some highlights. We began the program in the balcony of the church, which we shared with a bunch of evergreens. The first piece, Tavener’s “O Do Not Move,” is brief but timeless. The tenors repeat the title three times, in three different modalities (minor, major, major with a diminished second), moving from conventional harmony to a more Byzantine sound. The whole choir then joins in, holding a minor chord while the sopranos sing the word “listen” in a descending Dorian scale; the piece then closes as it began. The text, O do not move/Listen/to the gentle beginning, calls the listener to move into a more contemplative and meditative frame of mind.

The second piece, Pärt’s “Magnificat,” also went well. Like most of Pärt’s vocal works, “Magnificat,” is constructed of alternating chant and triadic singing in relatively free meters and different voicings. The biggest challenges for the singer are paying attention and telling a unified story from beginning to end. Here I felt we could have better told the story; the Magnificat, after all, is Mary’s song of praise upon finding out she has been chosen to bear Christ. But the performance was generally good.

The third and fourth pieces, Tavener’s “Today the Virgin” and Górecki’s “Totus Tuus,” were both outstandingly performed. I had done the Tavener in the Cathedral Choral Society several years ago, and here the text was cleaner, crisper, and more expressive while losing none of the punch. (This is probably because the Cascadian Chorale has only 1/4 the members of CCS.) The Górecki was flawless and soaring, better than quite a few performances I’ve heard on CD, and raised goosebumps.

The Pärt Te Deum now ranks as the most challenging choral work I’ve ever sung. Like the “Magnificat,” Te Deum contains contrasting chant and triadic parts; it ups the ante with three antiphonal choirs, an orchestra that responds to each of the triadic sections, and a really long text (the piece clocks in at around 35 minutes). There were a few difficulties owing to the antiphonal arrangement, mostly sloppy entrances to chants, but overall I thought the piece went magnificently well.

The second half was the Christmas portion of the Messiah, which we performed at ludicrous speed. The music didn’t suffer at that tempo—the speed seemed to bring out the dancelike qualities of the early movements.

All in all it was a really satisfying concert to sing, and bodes well for the rest of the season.

Craig reminds me that I didn’t actually say anything about how the debut went, just that it happened.

Both arrangements were done by me and George Bullock, a jazz guitarist who works at my company and plays with the Charisa Martin Cairn Quartet. We started out trying “Accidents Will Happen” at Elvis’s tempo, but thankfully Charisa suggested that we take it slower after one run through where I mangled half the words. On the next run through, George played spare chords underneath while I straightened out some of the vocal melismas I had borrowed from Elvis. The resulting sound was a lot more subtle than the recording on Armed Forces and allowed me to bring out some of the anger and confusion in the lyrics while still staying melodic. I knew we had done well when we finished the last chorus before the “I know, I know” fadeout and the audience started applauding—even the ones who didn’t work with me. :)

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was really more of a showcase for George, since it’s a little low in my range, but I did my part by keeping the lyrics coming, playing a little with the phrasing and timing, and making the most of the few high notes in the song.

It was a great session. We’re already talking about trying to find ways to keep doing the music together.

So I just got back from a gig at the Liquid Lounge at Seattle’s Experience Music Project, where I made my solo stage debut.

Okay, okay, so it was my group’s holiday party. But it was the Liquid Lounge, and I did sing some Elvis Costello (“Accidents Will Happen,” as promised) and some Bing Crosby (“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”).

It was a fun time. Tomorrow is serious: the Cascadian Chorale’s Illuminatio concert. But it was fun to get up and sing music that was a little more relaxed.

I’ve referred to the Pärt Te Deum a few times but haven’t written much detail about it yet. It’s a difficult piece to write about. Almost a half hour long, much of it consists, as Steve Schwartz writes, of variations on D modality—major to minor and back. Many of the individual vocal parts do little more than oscillate around the notes of a ringing triad, from the third to the octave to the fifth and so on. But the music as a whole is a magnificent statement of faith. How does Pärt arrive from such simple materials at such a high spiritual peak?

The answer is partly structural, partly tonal, partly something else. The entire piece hovers around D, and Pärt makes it explicit with a D drone that begins in a low organ (or wind harp!) note, moves up to the basses and cellos, disappears in the middle, then returns in the violins and moves back down the octaves. Pärt’s deep faith is well documented, and my reading of the D drone is that it functions as a reminder of eternity, that regardless of the iterations of voicings and time, there are eternal truths.

The voicing tells the story of faith against this background. The entire piece is a colloquoy among plainchant, orchestra, and triadic singing. I read the melodic plainchant, which is ever changing, as humanity, and the triadic voicings (the third, antiphonal choir), which weave a more static melody from D major and D minor triads, as a choir of angels. One conductor I’ve sung under reads the orchestra as a kind of Greek chorus that comments on the interaction between the two.

With this framework, the piece can be read as a long striving of humanity to reach the perfection of the angels. So the first Sanctus, uttered in a unison D minor plainchant by the tenors and basses, is echoed in a D minor triadic Sanctus by the antiphonal choir. The entire piece is built on groupings of three: three choirs, three contributions of three part phrases from the orchestra, building blocks of chant + triadic song + orchestra, and so on, that Pärt varies for dramatic effect. Accordingly, there are three dramatic moments of unison between the plainchant choirs and the antiphonal choir. The first two are followed immediately by plainchant advancing the argument of humanity, while the third is followed by a chanted Amen and an echo of the Sanctus by the antiphonal choir that fades into infinity.

I may find more to write about in the Te Deum as we continue to work on it. I continue to learn more about the piece each time I sing it or listen to it.

I feel inexplicably good this morning. Rain came last night and scrubbed the fog out of the corners of the fields and valleys. And we had a great rehearsal.

To my Seattle area readers: you owe it to yourself to check out the Cascadian Chorale concert this Sunday. We rehearsed the Pärt Te Deum last night with the string orchestra for the first time and it’s sounding really really really good. I can’t wait to hear how the Górecki sounds on Wednesday.

My euphoria probably started around the second runthrough of the piece and was capped when, after rehearsal, one of the sopranos started playing “Autumn Leaves” on piano. I was moved to contribute a vocal walking bass line, someone else joined in on vocal percussion, and we improvised our way through the whole thing. I haven’t done anything that musically spontaneous in a long time. There’s something about just playing or singing from the top of the head that reaffirms my faith in the power of music.

Not much blog yesterday because I was pooped. After Friday night’s housewarming party (good crowd, good food—Lisa made an amazing ragu Bolognese for gnocchi with melted mozzarella, and I made a pan of meatballs which we served with a plain tomato sauce and more mozzarella, plus wine), I dragged myself out to the Sammamish plateau for the dress rehearsal for the Cascadian Chorale’s guest appearance with the Sammamish Symphony. The music? Messiah.

I had never sung the Messiah all the way through before, though I had sightread parts of it many years ago in my Glee Club days and had done individual choruses. I soon found that my experience was as close to singing the whole piece as catching a connecting flight in Rome’s Fiumicino Airport is to seeing Italy. If there are no other signs of the presence of a higher power, consider this: not only did Händel take the time to write this hulking monstrosity of a piece (in twenty-four days), but it’s performed every year—and people still come to hear it, though sitting through the entire performance must be exhausting even as an audience member.

I can attest that, as a performer, it’s a bit like what I imagine running a marathon must be. Pacing is key, for instance, so as not to blow out one’s voice totally before the final Amen. There are long stretches where one, exhausted, wishes for the kisses of nubile young Wellesley students—or anyone, for that matter, so that blood flow will leave the vocal chords and be restored to the feet and to the left arm, which has lost all feeling about an hour ago from holding up the score. And after the final fugue on “Amen,” a curious euphoria descends, at least if one has hit the notes correctly. It feels like entering heaven. Or just extreme relief that one has escaped the piece with vocal cords intact.

So that was Saturday. On Sunday after church I drove back out to do it again.

And we have another concert next Sunday, with music of Tavener, Górecki, and Pärt as well as some more Messiah. Can hardly wait...

Driving into work this morning, KEXP was playing some Beastie Boys (“Shake Your Rump”) followed by some Digable Planets (“Where I’m From”). I was enjoying the hell out of it. Then I realized I was thirty, in a silver Passat, driving to work, and grooving to funk.

I now know what was wrong with me for the last few months. I lost my funk. In retrospect, it has been missing for longer than that. After seeing the P-Funk All Stars at the 9:30 Club with Craig (he may remember what year, maybe 1998 or 1999), I gradually stopped listening to funk. It may be hard to believe, but there was a time that Parliament and James Brown, together with a smattering of hip-hop, were in steady rotation on my CD player.

It’s high time for me to go back and dig out those tracks. After all, as George Clinton says in Funkentelechy (the song from which my new tagline--“Please join me at my new site!”--is taken), “You may as well pay attention ’cause you can’t afford free speech.” I ask you, has there ever been a finer collection of one-liners tied together by funk:

• When you’re taking every kind of pill/nothing seems to ever cure your ill
• Oh, but we’ll be pecking lightly, like a woodpecker with a headache. ’Cause it’s cheaper to funk than it is to pay attention. You dig?
• Would you trade your funk for what’s behind the third door?
• Step up and dance until I tell you to come down!

I won’t be trading my funk again.

Tony reminded me: it isn’t just my birthday today. Yep, today is Britney Spears’s 21st.

(I hesitate to file this one under Music, but hell, why not? As I understand it, Britney does occasionally sing.)

Currently playing song: “Funkentelechy” by Parliament on Tear The Roof Off.

Annie Zaleski reviews the new U2 compilation, The Best of 1990-2000, with mixed emotions in Salon. “Revisionist history” isn’t a bad description. Certainly ten years ago I would have expected “The Fly” to make it onto a best-of compilation. With that throbbing bass line, nasty guitar hook, and curiously vulnerable chorus vocal, it was the pivot away from the wide-eyed Americana into which U2 had stooped in the late 80s, back into a defiant embrace of good old fashioned decadence. It’s not on the compilation, though. Neither is “Lemon” or “Elevation” or even “The Ground Beneath Her Feet.”

Okay, so the disc doesn’t live up to its title. (And the b-side disc is worse. The b-side disc for 1980-1990 was the best part of the package, lots of lost songs (like “Walk to the Water” and “Luminous Times”) that true believers cherished and no one else had heard. This one? Skanky disco remixes of tracks deserving and undeserving. I miss the original mix of “Lady with the Spinning Head” and “Salomé.”) But there are some things it does right. It lays claim to some good songs from the otherwise misbegotten Passengers album, for one. And it reminds me that Pop was a truly dark and magnificent album... in places.

I walk away from this compilation a little disappointed. It, like the new songs “Electrical Storm” and “The Hands That Built America,” is too safe. This isn’t the band that wrote

It's no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest
It's no secret ambition bites the nails of success
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief
All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief

A while back I wrote about the Open Music Directory project, MusicMoz. I figured it was time for an update.

The good news is that I’ve become editor of a few categories, including Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore, the Pixies, Gastr Del Sol, and the Velvet Underground. (Thus securing myself the title of “Master of Vaguely Arty Noise Rock.” At least in my own mind.) The bad news, or the opportunity as we positivists like to call it, is that the project still needs volunteers. There are some choice categories open, including Pavement, Liz Phair, the Police, Porno for Pyros, the Psychedelic Furs, Parliament, Public Enemy. And that’s just in the Ps.

Think of becoming an editor at MusicMoz as the equivalent of being a library volunteer. You’re spending your time working with things you love, making it possible for other people to learn about the music that fascinates you, and contributing to the overall usefulness of the Internet. How many opportunities like that are there? Well, I mean, other than blogging in general...

I came into work this morning and turned on my music software. The first song it decided to play?

Sonic Youth’s “Expressway to Yr Skull.”

Happy Halloween.

(Now I just need to dig up the UK Surf mix of the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” and I’ll be in that proper indie rock Halloween mood.)

I emailed Michael Goldberg today. He founded Addicted to Noise, which in the mid nineties was the coolest music site around. They had Corinne Tucker of Sleater Kinney writing a column for them for a while... Alas, they sold to SonicNet, who sold to the VH1 corporate megalith, and a lot of great content that they had has disappeared (though some of it is still in the Google cache).

That was actually why I emailed Michael. I was looking for good SY and Thurston Moore reviews for musicmoz, but the content was no longer accessible. To my chagrin, Michael confirmed that VH1 owns the rights to all those great stories. There’s a greater point to be made here about the evils of contracts that give all rights to the purchaser of content. You think copyright is bad when Disney owns it? What about a corporation that is bought and essentially ceases to exist, and a new copyright owner who lets all the content rot?

Fortunately this story has a happy ending. Michael’s now at Neumu, a killer little site about music and art that deserves to be a lot better known. Go check it out.

Enough said, really. I picked up Blacklisted the other day and I’ve forgotten all the other music I was listening to, which almost never happens. If you’ve never heard Ms. Case’s music, do yourself a favor and check out the new album’s second track, ‘Deep Red Bells.’

Brent, in a relatively rare break from work (the man has been busy since NetNewsWire went beta), wonders where the next Nirvana will come from. Is it maybe the Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, and the White Stripes? I don’t know. I’ve certainly heard words to that effect from various sources.

But the thing that Nirvana did that made everything change was to break down the barriers that the music industry and the audience had created with genres. By grabbing metalheads who were hungry for a change after the self indulgence of Axl Rose howling “Live and Let Die,” alternative music listeners who were disappointed with the Pixies’ Bossanova, and yes, frat boys who knew all the pretty songs and liked to sing along, Nirvana built a huge audience around a youth culture that felt as aimless and trapped and angry as Kurt sounded.

All the Strokes have succeeded in doing is opening the floodgates for a bunch of bands that sound kind of like them. That’s ok if you like that sort of thing, but...

I think the real problem is radio, contrary to John Robb’s assertion that it’s dead. (John, check out the MIT station WMBR the next time you’re close enough to pick up the signal. Or tune in KEXP on the web and pretend you’re in Seattle. :)) With all the radio stations being operated by remote control by some guy in Cleveland or LA who only can remember about five songs at one time, there’s no way that the “O Brother” phenomenon could reach the enormous teen audience that might have taken it and made it their own. I know it was a huge success as a soundtrack, but I have to think the demographics for it skewed way upwards of 25.

I wonder whether there’s enough commonality left in the music listening audience to make another Nirvana possible, or whether the musical universe will just keep expanding infinitely, genres rushing away from each other at the speed of light, until all the energy of pop music is turned into entropy and loss.

I think the correlation between music and quality of life is absurdly high for me. This morning I hopped in my car--okay, stumbled into is more accurate given the fog I was in--and turned on the radio. KEXP was playing “Dig for Fire” by the Pixies. Right on, thought I, and started driving down the hill. Then they switched to “Alec Eiffel”, then Frank Black’s “Tossed.” Alas, at that point their pledge drive pitch came back on (I’ve pledged, have you?). So I turned on the iPod and it was Daniel Lanois’ “For the Beauty of Wynona.” Then Violent Femmes: “Girl Trouble.” When I got to the office, Liz Phair’s “Support System” was playing.

How could one feel anything but sing and dance good after a set like that?

A lengthy, cynical review of Lou Reed’s performance at Bumbershoot that finds nothing to bitch about save his performance of The Raven. I love the shtick that the author and his friend work up over this one:

This offers the evening's only opportunity to do shtick over the course of the song, and Ian and I traded barbs over Reed's rendition:

Reed: "For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore Nameless here forevermore."

Us: "Because she's a dirty junkie slut who got what's coming to her!"

Reed: "Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer..."

Us: "So I popped another bennie and fucked the drag queen like a dog!"

Reed: "Soon again I heard a tapping, something louder than before..."

Us: "And it was Andy inviting us to an opening in Soho!"

Reed: "Then the bird said, `Nevermore'..."

Us: "And he stole my TV the next morning for smack!"

You’ll have to read the review for Lou’s “pre-emptive strike” over this one, which makes the jokes look like child’s play.

Just saw this article from 2000 by Pat Metheny (thanks to Flangy for the pointer) about boycotting Kenny G. Nicely sums up what I felt fifteen years ago about Mr. G, but prompted by a more serious offense than “Songbird”: playing over Louis Armstrong. Sample comments from Pat:

his saxophone style is in fact clearly in the tradition of the kind of playing that most reasonably objective listeners WOULD normally quantify as being jazz. it’s just that as jazz or even as music in a general sense, with these standards in mind, it is simply not up to the level of playing that we historically associate with professional improvising musicians....

but when kenny g decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that i would not have imagined possible. he, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that louis armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. by disrespecting louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, kenny g has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. we ignore this, “let it slide”, at our own peril.

Currently playing song: “Angels” by David Byrne on David Byrne.

Currently playing song: “Her Used-To-Been” by Spain on The Blue Moods of Spain.

I sang Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum for the first time in rehearsal last night. It’s the first time I’ve sung a work of that scale by Pärt, but I’ve been singing his music since college.

I was talking with Shel over the weekend about music that we discovered in college. For me, I said, it was the Pixies and Tom Waits. And jazz. But I neglected to mention that I discovered choral music in college as well. Our Glee Club director, John Liepold, introduced us to a broad swath of music from the Renaissance through contemporary works by Pärt (“De Profundis”) and Tavener. I was fascinated by the way Pärt took a simple melodic plan of ascending minor melodies and constructed an achingly beautiful and powerful work.

Later I sang a few Pärt works in the Cheeselords, including “De Profundis” and “...And One of the Pharisees”, and in the Cathedral Choral Society, including “Solfeggio”, “Cantate Domine”, and the haunting “Magnificat”. Each demanded utter concentration and repaid it richly in transcendence. But the Te Deum dwarfs all these. Pivoting between D major and D minor, the work (in seventeen sections) builds throughout from an opening men’s chant through interactions between three different choirs, over orchestral obbligatos of increasing complexity, to a thundering affirmation of God. It then tapers to close with a simple “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus”: Holy, holy, holy.

I had listened to the premiere recording many times since college and knew what was coming. But as we ran through the piece, stopping and starting occasionally, I couldn’t help but get goosebumps. The Cascadian Chorale, with which I’m singing now, has the ability to perform this piece transcendentally. I’m looking forward to it.

An unexpected letter today from my friend Dan in DC. A while back when I was singing with Suscipe Quaeso Domine (aka the Suspicious Cheese Lords), we used to joke about doing a joint concert with the Mediaeval Baebes. (The Baebes were founded by Katharine Blake from Miranda Sex Garden and exemplified a female version of our attitude toward medieval music, only with sexy costumes.) Since the group was UK based, I finally, reluctantly assumed nothing would ever come of it.

Fast forward to today, when I receive a card from Dan. He writes, “Now that you’re in the West I’m not sure if you keep up-to-date on the Mediaeval Baebes. This year, they played the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and several of your old Cheeselord clan was in attendance. They managed to meet the Baebes, and they got you the enclosed signed and lipsticked token.”

Inside was a postcard announcing the new album. On the back: signatures and one lip print from the Baebes, including Ruth, Marie, Cylindra, Audrey, and Teresa, among others.

As Opus once said, “I got the best friends in all known space!!!”

That wasn’t really Colin Hay from Men at Work in the first few minutes of the season premiere of Scrubs, was it???

Oh god. He just took it up an octave in that early-eighties Sting manque kind of way. I guess it is.

Just heard the first commercial to use music from Moby’s new album 18 (as opposed to his completely licensed album Play): an Intel commercial using “We Are All Made of Stars.” To begin with, using Moby’s song for a commercial promoting burning mix CDs is pretty cool. However, they revised the chorus: Instead of “People they come together/People they fall apart/No one can stop us now/Cause we are all made of stars,” they substitute “We are all made of stars” for “People they fall apart.”

Why the substitution? I think it makes it a weaker song. Is it to avoid any mention at all of negative things, fearing that we weak consumers will freak out? It’s very sad, I think, that advertising agencies think so little of us. After all, Windows 95 was sold with a song whose chorus featured the line “You make a grown man cry,” and people bought it in droves. (Granted, they cut the song before the line. But at least they didn’t alter the parts that they played.)

Later: Just heard the commercial again, and damned if they didn’t play the song unaltered. So much for punditry.

Anita blogged my rambling rant about Mozart's Requiem. Her comments page has good feedback--particularly comment #3 which correctly calls me on my imprecise musical history. No one is really sure why Süssmayer or Mozart chose to end the final movement with the opening angry Requiem theme, and there is a lot of history between Mozart and Fauré. But at the end of the day, all we are left with is the final artifact. And I still argue that the outraged emotion of Mozart is a more adequate response to the World Trade Center attack than Fauré's peacefulness--at least from where we sit today, one year on.

Not sure how I missed the link on Tony's site to his Sonic Youth photoessay. It sounds like it was pretty similar to the show I saw, which is to say completely mindblowing.

Listening to the new Solomon Burke disc, and I can't believe I've put it off this long. Oh my God. The first track alone will lift off the top of your skull and lay some soul inside. And there are ten more after that. Just became one of my favorite albums of 2002.

I finally got my record player hooked into my stereo. This is a bigger deal than it might seem: my record player and all my records were in a garage in New Jersey from April 2001 to June 2002, then in a moving truck going across country in early July, then in our garage until yesterday. Plus I had to add an adapter and another cable to reach from where I had to put the record player (too far for the attached cable to reach). But it sounds great. I played my vinyl copy of The Joshua Tree... which I got in 2000.

Giggling hysterically this morning: Mo' Money Mo' Problems remix contest. The only rule? Involve Fiddler on the Roof.

Had the first rehearsal today in preparation for the Rolling Requiem next Wednesday. Mozart's Requiem in every time zone starting at 8:47 am. I think it's the most appropriate way I can commemorate the occasion.

Well, I just tried out for another musical group. And got in. First performance is in a week: Mozart's Requiem, in performance on September 11.

Am I ready to give to another group again? I don't know. But I do know that my voice is out of practice and wants exercising. We'll see how it goes.

I arrived outside Seattle Center and found a parking space less than two blocks from the gate. Then I got in line to go into the gate and saw the line going the other way into the stadium. The line kept going and going. In fact, it stretched all the way across the Seattle Center grounds. I had been looking forward to catching another act before I went into the stadium, but I grit my teeth and hopped in line. Fortunately, it moved along pretty quickly and before long I was inside listening to Modest Mouse. I’m not really a fan, but I noted that their singer seemed to be trying to do a Jim Morrison with a little bit of his baritone yelp, that is when he was singing instead of yelling.

When all the Modest Mouse fans started leaving the stadium, I made my move--all the way up front to within about 15 feet of the security guards in front. Reached in my pocket for my earplugs--oops, still at home. Hoped that the sound system wasn’t as deafening as it was at the 9:30 Club, where I had last seen Sonic Youth in 1998--before all their gear got stolen, before Jim O’Rourke joined, before they released the mostly throwaway NYC Ghosts & Flowers and the brilliant Murray Street.

A commotion. Lee Ranaldo had hopped on stage to check some of the gear. We yelled, “Lee!” He turned around and grinned as he headed back offstage. A few minutes later, the band came out and plugged in. Thurston started with a few chords. “Kotton Krown.” Then “The Empty Page.” Then “Drunken Butterfly.” People started really getting into this one--crowd was moshing and some people started crowd surfing. But the energy was really good. Amazing, in fact. Then someone cut in front of me and just stood there. But the nice geek next to me (with whom I had discussed SourceForge prior to the show) and his girlfriend (who looked uncannily like Rory Gilmore) helped me get rid of him.

More incredible music. I don’t remember the order, but “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style,” “Candle,” “Sympathy for the Strawberry” (Lee played keyboards and broke two guitar strings!), “Rain on Tin” (Jim O’Rourke got to do some amazing feedback), “Plastic Sun.” A few I’ve forgotten. Then Kim stepped up to the mic as Thurston hit “Kool Thing.” I thought the crowd had been going before, but I was wrong, wrong. The song didn’t miss Chuck D, and it had a nice moment where Kim said, “You gonna free us girls from male, white, corporate oppression? ... We have this friend. She had to take most of her clothes off to sell records, her label said. Then the label said, ‘Mariah? You’re half naked, you need a makeover!’”

The band went offstage, then came back on and played “Disconnection Notice.” After the rest of the set, it felt somber and almost valedictory. This was the last set of their tour. Wind came up into Lee’s hair. They left the stage. I left the stadium and drove home.

Written Saturday 31 Aug: Just got back from our first day at Bumbershoot. Mental note: look at the map first next time. We parked on the wrong side of the Seattle Center for the Will Call desk, and that's a long walk.

Despite which it was really pleasant. Walked around in the sun, watched a goofy circus, heard a lot of percussionists, laughed at kids trying out hula hoops for the first time, watched the last two songs of Johnny Lang and the first three of Ani DiFranco.

Watching Ani: the first two songs sounded pretty much alike: spoken lyrics, sung chorus, spiky guitar accompaniment. The third one got lyrical. She introduced it as a "long rambling folk song." As she played I watched a blind woman being led down the sidelines of the stadium field by an usher; her cane steadily slid ahead of her, bobbing from side to side, as Ani played.

Tomorrow, Sonic Youth. Tonight, collapse.

From my old stomping grounds: Marsalis Music opens its doors. What’s interesting is that Branford explicitly bitchslaps the record labels in the press release:

"The consolidation of the record industry into major conglomerates has turned the business into a mega-hit pop music machine with a very short term focus. Artists who want to be musicians, not marketing creations, have very few places to record anymore," Branford notes. "We formed Marsalis music to provide a real alternative. This is a very exciting time and I am thrilled to be doing this."

This probably explains why “Footsteps of Our Fathers” was in pre-release so long…

Latest radio asinine moment: Country DJ fired for sounding too Southern -- in Atlanta! Greg nails this one:

Like much of the rest of the industry country music has taken a nosedive -- but that has nothing to do, so we're told, with playlists programmed by committee, managers so out of touch that a quintuple-platinum Grammy-winning sleeper hit still can't get airplay, or artists that aim to sound less like Johnny Cash than Rick Dees. Nope, the problem is that the DJ -- on a country station -- in Dixie! -- sounds too Southern.

Currently playing song: “Ted, just admit it...” by Jane's Addiction on Nothing's Shocking.

Currently playing song: “Steve I Always Knew” by Mark Eitzel on The Invisible Man.

Doc: More on what's fucked about radio. Doc lays the blame for the sorry state of commercial radio at the feet of radio's business model, which treats the listener as secondary to pleasing the advertiser.

This is another reason I grew to dislike Ziff Davis magazines. After a while, I realized that the stuff in between the ads felt like an ad too, for things I couldn't afford to buy.

Jenny Levine: “Doesn’t the RIAA have something better to do than pay legislators to pass laws that will ultimately harm its members?”

Craig Pfeifer gives away the secret—the secret site that is supposedly only accessible if you buy the new Counting Crows cd, that is. Man, it's good to know developers, even if they are straying into Sklyarov territory. :)

He's wrong about the content, though. On Monday they posted a link to a song from a show they did in Irving Plaza, NY, and they claim they'll update every week...

...but John Vanderslice won't be if you go to his concerts. There's one in Seattle at the Crocodile Cafe on Saturday. Highly recommended. I've only heard one track off his newest, Life and Death of an American Fourtracker, and am looking forward to hearing more. (His last album, Time Travel is Lonely, was amazing--I still can't get the title track out of my head.)

Currently playing song: “Glass Enclosure” by Bud Powell on The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings (Disc 2).

I never cease to be amazed at how quickly a song can take you back. I loaded the changer this morning with a mix of new CDs and ones that had been in storage for two years. The first song to come up? REM’s “