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Rumors

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Yes, its the title of a famous Fleetwood Mac album. However, it could also describe some new I received from Jessie, who heard about it from a former coworker, who heard it from a friend who knows a guy….let’s just say I received this link to a board with this news at the bottom of the page:

“ATO_Records is apparently a credible PTer. I am not familiar with him, but the general consensus is that he posted information regarding the NYE ’95 CD and the Brooklyn ’04 DVD before any information was released, making him a reliable source. New information supplied by gordeaux shows that ato_records quite probably stands for According to Our Records, an independent record company started by Dave Matthews and some Coran Capshaw fellow, leading some to believe that ato_records is the latter.

Anyway, he posts that he has gotten a list of dates Phish has booked for 2006 at Madison Square Garden – October 28th and 29th. On top of that, rumors have been circulating (though the source is muddled) that Phish has scheduled Halloween 2006 at the Spectrum in Philly and a summer tour that same year. On top of that, a new record label, JEMP records (Jon Ernest Mike Page?) has surfaced on Phish.com and has ownership of the domain jemprecords.com. Couple that with the latest talk by Trey of “not ruling out playing with Mike, Page and Fish” and (supposedly, I know little of this) claiming that he is “working on logistics of a Phish comeback” (any more info on that would be appreciated) and this rumor fits very nicely with the rest of the info circulating as of late.

Also, many third hand “My friend who told me about the breakup before it happened” sources are apparently claiming that Phish is returning – I have two of those going myself, but as always, take those with a grain of salt.

More news: Madison Square Garden Oct 27 and 28 of 2006 is booked. The hold says “Dionsyian Productions and JEMP.” I assume its safe to assume that that has something to do with Phish. Talk about booking shows WAY in advance…

These are the reported Phish dates.

Camden July 24 and 25 (given to us by someone who works for Ron Delsener and said phish is booked for these two nights at the tweeter center in camden)

Festival in Maine (given to us yesterday by someone who claims they work forGreatnortheast Prod. and said permits are in the works)

MSG October 27 and 28 (given to us by ato records, a usually reliable source who told us about the dvd/cd releases as well as the may trey tour)

Halloween at the Spectrum (given to us by someone on the OKP boards who let us know about the breakup before it happened)

Also Hampton 10-23,24 and Providence after Philly

“Rumor is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it.” – William Shakespeare, from King Henry the Fourth, Part II (Rumor at induction)

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VMAs Win in the “We Suck” Category

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At first, Jessie and I tried to keep a diary of the hell that was watching the MTV VMA show on Sunday night:

9:24: Between R. Kelly’s bad lip syncing and listening to the lead singer of the Killers sound as if he ran a marathon before he sang a single word, all we can think is, “What the hell is going on? How low can the production value go?” I really liked Mr. Brightside before I heard it live – damn you MTV! A camera pans the crowd: Yeah, look at us, whoo! We’re at a trendy hotel watching a bad reality show pretending to be a relevant music awards show! Some thoughts: Who is Hillary Duff dating and why is he so much cooler than she is? Why do we need to listen to Diddy explain his 27th name change? When did MTV start sucking this badly?

9:32: Thank god something good like a new Beavis and Butthead skit happened! I am Poseiden! I am the God of Poop! Love it. Maybe the show will improve. I pray that it will because I’m watching no matter what as my wife needs to see if certain ads actually air. Oh joy of joys. We even had to stop TiFauxing “Rome” on HBO in order to watch this shite.

End of log. There was no need to keep going. The show did not improve as hoped. The rest of the evening was even worse. MC Hammer? Why? My advice to you is to fade away senor. I can go on and on….I won’t.

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In Memory of Jerry

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Today marks the 10th anniversary of the day Jerry Garcia passed away. I remember exactly where I was and who told me: in front of Lori’s house and by Shrujal as he stood in front of his parent’s Mercedes 2 door convertible. “Did you hear that Jerry is dead?, ” he said almost happily (he was not a fan of long-haired freaky people). “Not just in the Dead but dead dead.”

To mark this occasion, the NY Times has an article in today’s paper about what has happened to his and his band’s legacy since then. Feel free to read it after the jump.

Jerry Garcia: The Man, the Myth, the Area Rug

By SETH SCHIESEL

Published: August 9, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 8 – One of the icons of modern American culture now resides in a nondescript warehouse about 30 miles north of here, in a windowless, climate-controlled, heavily-alarmed room built like a bomb shelter that is called simply the Vault.

There, in towering rows of 13,000 audiotapes, 3,000 videotapes and about 250,000 feet of traditional 16-millimeter film lives the recorded history of the Grateful Dead, one of the seminal American rock bands.

The Grateful Dead ceased to exist on Aug. 9, 1995, when the band’s lead guitarist and most recognizable figure, Jerry Garcia, died at age 53 of a heart attack at a drug treatment center. Yet 10 years later, the man and the band remain alive for millions of fans, and the once notoriously ad hoc Grateful Dead business operation has become a model for a music industry struggling with the Internet and digital democracy.

“When I first got into the record business I learned that it wasn’t cool to be into the Grateful Dead,” said Christopher Sabec, 40, a lawyer who said he saw the band more than 250 times and is now chief executive of the Jerry Garcia Estate L.L.C., controlled by Mr. Garcia’s heirs. “But if you look at where the music business has been forced to go by technology, now it’s not about selling records. It’s about live shows and inspiring a fan base to be absolutely loyal. Hello? Who did that first? The Grateful Dead.”

The Jerry Garcia company and Grateful Dead Productions are separate businesses each generating millions of dollars of revenue a year. Just how many millions is not publicly known. But consumers still buy more than a million J. Garcia-brand neckties each year, and Cherry Garcia is often the top-selling brand of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, each pint generating royalties for the Garcia heirs.

The band’s four surviving members – the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, the bassist Phil Lesh and the guitarist Bob Weir – have toured occasionally as the Dead, though not this year. They control the Grateful Dead’s licensing business, which oversees thousands of products sold around the world, like gas tank caps, incense burners, golf club covers and sandals. (The Garcia company receives a share of the proceeds.)

But for cultural and practical matters, the heart of the Grateful Dead’s legacy resides in the 10,000 cubic feet of space in Novato, north of San Francisco. The Vault feeds a continuing business based on regular releases of old concert recordings on iTunes, on the band’s Web sites and in stores, feeding old Deadheads and creating new fans.

Physically, there is only one key to the Vault, and only two people know where to find it. David Lemieux, 34, the band’s archivist, is one of them. Jeffrey Norman, one of the band’s engineers, is the other.

“This is it, the key to the Vault,” Mr. Lemieux said, holding up the gleaming shard of metal, a sliver that to some Deadheads may be more sacred than a splinter from the True Cross.

One major way the band and the Garcia company have kept the flame alive is by regularly releasing audio and video recordings of old concerts that have been restored with the latest digital techniques. Two years ago, for instance, the band released a DVD of its performance that closed San Francisco’s legendary Winterland Ballroom on Dec. 31, 1978.

“There is just no way we could have done the Winterland release without the current technology,” Mr. Lemieux said in his memorabilia-plastered office.

For fans used to fuzzy old cassettes, the new releases are a revelation.

“Many of us Deadheads are experiencing a renaissance now in our appreciation for the band because such high-quality recordings are available,” said Amir Bar-Lev, 33, a filmmaker from New York who said he saw the band more than 100 times. “Ten years ago I was listening to 20th-generation tapes kicking around the floor of my car. Now, thanks to all of the technology, I can hear the band in all its glory.”

Mr. Weir, the guitarist, said in a telephone interview on Friday from West Virginia, where he was on tour with his band RatDog, that although Mr. Garcia sometimes resented his own celebrity, he would have been pleased that his music endured. “I’m glad people can still enjoy it,” he said.

He continued: “I am a big fan of Duke Ellington and I never saw him live. I’m a big fan of John Coltrane and I never saw him live. I don’t want to put us on that level, but we don’t play all of this music casually or callously, and of course Jerry would appreciate people being able to experience it.”

More broadly, the Grateful Dead’s emphasis on touring over selling records presaged the music industry’s current predicament over file-sharing on the Internet.

The Grateful Dead was the first major band to allow fans to freely make and trade recordings of its live performances in the belief that spreading the music that way would ensure long-term success. That formula was later adopted almost wholesale by other successful bands, including Phish, andfans still avidly trade live Grateful Dead recordings online.

Even though there are now high-quality recordings for sale, created using the official sound-mixing boards used at concerts, fans are still free to trade recordings made in the crowd. The band used to offer a special section of seating for amateur tapers.

“They wanted to create a space for themselves and their fans to gather and play, and that didn’t sit well in the offices of the record business,” said Mr. Sabec, who is perhaps best known in the music industry for discovering and managing the 1990’s teen-pop group Hanson. “Now I find myself sitting in meetings where other bands are using the Dead as a model.”

In the years immediately after Mr. Garcia’s death, Grateful Dead merchandising brought in more than $50 million in annual gross revenue. That figure may have declined a bit since then, and the band’s licensing activities are now separate from the Garcia estate’s business affairs, but both entities continue to thrive.

In addition to ties and ice cream, the Garcia company has expanded into rugs and wine. An artist as well as a musician, Mr. Garcia signed his work “J. Garcia.”

“I’m not trying to turn the J. Garcia brand into something you find at Target, but I am trying to broaden it,” Mr. Sabec said. “There are J. Garcia carpets that my mother would be happy to have in her house, and she’s not a Deadhead. If you were to position it only for people who were fans of Jerry’s music, it would be a much smaller market than what we’re going for.”

Yet even as the Garcia company has expanded its ambitions, the band’s business wing, Grateful Dead Productions, has in some ways pared down its operations in recent years, like many United States companies.

For a few years after Mr. Garcia’s death, as the technology bubble expanded (Aug. 9, 1995, was also the day Netscape stock went public, signaling the coming dot-com boom), the band pursued a vision of creating a business tentatively called Bandwagon, which would function as a one-stop merchandising and online distribution operation for a variety of musical acts. In addition, the band came close to creating what would have amounted to a countercultural theme park in San Francisco.

“The whole Bandwagon thing was a function of the dot-com mania, especially spectacularly in the Bay Area,” said Dennis McNally, the band’s longtime publicist and historian. “There was also an idea of creating a performance space and museum called Terrapin Station, which we figured we needed $50 million to do. And in the context of the dot-com revolution, that seemed perfectly doable.”

In the end, the band balked at potentially having to cede final control of the projects to outside investors. And as the dot-com bubble burst, the band went in the opposite direction. It laid off dozens of longtime employees, closing its own warehouse and largely outsourcing the logistics of the memorabilia business.

Now, the band has only about 10 employees, including Mr. Lemieux at the Vault.

Although the theme park never came to be, on Sunday in San Francisco, the city unveiled the newly renamed Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in John McLaren Park, near the blue-collar Excelsior District where Mr. Garcia grew up before moving to the better-known Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

Backstage at the event, Mr. Garcia’s older brother, Tiff, seemed to share his sibling’s somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the marketing of celebrity.

“They’re trying to do an Elvis on him, with all of the garments and merchandise and different items,” he said. “But I’m not surprised. He meant so much to so many people, and I’m proud of the fact that one individual could draw so much attention.”

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Mindless Self Indulgence

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My friend and sometimes co-worker Gil knows the drummer in Mindless Self Indulgence and got me on the guest list for last night’s show at Webster Hall which was awesome considering one of my favorite things in the world to say is, “I’m on the list.” The show itself fucking rocked – I really liked their sound, the crowd was crazed (full of amped up angry punk-goth kids thrashing about) and the band played with so much energy they must have lost a few pounds during the performance. I especially liked it how at the end of the show, the guitarist played his axe w/ a sledgehammer and then destroyed it with said sledgehammer. I hope to see them again in the future, even if I’m not on the list. Here is what the Village Voice has to say about them:

“MSI, the greatest punk-goth-industrial-rap-glam-electro-metal band of all time, recently released You’ll Rebel to Anything, 26 minutes of spazzy misanthropic anti-corporate / conservative / misogynist anthems and a Rush cover [Tom Sawyer, which they played]. Buy it for the bitter, confused teenager in your life, especially if that teenager happens to live in your body. Go to the show for the the thrill, the danger, and the gravity-defying hair.”

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In Your Honor

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The Foo Fighters have a new double disc titled “In Your Honor” which I am absolutely enjoying – so far I’ve listened to it a few times over the past 36 hours. I haven’t been this pleased by a new disc by an “old” favorite of mine since maybe “Midnight Vultures” by Beck. I’m a huge Foos fan and this album, one disc rock (some metal, some pop, some hard rock) and one disc acoustic, is extremely satisfying.

I was very pleasantly surprised to read in the liner notes that John Paul Jones, 1 of 4 members of my all-time hands down favorite band Led Zeppelin played on 2 tracks. “Miracle” is okay but “Another Round” is very good. The Toronto Sun has an article about what it was like for Dave to play with John.

Some stand out songs me on these discs are “In Your Honor”, “Best of You”, “The Last Song”, “End Over End”, “DOA” (very poppy – will be a huge radio hit), “Cold Day In The Sun” (Dave is on drums in this one) “Another Round” (feat JPJ), “Razor” (which sounds very much like a Phish song) – hell, most of them are stand out songs. Buy the album or click on the Foo Player icon on there web site and tell me I’m wrong.

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I’ve Been Mezmerized

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I have not really liked any of the new bands that have entered the musicscape the past few years – I’m not sure if its because I’m getting older, if I’m not listening to the right bands or if its because most of the music today sucks. Its probably a combination of the 3 because recently my friends Jordan and Greg have turned me onto some good new music from the likes of Bloc Party and the Arcade Fire so to paraphrase the Descendents, “everything doesn’t totally suck today.”

One band that has definitely caught my attention however is System of a Down. I have loved their sound, their style and their weirdness since I first heard “Sugar” on the radio in the late 90’s. They recently released their third album “Mezmerize” and it is down right kick ass. I got it and I suggest you do too because its really, really good.

In the most recent Rolling Stone mag, an interview with the band has given me even more reason to love them – they are all full-blown geeks. For instance, their drummer John Dolmayan has storage space in a North Hollywood warehouse to store his collection of comic books, action figures and video games. At the start of the interview he said, “Dude, I like comic books. How cool could I fucking be? Dungeons and Dragons is badass. If I could find a good dungeon master, I’d play a game.” So would I dude, so would I…

Rock fucking on!

music

New Foo Fighters Double Album In Stores 6/2005

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“In Your Honor” will be the bands fifth album. Almost exactly a decade from the release of the first Foo Fighters record, it will come out in June. It is a double album, as promised. One CD rock, one CD acoustic.

As Dave Grohl puts it, “just so you know, I have a calendar in front of me that is a year long, fucking packed with tours that will spin us around the globe over and over and over again. It makes me dizzy just looking at it. I can’t fucking wait.”
Neither can I.