Tag: Music

Duran Duran – Red Rocks – August 29, 2023

Velvet Newton
Night Boat
The Wild Boys
Hungry Like the Wolf
The James Bond Theme (John Barry song)
A View to a Kill
Notorious
Give It All Up
Lonely in Your Nightmare / Super Freak
Is There Something I Should Know?
Anniversary
Friends of Mine
Careless Memories
Ordinary World (Dedicated to the people of Hawaii and Ukraine)
Come Undone
Planet Earth (With band intros)
White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It) (Grandmaster Melle Mel cover)
The Reflex
Girls on Film / Acceptable in the 80’s

Encore:
Save a Prayer
Rio

setlist.fm

NOTE – I was at this show. Also featured were Nile Rogers/Chic, and a band I was unfamiliar with called Bastille. All excellent, imho. And, the crowd was into it, singing along with a number of the tunes.

Kool-Herc Interview – NPR, Fresh Air

MOSLEY: This month marks 50 years of hip-hop. To celebrate, all this week we’ll be featuring interviews with some of the most influential rappers and DJs over the last 50 years. We’ll start at the beginning with DJ Kool Herc, who, on August 11, 1973, DJ’d an end-of-summer party in his Bronx apartment’s rec center. Little did he know that it was the beginning of hip-hop as we know it. Kool Herc was the first DJ to isolate and repeat the breaks – the most danceable beats in a record – to rev the party and keep the dancers going. Although Herc is often credited as the father of hip-hop, he didn’t record and, for years, remained relatively unknown.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/28/1195667940/fresh-air-celebrates-50-years-of-hip-hop-dj-kool-herc

The Hives – What’s In My Bag?

Vigilante Carlstroem, The Johan and Only, and Nicholaus Arson from The Hives go record shopping at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. The Hives’ latest album ‘The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons’ is available now from Disques Hives.

Check out their picks:
Howlin’ Wolf – Rockin’ Chair (LP)
The Flamin’ Groovies – Shake Some Action (LP)
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers – Greatest Hits (LP)
Bad Brains – Live At CBGB 1982 (LP)
Big Star – #1 Record (LP)
Big Star – Radio City (LP)
Tom Waits – Real Gone [Remixed And Remastered] (LP)
Tom Waits – Alice (LP)
Bad Brains – Bad Brains (LP)
Roky Erickson – The Evil One (LP)
Elliott Smith – Either/Or (LP)
Neil Grant Vosburgh – God’s Best (LP)
The Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs [Box Set] (LP)
Emmylou Harris – Wrecking Ball (LP)

Hats off to Taylor Swift and the Food Banks

When the Arizona Food Bank Network received a call that Taylor Swift wanted to make a hefty donation to the charity as she kicked off her Eras tour in the state, some staffers thought it was a prank.

But it was no joke. The megastar, who is raking in big bucks from her blockbuster concerts, has been giving back to communities where she plays. From Georgia to Michigan to Texas to California and in between, food banks have benefited.

In Arizona, Swift’s donation in March allowed the network to send several tractor-trailers filled with 40,000 pounds of fresh produce to its member food banks, said Terri Shoemaker, a spokesperson at the nonprofit organization. Plus, it bolstered funding for programs aimed at combating hunger, such as helping eligible children gain access to free and reduced-price school meals and senior citizens obtain food stamps.

Taylor Swift is a hero to food banks from coast to coast

Trumpet Player on the Roof – Flea anecdote.

I spent the most peaceful and light hours practicing trumpet on the roof. Our sweet landlady was a tripper who’d come up there to sit and listen to me play; she told me it was beautiful, and I once saw a soft tear roll down her painted face when she said it. I had two different friends later on, Maggie Ehrig and Ione Skye, both who told me they would hear the trumpet sounds flying through the neighborhood, not knowing the origin, and it brought them joy.

Acid for the Children
Flea

Note – good stuff, recommended.

Ozzy Osbourne vs the Ice Machines

Ozzy’s second Rare Breed gig was at Aston University, where once again we were booed off and the promoter only gave us half our fee. That was the night I learned that Ozzy could defecate at will. As we were loading our gear back into the van, Ozzy pulled down his pants, crouched on the bonnet of the promoter’s Jaguar and left one of his trademark calling cards. To be fair, he refined his talent as the years went by. On future American tours, he’d shit in hotel ice machines, so that anyone who fancied a Scotch on the rocks might get it with a twist.

Into the Void
Geezer Butler

Unbeknownst to Sharon, who as usual was taking care of day-to-day business in her hotel room, Ozzy found his way to the road crew’s hotel where he drank and snorted until Sharon finally tracked him down that evening.

Upon his arrival back at the hotel, Ozzy continued his rampage by defecating in the ice machines before retiring from another full day of mischief. Due to countless incidents of day off shenanigans, I truly believe that Ozzy is responsible for the modifications that have been made to the design of today’s hotel ice machines.

Off the Rails: Aboard the Crazy Train in the Blizzard of Ozz
Rudy Sarzo

Note – both books recommended.

RIP – Teresa Taylor

She eventually dropped out of high school and met the singer Gibby Haynes and the guitarist Paul Leary, who had founded Butthole Surfers in San Antonio in 1981, while renting them space in the downtown Austin warehouse where she was living. In 1983, they invited her to join the band on a tour of California.

During Ms. Taylor’s tenure, which lasted much of the 1980s, the band never scored a hit record. although it eventually found success atop Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart with the song “Pepper” in 1996. But mainstream acceptance was very much not the point — as their name made clear.

Mixing a taste for Dadaism and Nietzsche with a cyclone-force howl, Butthole Surfers proved audacious even by punk standards. Concerts featured transgressive elements like naked dancers, bullhorns, garbage fires and morbid films of surgeries. “Their live shows were an assault on the senses,” the music site Rock and Roll True Stories observed in a 2021 retrospective.

Teresa Taylor, Butthole Surfers Drummer and a Face of Gen X, Dies at 60
In addition to playing with the audacious Texas band, she helped define the image of an aimless generation with her role in the 1990 film “Slacker.”

IMDB – Slacker

The Authentic Feel of Unpolished Expression

Of course Bernard didn’t realise the song wasn’t in his key. None of us did. We didn’t know anything about stuff like that. We always wrote the music first, and what I’d always loved about Barney’s vocals was the unintentional strained quality as he tried to fit into the track. Like Ian, he wasn’t blessed with the world’s best singing voice, but it had emotion, passion, and to me the struggle in Bernard’s voice was a major part of the band’s appeal. (I agree with David Byrne, who said, ‘The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.’)

Substance: Inside New Order
Peter Hook

RIP Tina Turner

Tina Turner (born Anna Mae Bullock; November 26, 1939 – May 24, 2023) was an American-born and naturalized Swiss[a] singer, dancer, actress, and author. Widely referred to as the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll“, she rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue before launching a successful career as a solo performer.

Turner began her career with Ike Turner‘s Kings of Rhythm in 1957. Under the name Little Ann, she appeared on her first record, “Boxtop“, in 1958. In 1960, she debuted as Tina Turner with the hit duet single “A Fool in Love“. The duo Ike & Tina Turner became “one of the most formidable live acts in history”.[5] They released hits such as “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine“, “River Deep – Mountain High“, “Proud Mary“, and “Nutbush City Limits“, before disbanding in 1976.

In the 1980s, Turner launched “one of the greatest comebacks in music history”.[6] Her 1984 multi-platinum album Private Dancer contained the hit song “What’s Love Got to Do with It“, which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and became her first and only number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100. Aged 44, she was the oldest female solo artist to top the Hot 100.[7] Her chart success continued with “Better Be Good to Me“, “Private Dancer“, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)“, “Typical Male“, “The Best“, “I Don’t Wanna Fight“, and “GoldenEye“. During her Break Every Rule World Tour in 1988, she set a then–Guinness World Record for the largest paying audience (180,000) for a solo performer.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Turner

Sad Music, Attraction of

When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”

This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way. Countless scholars since Aristotle have tried to account for it. Maybe we experience a catharsis of negative emotions through music. Maybe there’s an evolutionary advantage in it, or maybe we’re socially conditioned to appreciate our own suffering. Maybe our bodies produce hormones in response to the fragmentary malaise of the music, creating a feeling of consolation.

The Reason People Listen to Sad Songs
It’s not because they make us sad but because they help us feel connected, a new study suggests.
NYTIMES
Oliver Whang

from the comments:

DNALevelC
I’ve always attributed the mood improvement I get when listening to sad songs to some kind of homeopathic response. Like a vaccine, a small dose of sadness immunizes against profound sadness. I find it a powerful effect

Surin S
Melancholy songs are the closest thing to traveling back in time.

David Knight
The whole thing when you are sad is that you feel like you are the only one in the world that feels that way. Hearing sad music shows you that you are not the only one and a good song writer can put a positive spin on the whole thing. The idea that there is someone out there who has empathy for the rotten way you feel is uplifting. I’ve experienced this with multiple genres of music from country, folk, and blues to jazz, classical, baroque and renaissance so it’s not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. Hurtin’ music has no boundaries.

Sarah
Sad songs do two important things: they put to words feelings one might have been unable to verbalize and they remind us that we are not alone in our sorrow.