Each morning I wake at 6:30am, check some headlines, and then mull over the blog posts for the day. I was struck by the notion this morning while the coffee was sputtering and brewing that, y’know – the thing about the Sex Pistols for me, and this era of punk in general is that it was truly the last time I can think of when people were “shocked and/or offended” by the antics of a bunch of snot-nose kids. Those days are over, really–the river’s run dry.
Then I sat down to put some hazy thoughts together and shocked myself–“Holy…this’ll be the 500th post…!” And all of this from one lazy morning as the coffee sputtered and brewed.
Need a feast for the senses? Well, TVD’s got two of them covered for ya. Tomorrow night at Dahlak, check out Sarah Claxton’s moody and evocative photography at the opening of her one-woman exhibition, and none other than DJ Neville C. will be spinning mod, soul and garage–and there might be a Brazilian tune or two in there as well, he tells us. See ya there, right?
John Foster may have found fame in the design world but he certainly didn’t encounter happiness. Performing his confessional songs under the Sad Crocodile moniker and enlisting some of the area’s top talent to help out, he may well be the most honest songwriter in DC. (And it should be noted, an ardent supporter of this very blog.)
Here are the lyrics to “Holy Water Down.” What more do you need to know?
she said it’s been a long long way she can barely carry the weight she said she likes cornbread she said she likes dangerous men
I just smiled back at her spent my last joke on her at least I agree with the part about the cornbread at least I agree with the part about the cornbread
she said don’t put up a fight just fall into me tonight I know a place where we can go I know a place where…
now it’s early Sunday morn and I’m still late for church not a pair of dress shoes anywhere in sight not a goddamn tie that I can buy
she just smiles down at me says she likes my attack on the TV remote if it helps God – I don’t know
she said don’t put up a fight just fall into me tonight I know a place where we can go I know a place where…
now I truly did not know holy water went so slow from my mouth to my throat if it helps God – I don’t know
The track “Lawrence Hates Maurice” was written exclusively for The Vinyl District. The first person to correctly answer who the names refer to wins a limited edition silkscreen poster from Mr. Foster.
You get a little jaded doing alla’ this blogging. Well wait, let me clarify–one’s email inbox tends to fill up quite nicely with solicitations from bands, invites to gigs, and all sorts of announcements. It’s dizzying. But ya’ know what…I welcome it when it delivers something that makes me finally sit up and take notice:
Eli “Paperboy” Reed and the seven piece True Loves are bringing their brand of old school soul (think Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding…) to the Rock and Roll Hotel on September 19th. Featured recently on NPR’s morning edition alongside Sharon Jones and the DapKings, as MOJO magazine put it: There are singers who sing, then there are singers whose sheer power of expression can knock you off your feet. Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed falls firmly into the latter category … [he] threatens to be one of the defining voices of the year.”
Eli’s given TVD two pairs of tickets (2 winners!) for this Friday’s show at the Hotel, along with DC’s The Ambitions and The Jones. (And you’d be wise to catch Eli and the True Loves in this more intimate setting before they hit the road with Duffy this October.) But if THAT wasn’t sweet enough, he’s tossing in a copy of his new “Roll With You” on vinyl for both winners.
So–get to typing! Leave us an old school comment why you should be one of the chosen two winners for the pair of tickets and a copy of the LP shipped right to your door. We’ll take solicitations for the show until noon on Friday and please remember to leave some contact info!
Those readers with a keen eye on all things DC will recognize that we’ve been highlighting bands over the past few weeks from the roster of local label The Kora Records (upon whom BYT had a rather excellent feature this week.) A big thanks goes out to Mike Fink for putting the entire Kora/TVD mashup together–which actually continues today as we chat with Mary Lorson from The Piano Creeps:
“The Piano Creeps is a collaboration between Billy Coté, Kathy Ziegler, and myself. We started informally, just talking about it, a few years ago, but it was Billy and Kathy who really made the record happen. I was just beginning a new teaching job, in addition to dealing with some health problems, so I didn’t have much free time, but Billy and Kathy would meet every Tuesday. They would construct tracks and play them for me and we’d confer and eventually the project became an album. They really did the spadework–I was just the lucky stiff who got to step in, bring a couple songs, and sing. But somehow this patchwork collection does represent all three of our rather divergent and personal zeitgeists, and I’m happy we made it.”
“In our old band Madder Rose, Billy was the boss and main songwriter; after that, I put together Saint Low and was the one who made the big choices. Kathy makes her living as a session and road player, but has been in charge on all of her solo records. So I guess the interesting thing about this collaboration is that we’re three opinionated people with our own styles who are rather used to creating situations where we get to be control freaks. But with this project we all really did a good job of letting go and being curious. I’ve made a bunch of records now, and this one developed the most organically, process-wise. It came together more the way Billy and I work on the film music, where we explore every valid idea until the piece shows itself as either work-able or not. The gigs have been a really fun extension of this ease and trust we have, so we’re looking forward to getting together this month to play gigs around the Kora release of “Future Blues”.”
My musical taste has always developed in a bubble, sealed off from whatever was stylish and popular among my peers. I first became conscious of this terminal uncoolness on one particular day in the fifth grade. Our teacher let us have the afternoon off for a pre-holiday party, and everyone was supposed to bring along some tunes. This posed a problem for me, as I owned none of my own. I loved music but I was ten years old and had no money to buy tapes or CDs. All I could listen to was the local radio station and whatever my father left lying around. He consumed music profligately, spending huge sums of money on rare imported albums, listening to them once or twice, and forgetting about them. This left me with a treasure trove of music way out of my age range for my personal listening pleasure. It was an outcome of this circumstance that I knew by heart the lyrics to Leonard Cohen and Ray Charles before I learned how to do long division. This fact didn’t endear me to my savvier peers, who worshipped Weird Al and the Spice Girls. Something told me my father’s castoff albums wouldn’t make the best soundtrack for a fifth-grade dance party, but I brought them anyway. I waited for a quiet moment to slip one of my cassettes into the tape player. Unfortunately, I had neglected to rewind it, and when I pressed play the tape picked up right in the middle of Elvis Presley’s “I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine.” All the fifth-graders shrieked in horror as Elvis belted out, “We’re-gonna-kiss-and-kiss-and-kiss-and-kiss-and-we’re-gonna-kiss-some-more.” I raced to switch it off, but it was too late. For the rest of the day (it felt like a year) I was shunned as the girl who ruined the whole party with the kissing song. I sat at my desk, sobbing silently into my sleeve, and my friend Dana put her arm around my shoulders. “Don’t worry,” she whispered comfortingly. “I don’t have any real music either, except for my old Barney tapes.” I would have traded my Charles Aznavour for her Barney any day. At least people knew how to pronounce his name. Close your eyes and imagine an earnest little girl with round glasses and messy braids, lying on the floor of her room with her ear pressed up against the speakers of her old-school boom box, listening to the following songs, and you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of what I was like growing up.
…and then there are the artists and bands who innately embody song-craft and tunefulness, melody and harmony, making the purposeful seem like happenstance–on each and every track on each and every LP. I simply can’t sing the praises of The Posies any louder. And you should join me…
Brian Coates of The Great Northwest sits down with us for this week’s First Date:
“I sat down to write a couple of paragraphs, and it was coming out all formal and technical-like. There were things that went-
“The Great Northwest records in a variety of places to force a feeling of newness with the stimulation of change. Each song is influenced by the feelings experienced in the new space, and when all are assembled as a collection it affects one who listens to travel in a cohesive trip.”
It felt rudimentary and lacking in style, though it was describing the actual sentiments properly.
It was an hour before I was to submit it, so I was rushed by the desire to really get a point across the way I’d wish for one to understand it, though more elegantly.
I had a smoke and relaxed.
I realized that simply saying that the Great Northwest records to play, plays to travel, and travels to record sums it up.
Ironically, the execution of the task of writing this is EXACTLY the way we record.”
I could think of three DC-based reasons why Bones and TVD would be a good fit when the Bones/TVD Prize Package was first proposed: 1. Once when I was indeed watching Bones, Agent Booth and Dr. “Bones” Brennan were actually dodging bullets in Adams Morgan which, as we know if you’re a local, isn’t a stretch. 2. DC’s own Thievery Corporation are behind a remix of Sarah Mclachlan’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ on the Soundtrack and 3. …well, they said they’d toss in a pair of Stereophonics tickets for Thursday night at the 9:30 for the grand prize winner. (That’s right, TVD: looking out for your good time.)
So, we proudly present the Bones/TVD Prize Package for which there will be two, count ’em, two winners. The grand prize winner gets the Stereophonics tickets for this Thursday night (9/11), the Bones Soundtrack CD, a Bones T-Shirt, and a bunch of other, random Bones swag, rumored to contain Bones Pens and/or Bones Computer Cleaner. (Really.) The runner-up will get all the same stuff, minus the tickets. And it happens to be a pretty cool soundtrack they’ve assembled…So, pull yourself away from the TV a moment and leave a comment in the lil’ comments box as to why you should be front and center when Kelly and the boys hit DC, OR just how much you’re in love with Bones–and we’ll choose a winner by Noon on Thursday.
Does anyone think for one moment that after his success with his previous combo (…name escapes me?) that Lennon would rest on his MBE-returning laurels, knock out a few radio friendly singles, and fill the rest of his first proper solo outing with well, crap? Indeed, no. In fact, just the opposite:
I had a whole post written up about the glories of ‘Grace’ …but …suffice it to say it was the proverbial game changer. Go ask Thom Yorke. Or Chris Martin, or…y’know – hell with that. Just listen (to everything BUT the singles…)
I was over at Orpheus Records the weekend before last and the inevitable was occurring since their announced closing a number of months back–the bins themselves were being broken down to be removed and sold. A coupla’ kids from Richmond were up to cart the things down south for a store they’re opening.
There’s still plenty of vinyl in the store however and one of the guys up north for the bins who had never been to Orpheus before was flipping through the vinyl like a punker in a candy store and enthused “wow – there’s so much vinyl in this place!” And Rick, Orpheus proprietor for 31 years now, replied that he should have been by 8 weeks ago if he really wanted to see vinyl in volume. And for the first time in all my visits since the going-out-of-business months, I heard a genuine sadness and resignation in Rick’s tone.
In a fit of irony, I’ve often laughed that I chose the wrong time to be behind a music blog because my opinion of the music industry and 90% of its denizens is well, rather low. I mean, the cream should rise to the top, right? And if that’s the case, scanning the Billboard Hot 100, or viewing just a half hour of the MTV Music Awards as I did last evening is enough to think that the cream ain’t coming at ALL these days. Zee-ro.
The days of the career artist are entirely, completely over, although the writing has been on the wall for some time now. It’s currently a singles-dominated business where personalities loom far larger than the substance of one or two measly downloaded singles. Sure, Katy Perry had the single of the summer, but does anyone want to hear a full album from Ms. Cherry Chapstick? Yep, The Ting Tings nicked a tasty Blondie riff for their straight to iPod TV commercial, but have you HEARD their full release? Of course not, it’s awful. Even one time ‘career artists’ such as Aerosmith and The Smashing Pumpkins are themselves debuting new material on Rock Band for the Xbox360 eschewing the whole notion that they just MIGHT still have a full LP up their sleeves. Embarrassing.
Putting the needle down on the first tack and listening to the very end used to be so commonplace it hardly bears mentioning. So, this week, TVD’s going to give the finger to the single and delve into what FM/Album Oriented Rock stations used to call ‘deep cuts’ cuz, well, they used to just as worthwhile as the 45 that heralded a new release. And they were purchased in stores, such as Rick’s, that fostered creativity and community. (And we’re tossing this in the name of downloaded convenience?)
I played ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Bicycle Race’ to death, but the rest of the record got just as much of a workout if not more, really. (Don’t get me started on the poster.)
My mp3 collection totals around 12,000 songs. I acknowledge the ridiculousness of having that many songs and no time to listen to them but it’s nice to put them on shuffle and hear songs I haven’t heard since I was 18. And some songs come around in the shuffle that I love, and, occasionally, some songs that I hate (but juuuust can’t delete). Normally in a shuffle I’ll listen to one or two songs and then another will come along and I’ll skip over it. Today, however, all 5 were songs that I would listen to in a row.
It’s a shame how the rise in popularity of the ipod has caused music for many to become impersonal, leaving the fun of things like mix tapes (and, if you’re of my generation, CDs) in the technological dust. I remember being a sophomore in high school and this senior, Travis who was quirky and smart in that nerd-in-a-movie way in which none of the girls really noticed him, but regretted it years later after he became a successful writer/artist/musician/earthworm wrangler, recorded a mix tape (that I was to supply) for me. Side note: The cassette, “borrowed” from my younger brother, was originally the story of Paul Bunyan as read by Jonathan Winters. I had to choose between that or one of my dad’s Hall and Oates cassettes. I think I went with Paul Bunyan because it seemed there would be less chance of getting made fun of for a book on tape than toting around a tape of some mustachioed male 80s duo in my backpack. Upon returning it, Travis had written things like “Babe the Blue Ox hearts Pavement,” which I thought was oh so rad.
I cherished that tape and played it a million times partially because I thought Travis was totally cute and knowledgeable about all things cool, but also because it was the first time anyone had given me a mix tape (unless you count the Vanilla Ice and NKOTB tapes my friends and I bootlegged for each other when I was 8) and I loved all of the music it exposed me to. I then spent the rest of my time in high school, on into college, perfecting my very own mix tape formula. Now, it seems, possibly due to busyness and/or laziness, I settle for the occasional iMix or just setting my tunes on shuffle. Modern technology may have the ability to put thousands and thousands of songs in one place, but it never gives me that rush of joy like when I popped that first mix tape into the player.
Each morning I wake at 6:30am, check some headlines, and then mull over the blog posts for the day. I was struck by the notion this morning while the coffee was sputtering and brewing that, y’know – the thing about the Sex Pistols for me, and this era of punk in general is that it was truly the last time I can think of when people were “shocked and/or offended” by the antics of a bunch of snot-nose kids. Those days are over, really–the river’s run dry. 
