I’m on my annual pilgrimage to New Orleans, the big not-so-easy-anymore, checking out the first weekend of the Jazz and Heritage Festival, or JazzFest for short. Fest is an orgy of music, food, and crafts, not necessarily in that order. Every year we try to revisit some old favorites, check out a few ringers, and stumble over some music we’d never heard before. Last year’s discovery was twisted Louisiana piano perfessor Bobby Lounge, who we’ll be seeing again tomorrow. This year so far I’ve fallen in love with Bonerama (not what it sounds like) and have two more days to discover something totally fresh.

Between the soft-shell crab and cochon du lait po-boys, rosemint ice tea, popcorn shrimp, and beignets today we heard jamming’ string-band music from Jeff and Vida and caught snippets of Zachary Richard, Trombone Shorty, Soulive, and Percy Sledge. We ended the day by shoving our way to near the front of the Acura stage (where they’ve finally outlawed those obnoxious frat/sorority style easy-chair encampments), to watch Van Morrison prove he’s still got it with a country-ish (dobro and fiddle included) band offering five-party backing harmonies. Dr. John came out to sit in on a Fats Domino tune but it looked like they had woken him up from a nap or a nod, because he tootled on the piano just a little bit and interspersed a little response to Van’s call in his inimitable “Y’at” drawl. Van opened with “Moondance” and took his time with “Cleaning Windows” and country classics like “There Stands the Glass” before my arthritic knee threatened to kill me if I didn’t hobble off the green and find some place to rest.

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It’s time to play a punk rock variation on the ancient What’s My Line quiz show, where you guess the musician and his new career direction. Here are the clues:
• Suppose your guitar playing and threadbare singing carry such coruscating intensity that concertgoers can hear their ears ringing days later—and this is after your solo acoustic shows.
• Suppose you were the grittier part of a songwriting team often described as punk’s Lennon and McCartney.
• Suppose Nirvana, the Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Green Day, the Hold Steady, and much other “alternative rock” couldn’t have existed without you, and yet none of your offspring matched the melding of noise and melody, and the sheer adrenaline rush, that spills out of your best work.
• Suppose a British website theorizes that you and Bobby Hill of King of the Hill are, in fact, the same person.

The mystery guest is Bob Mould, former leader of the umlaut-worthy Twin Cities power trio Hüsker Dü, and later the potent and more refined Sugar. And his new career direction? As I discovered on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., Mould–who has been a dedicated blogger, electronica DJ and man-about-town in the district for several years–is the new advice columnist for an alternative weekly, the Washington City Paper. In his Ask Bob column, Mould invites readers to ask him questions about “music, cooking, travel, politics, religion, neighborhoods, and sociology.” Read the rest of this entry »

Those of us who go back a ways with Iggy Pop know that he certainly has more than a little “Lust for Life” — even at age 60. He was full of lust when I saw him eat dog food on stage almost 30 years ago.

I’d never imagined that the cruise line travel industry would one day be channeling subliminal messages from William S. Burroughs through The Iguana, carefully masked as a ploy to sell us on the joy of ocean cruises. But for the past couple years, a certain vacation cruise line has been running a snippet of Pop’s “Lust for Life” with a strange edit that aims to soften the song into some kind of hip “let’s party on a ship” message.

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The Rolling Stones have become the scourge of Serbian humane societies due to their plan to hold a July concert at Belgrade’s Hippodrome, home to hundreds of horses that live a few meters from the stage. If things get out of hand, Hippodrome staff plan to give the horses Bensedin, an animal tranquilizer that became popular with humans during NATO air strikes in 1999. Since the horses can’t be moved safely, Serbia’s largest animal protection group, ORCA, is trying to get the concert moved to a different location. As a former humane society director, I hope the Stones find a more suitable venue. What I wonder is why any promoter would even consider a concert plan that places Keith Richards a few meters from a huge supply of animal tranquilizers. This is the same Keef who, just last month, famously told a New Musical Express reporter he had once snorted his father’s ashen remains with cocaine, only to later issue a retraction the reporter found disingenuous.

Whether the Stones will give the horses any reason to get excited is unknown. Mick and Keith are as professional as two deranged codgers can get. But artistically, they’ve mostly been gathering moss since 1978’s Some Girls, and relying on the near-bulletproof drumming of Charlie Watts to roll over the tough spots. The music blog of Philadelphia’s WXPN has unearthed a Stones performance that really could have gotten the horses moving— a dirty, bluesy romp on the TV show Shindig (complete with groovy backup dancers) that unexpectedly segues into a star turn for Howlin’ Wolf, accompanied by Billy Preston on piano.

What Stones material would rank as the most likely to cause equestrian unrest? I’d probably vote for a loud and fuzzy version of the entire Exile on Main St. album. Let us know what you’d choose.

Iggy Pop is missing some bones. I’m sure of it. There’s no other way to explain how his 60-year-old frame can slither through space the way it does. The rippled wall of lithe-yet-steely muscle he calls a torso compensates for the bonelessness, suspending The Iguana like a marionette. Fewer bones, more muscle, and just a little bit of celebratory butt crack to seal the deal (unless he gets pantsed, in which case all bets are off). Iggy’s body is one of the most beautiful canvases ever to grace a stage, which makes it all the more amazing that after all these years of hard living, Iggy still has no tattoos. It’s as if he knows that any art would detract from, rather than add to, the visual spectacle of his body. Wonder if Henry Rollins sometimes wishes he had stuck with his birthday suit.

Iggy Pop turned 60 yesterday, in front of an audience wishing it had half as much energy at 40. But make no mistake - this was a Stooges show, not an Iggy Pop show. All tracks were from the eponymous first Stooges album, Fun House, or their recent The Weirdness, with not a single nothin’ from the dozen-plus albums released under Iggy’s own name or recorded with other bands. That was OK, since some of us consider The Stooges and Fun House to be Rosetta Stones of rock, untouchable and unrepeatable in their massiveness, both in sound and in influence (it’s hard to imagine what punk or heavy metal might have evolved to become without these two albums). And yet Iggy seemed oblivious to his own birthday, until the band launched into a thudding version of “Happy Birthday” late in the show, and balloons silkscreened with Pop’s praying hands Raw Power image fell from the sky. The SF Chronicle summarizes last Thursday’s show pretty well: “Punk’s godfather is now its grandfather.”

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In an interview I did once with psychedelic guitarist Steve Kimock, I asked him why, when I hear music that isn’t familiar, I often find myself relating it to something I do know. For instance, a song by his then-band Zero had a hook that reminded me of the chorus of a Beatles song. One of his guitar riffs reminded me of Mark Knopfler’s playing on “Money For Nothing.” Zero’s cover of “Baby, Baby” (aka, “Baby, I Love You,” made famous by Aretha Franklin) smacked of a Dead song (”The Love Each Other”).

“Cultural preconditioning” was Kimock’s explanation. He was also talking about our familiarity with western scales and harmonies.

I can’t help thinking there’s something a mite odd about the way my brain will take some string of music fed into and run this frantic search to find even an approximate match in my memory. But then, it’s not just me, is it? In the Onion’s ‘03 classic “I Have An iPod—In My Mind,” the fictional writer touts the superiority of his built-in iPod:

There are no firewire cords or docks to mess with. I just put my hands behind my head, lean back, and select a tune from the extensive music-library folder inside my brain….

You say those iPods have customizable playlists that allow you to line up songs of your choosing? Primitive! I can put together a playlist, say “Best-Ever Heavy Metal Anthems,” while I’m sitting in traffic. My mind is light-years beyond that, though. Does your iPod have the “That Reminds Me Of Another Great Song” feature? Well, my mind does!

But I can go the fictional Ted Lascowicz one better. Given an arbitrary string of words my mind will come up with a somewhat relevant lyric. For years I’d find myself humming “Ruby Tuesday” (in my mind, that is) while shopping at the legendary Berkeley Bowl. Eventually I realize this song recall was being triggered by the stacks of ruby grapefruits.

And just this morning I noticed a bilingual wet floor sign in a stairwell at work. I’m going to assume that piso mojado means what I think it does. But a good ten minutes later I caught my mind cueing up Janis Joplin as she broke into perhaps the greatest cover song of her career, and singing

I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it,
Take another little piso mojado, baby,
Break another little bit of my heart now, darling, yeah.
Hey! Have another little piso mojado, baby, yeah.
You know you got it if it makes you feel good.

Oh yes indeed.

The Copyright Royalty Board has recently decided to nearly triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora.

The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

savenetradio.org has been created to raise awareness and reverse the tide, before this vital medium is smothered in its crib. Please consider sending email to your congress-critter / reps, encouraging them to stop the madness.

Tom Watson at newcritics calls Patti Smith’s cover of Van Morrison’s Gloria “the greatest rock cover performance (studio release) of all time.” Love how he doesn’t attempt to qualify or temper the statement by prefacing with the usual “All top ten lists are silly, but here I go anyway.” Just comes out and says it.

And onward it goes, every second fiery, living-breathing rock-and-roll. It feels incredibly live, with Jay Dee Daugherty’s singer-focused cymbals and fills and Lenny Kaye’s understated but omnipresent guitar. This song feels like it could only have been released in this performance, in this actual cut, in the recording that was made on that one day with this one band in this one studio. And to me, that’s what great covers are about: building on somebody else’s song, putting your own meat on the bones, creating a singular performance.

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The Bay Area’s burgeoning ukulele scene, which (like most ukulele scenes) has endless fun covering both 1930s trad and classic punk, has found another natural affinity in the gritty catalog of Tom Waits. And where goes ukulele, so go its companion instruments: the washboard, the singing saw, accordions, kazoos, and toy pianos — instruments that do what they do with the least-possible investment of either technology or capital, and that can be played passably without spending a decade at Juilliard. The singing saw wants a player with grapes, not cash.

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The Dylanhearsawho.com site we mentioned a few weeks ago is getting lots of attention this week, with a fresh article on Salon confirming that legal threats took the site (or at least the music) off line.

With luck, archived versions will continue to be posted at other web sites, and the music will survive virus-like for decades to come. But for now, your best bet is to scour file sharing networks, where the tracks will certainly become a cult classic.

While reading the Salon piece, I started thinking that if it’s parody, it should be clear because of the 2 Live Crew scandal some years back where their parody of “Oh, Pretty Woman” got taken to the Supreme Court as a free speech issue. The band Negativland ran with that court case ruling, covering it in their book Fair Use: The Letter U and the Numeral 2 , which became a de facto primer on copyright and digital culture.

The thrust of the book was that Negativland could have won their case if they could have afforded to take it to court, but that their label, SST, backed away. The book also points out The Supremes conclusion that not only is music parody protected as free speech, but that there was no legal grounding at the time requiring music companies to license sampled work. Nevertheless, business practices had evolved based on paying for sample usage, even if that usage would otherwise have been protected as fair use.

In a perverse twist, what became chapter one of the book was orignally published as a magazine, which pissed off SST enough that they sued Negativland.

Page two of the Salon piece explores the legal angles in more depth, and makes the point that it’s hard to think of Dylan Hears a Who as parody when it lifts the Seuss “lyrics” whole-cloth. Humorous vocal delivery alone does not a parody make. A Dylan parody, sure, but a Dr. Seuss parody? Not buying it. In the end, Dylan Hears a Who is just a set of brilliantly executed cover tracks, published without permission.

But wait — what’s this?

How is that Jesse Jackson can read Green Eggs and Ham on Saturday Night Live and get away with it, while this unheard-of musician with a little traction in the blogosphere cannot? Why is Jackson (or NBC) able to lift Seuss’ words in toto and have it remain on YouTube after all this time, while the little guy can’t get his “parody” in edge-wise? Did SNL obtain permission from the Seuss estate? Maybe. But I doubt it.

And where do we even begin with this cover of the theme lyrics to Gilligan’s Island, sung to the tune of Stairway to Heaven?

Truth be known, I’m not much of a Dylan fan, but a friend does some killer karaoke covers of Dylan as channeled by Elmer Fudd. I’ll try and track down some samples of that, and we’ll see how long they stay online.

Remember ingesting the Talking Heads’ 1979 Fear of Music for the first time? You may have come away with your brain drenched in a hybrid African / New Wave alchemical sweat. Not quite as aromatic as the sweat that oozed from Remain in Light, nor quite as pungent as the sweat that squirted from the somewhat more ragged 77. Fear of Music-generated sweat had a darker scent: More earthy, with an undercarriage of oak and peat moss. Beneath all that deep African funk was something very American - iconic portrait/bursts on simple themes: Drugs, Paper, Heaven, Animals, Cities. And underneath it all, something strange and wonderful and unlike anything you had heard before. But on the first track — I Zimbra — the African stuff did something sneaky to your brain: It set you up for deception. If you’re like most people (not saying that you are, but if you are), you may have assumed that the lyrics were a lifted tribal chant, cribbed from somewhere deep in the bowels of the Serengeti. The rhythms told you to assume that.

As for Marie Osmond… we’ll get to that.

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Don Bolles (better known as 70s drummer for punk outfits The Germs and 45 Grave) has reportedly has been arrested for (wait for it): possession of soap. That news comes from a recent posting by musician Nora Keyes. We haven’t independently confirmed the details of her account, but if it’s even mostly accurate, the charges are outrageous. According to Keyes, police, searching Bolles’ van in uptight Orange County, CA, found nothing suspicious but a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap in the back.

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