When I think about Tom Snyder, the talk show host who passed away earlier this week, the first thing that comes to mind is his laugh, an old-school guffaw that bordered on self-parody long before Dan Aykroyd made it the centerpiece of a Saturday Night Live routine. Then I think about the eyebrows, twin black caterpillars that gave away his mood just as convincingly as Sam Donaldson’s as he made conversation with guests ranging from Ayn Rand to Charles Manson (and no, I’m not drawing any connection here). But most of all, I remember the music and interviews on Snyder’s signature program, The Tomorrow Show, which ran in my formative years between 1973 and 1982. At a time when even SNL had distinct boundaries on what could be played and discussed during the show, Snyder took risks with performers considered too edgy or unpredictable for most of the “alternative” shows of the day.

Superficially, the slightly haughty Snyder could come off a bit like the Mr. Jones of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” (“something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is”). But Snyder didn’t patronize the performers, wasn’t afraid to call them on their own contradictions, and got some unlikely subjects to stand and deliver. Many of the highlights (although conspicuously, not the Clash and U2) are included in Shout Factory’s recent DVD release The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave, which captures appearances by the Jam, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, among others. In the rest of this post, I’ll share a few memorable Tomorrow Show moments. (Also discussed below: the hidden connection between Martha Stewart and the Plasmatics.)

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One of our oldest and dearest friends, who goes by the name Rinchen, is a devout Buddhist currently two thirds of the way through a three-year hitch in a monastery in the Santa Cruz mountains, where he is studying with the teacher he’s chosen for life, and practicing almost total silence. Rinchen has no access to the outside world — no phone calls, no newspapers, no internet, no television… and no music. The latter fact is particularly striking, as Rinchen is one of the deepest listeners we know - a man who could spend an entire day tapped into an 8-disc Cecil Taylor free improv set, then put on some Parliament or Missy Elliott and jam the night away. Rinchen’s music collection was breathtaking — before he sold it all to finance his silent expedition.

A few times a year, Rinchen is granted a day or two to visit with family and to write letters to friends. We wrote him a few months ago asking what music runs through a monk’s mind in between the long periods of silence. Today we received the following poem/riff on Cage, Monk, Miles, The Meters and more (with bundled playlist).
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Is a record not spun a record not played? Dragging a needle across old, brittle vinyl records or wax cylinders can damage them — not something you want to do with rare historical recordings. At the Library of Congress, researchers have developed a scanner that can extract audio from records by scanning them digitally - no spinning required. Images are analyzed and transformed back into audible sound. “Stuck” records magically become unstuck, while physically broken records can be pieced back together with great results.

How does it sound? “The machine is not adding its own color. It’s not adding anything of its own nature,” says the device’s developer. The samples on the NPR site are low-res internet audio, but the comparisons to the original are impressive, despite a persistent background hiss.

The technology could eventually become available to general consumers, meaning that the daunting task of MP3-encoding piles of vinyl would become way less daunting. It’s a strange and beautiful world.

Thanks Jeb

For the past 231 years or so, a favorite American pastime has been to pretend to hate the French, while secretly admiring French cuisine, art, architecture, philosophy, and yes, even its music. And the French have helped us become ourselves. It took French intervention to secure victory in the American Revolution, French theorist Alexis de Tocqueville to comprehend American culture, and French real estate in the Louisiana Purchase to give our country decent places to get barbecue. Years later, it took Brigitte Bardot to make us appreciate the Harley-Davidson motorcycle as an object of unbridled lust (sorry, Steppenwolf).

Recognizing that the original Bastille Day was literally a riot, we at Stuck Between Stations are coming out of the closet as Francophiles. To many Americans, “French music” has a limited reach, consisting of Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Johnny Halladay, and the anonymous Eurodisco that plays in the background at the Gap. A smattering of words from “Lady Marmalade,” “Games Without Frontiers” or “Psycho Killer” might also come to mind. I asked our regular contributors to put together playlists of music sung in French or recorded by artists based in France.

Four playlists appear below. Mine riffs off the global reach of French-speaking musical traditions, taking flight with a mix that moves from Paris to Algiers and Dakar, and then across the pond to Lousiana and Quebec. Malcolm Humes starts with France Gall’s most scandalous teen-pop anthem (a far weirder variation on the “I Want Candy” theme) before settling into a list that is heavy on adventurous prog and moody experimentalism. Christian Crumlish’s list celebrates the French role in Anglo-American music, and vice versa. Scot Hacker conjures an alternately loopy and romantic concoction that includes both jam and fromage.

There’s nowhere better to start than with Serge Gainsbourg, the genius, provocateur and pipe-smoking lothario who, according to Richard Gehr, still lived with his parents until he was 40. Gainsbourg’s “Couleur Café” is the obvious choice, because nothing says “liberty, equality and fraternity” to me quite like this video, which features an exotic dancer cavorting around the room and pouring Serge what has to be the single sexiest cup of java in music or film history. With all respect to the great Bob Dylan, next to “Couleur Café,” his “One More Cup of Coffee” sounds like something brewed at the AM/PM minimart.

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On the 231st birthday of an outrageous experiment in nation-building with a pretty decent soundtrack, I asked our regular Stuck Between Stations contributors to take time from their five-alarm barbecues and traffic jams and hissing summer lawns to answer a simple question: What songs would you like to hear on the Fourth of July, in any style and for any reason? Faster than you can say “Sufjan Stevens,” we all went to look for America, and I said “be careful, my laptop is really a camera.” (Thanks, Apple).

Our stable of beloved revolutionary sweethearts proved worthy of the challenge. In what follows after my opening playlist, Sal Reyes casts George Washington as our founding prophet of rage, tucking into his knickers a “battle-scarred iPod” loaded with classic Public Enemy tracks. Scot Hacker surveys the state of a nation under a groove bold enough to mix Dylan and MC5 with Parliament/ Funkadelic, and explains why Condoleezza Rice won’t serve in President George Clinton’s cabinet. Malcolm Humes passionately describes Robert Wyatt’s relevance to our era of self-evident “truthiness” and freedom with asterisks.Christian Crumlish puts the jam back in holiday jamboree, from the Dead’s slow stew to the Minutemen’s quick sizzle.

Since my list includes James Brown’s Ford Administration civics lesson, “Funky President,” I’ll get things rolling with a teaser—David McMillan’s classic rant about the cosmic connections between James Brown and Gerald Ford.

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Budding guitarists (hell, all guitarists), take note: Guitar music is church, and there are ten commandments you gotta internalize if you want that axe to say something that will raise souls to the ether. Prophet / spiritual leader / ghost dancer Captain Beefheart, whose voice allegedly once destroyed a $1200 Telefunken microphone, saw (sawed?) through the blues, took them to metaphysical planes, twisted them up in old socks and dish rags, made your spine vibrate with surrealistic pleasure.

More on the Good Cap’n another day, but for now: Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing:

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