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.)

Continue reading Tom Snyder in Tomorrowland →

The Arctic Monkeys’ reworked version of “Dancing Shoes” with a ridiculously catchy Cuban rhythm, featured on last fall’s Rhythms del Mundo compilation, first seems noteworthy simply for its goofy exuberance. A YouTube video, which borrows a classic Bollywood dance sequence, makes the song even more relentlessly silly. But beneath the surface humor is a desperate plea for help, revealing the Arctic Monkeys’ struggle for survival in an increasingly inhospitable climate.

Sadly, the Arctic Monkeys’ plight is representative of a huge, and until now, underreported problem: the threat climate change poses to the world’s music supply. This six-part essay reports on the impending musical catastrophe and the global efforts, spearheaded by international celebrity and unofficial “fifth Monkey” Al Gore, to bring about a saner and more musically balanced future.


Holiday in the Sun

Between 1971 and 2000, July high temperatures in the Arctic Monkeys’ hometown of Sheffield, England averaged a moderate 67.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Monkeys members fear a rise of several degrees could induce a complacency that would thwart their ability to turn aging Buzzcocks and Libertines riffs into snappy pop songs. It’s hardly a coincidence that the Arctic Monkeys’ new album is titled Favorite Worst Nightmare. “This is serious, man,” remarked lead singer Alex Turner. “Take away that distinctly British chill, and before you know it, we’d be crooning bloody Cliff Richard songs on ‘Top of the Pops’ for me bloody mum and auntie.”

British musicians fear that warming trends threaten the supply of angst, guilt and irony, the three pillars of British musical expression, and arguably of all Anglo-Saxon culture. MySpace ska-pop princess Lily Allen announced she is canceling a spring break in Ibiza and touring by dogsled in Lapland instead. Allen, who asked “sun is in the sky, oh why?” on last year’s prescient “LDN,” wants a secure place for her music. “The reindeer are a bit daft, but I feel safe here,” she said, sipping Absolut vodka in Sweden’s Jukkasjarvi Ice Hotel, 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

The direst warnings came from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. “Look, I’m not trying to get all Bono on you about global warming,” he said, “but I think we may already have reached the tipping point. You know that old Pink Floyd concert movie filmed at Pompeii, where the lads are so out of it that they sing a 23-minute song about an albatross and babble incoherently about wanting pie with no crust? Well, that would be Radiohead in a warmer world. If you thought Kid A was already full of little blips and burps, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Continue reading Global Warming Threatens Arctic Monkeys →

On the second anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I’m posting my New Orleans odyssey, “Listening to the Water.” The soundtrack to the story features Irma Thomas, Mos Def, the Meters, Amerie, Bessie Smith, Randy Newman, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, with a special public service announcement from Kanye West.

The man at the door of the Blue Angel nightclub had the ugliest mustache I had ever seen. It looked penciled on, like he was playing Rhett Butler in a school production of “Gone with the Wind” without really giving a damn. I moved toward my sister, trying to look married. The man grinned. “Uh, y’all are eighteen, aren’t you?,” he asked. “Yes—uh YES,” I croaked. “Well, come on in,” he said, “don’t get too crazy all at once, you hear?”

It was May 1977. So far, I’d had a New Orleans experience the Chamber of Commerce could have scripted. Stroll the French Quarter’s sunshine-filled streets. Inhale chicory-scented coffee and beignets. Clap as ancient tuba and banjo players at Preservation Hall trot out their millionth rendition of “St. James Infirmary,” and clarinetist Pete Fountain entertains your mom’s corporate convention.

At 15, I didn’t understand that to natives, most of this signifies “New Orleans” the way Rice-a-Roni is the “San Francisco treat.” But inside the smoky club, I sensed more mystery. The cornet player stopped his Dixieland riffing and hit a note so hushed and low it hinted at another New Orleans behind the tourist curtain. Outside the nightclub, a street drummer coaxed ripples and torrents out of garbage can lids. He motioned to me, as if to share a secret. But he only said one thing: “The sound is in the water.”

Irma Thomas – It’s Raining

Mos Def, “Katrina Klap”

Continue reading Listening to the Water →

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.” Continue reading Bob the Builder →

If I mentioned that Oakland-based guitar guru Henry Kaiser ventured into the Deep South for a recording, you might think of Lynyrd Skynyrd, or if you’re younger, perhaps the Drive-By Truckers and Cee-Lo. But Muscle Shoals and Jacksonville must seem like mid-northern outposts to the globetrotting Kaiser, who earlier this year became the first musician to record a CD in Antarctica. The CD isn’t available yet, but his website provides proof of his use of the South Pole as a guitar slide. And I recently had the pleasure of taking my daughter Amelia to see his kid-friendly triple threat performance at Oakland’s Chabot Space and Science Center, in which Kaiser simultaneously lectured about Antarctica’s fragile ecology, narrated an Antarctic video he shot underwater, and played a few guitar riffs that would be completely beyond your reach unless your name is Richard Thompson or Nels Cline.

Kaiser, whose similarly named grandfather was the father of modern shipbuilding, has a fascinatingly well-rounded life and a staggeringly eclectic musical career. I first encountered his work in the late eighties, when he joined forces with Thompson, Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith, and Captain Beefheart drummer John “Drumbo” French for the good-natured avant-geek supergroup French, Frith, Kaiser, and Thompson. Since then, he’s teamed with hirsute fellow traveler David Lindley for two first-rate musical anthologies, the Madagascar-based A World Out of Time and the Norwegian opus The Sweet Sunny North. His Yo Miles! collaborations with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and a roving cast explore and extend Miles Davis’ seventies electric legacy.

Despite producing a New Years Day event called Icestock with a poster assist from his friend Matt Groening, Kaiser wasn’t simply slumming it in Antarctica. He’s been there several times as part of his other career as a professional research diver, and his gorgeous video footage of Antarctica’s life aquatic, filmed while swimming underneath a twenty-foot ice sheet, will be featured in Werner Herzog’s forthcoming film, Encounters at the End of the World. Kaiser’s firsthand account of Antarctica’s melting ice shelf also might help persuade the three or four people left out there who doubt the reality of global warming (all of whom seem to hold public office).

When I’m on road trips, a favorite pastime is to flip through the radio dial trying to find local stations featuring regional music or other hidden treasures I may have overlooked. In recent years, though, these flips through the dial have increasingly become the aural equivalent of what urban sprawl critic James Howard Kunstler has termed the “geography of nowhere,” with the “local” stations’ music having all the color and life of the surrounding strip malls. Fortunately, an important bill just introduced in Congress, the Local Community Radio Act of 2007, will if passed remove an ill-conceived legal barrier that has thwarted the development of community radio for years.

The desensitizing sameness I’ve noticed on the road is not a coincidence. The nonprofit Media Access Project, which provides legal support for independent radio, reports that in the aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the total number of radio station owners has dropped by a third. Radio behemoth Clear Channel alone now operates over 1200 stations, and in most markets, four or fewer companies control more than seventy percent of total market share. By 2003, the average cost of a conventional radio license had grown to more than $2.5 million.

In 2000, with radio rapidly turning into a tame game played by multimillionaires, the Federal Communications Commission experienced an outburst of common sense. That year, the FCC set up rules that were designed to authorize thousands of noncommercial Low Power FM (LPFM) stations to serve communities at a fraction of the costs of a conventional station. But sadly, Congress several months later succumbed to lobbying pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters, leaving LPFM literally stuck between stations. The resulting law, sneaked into an unrelated appropriations bill, effectively barred LPFM from the 50 largest media markets in the country, by requiring these new stations to stay at least four intervals on the radio dial (0.6 megahertz) from existing full-power stations. And in a twist on Elvis Costello’s prediction in “Radio Radio,” radio is now in the hands of a shrinking number of fools “trying to anesthetize the way that you feel.”

Continue reading Stuck Between Radio Stations →

Yesterday on National Public Radio’s dependably hilarious quiz show, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Associate Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer attempted to answer questions inspired by a Blender article on the 50 craziest pop stars. Justice Breyer proved to be a good sport with a decent sense of humor, which you’d need to get through a day job spent arguing with Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas. But unfortunately, the esteemed justice was unable to correctly answer any of the questions about David Bowie (crazy pop star #41), Ozzy Osbourne (#10), or Iggy Pop (#26). Justice Breyer was not only unaware that Ozzy had asked for directions to the bar at the Betty Ford clinic, but was unaware of his very existence. He had no idea that David Bowie had once attempted to exorcise Satan from his swimming pool. Most disappointingly for me, Breyer incorrectly believed that the Chief Stooge had spoken only in rhyme for a year while hanging out with Bowie in Berlin. The correct answer–as I’m sure our readers already know–is that Iggy ate only German sausages for a year. So much for Stanford, Harvard and the highest circles of American jurisprudence giving you a proper education.

If you scratch at the surface a bit, Mr. Pop and Mr. Breyer may have more in common than meets the eye. One wrote a satirical (I think) song called “I’m a Conservative,” while the other spends most of his waking hours skewering the logic of right-wing jurists. Both understand the fearsome consequences of raw power. Both grew up in middle class families; both try to stay in shape and know their way around a golf course; both ride through the city at night, seeing the bright and hollow sky and the city’s ripped backsides. Okay, maybe Iggy a little more than Steve on the last one.

As someone who straddles musical and legal circles, I appreciate little moments when these worlds collide. One of my favorites is the 1987 appellate ruling in United States v. Abner, the notorious Talking Heads decision. In it, an enterprising Heads-obsessed judicial clerk managed to sneak 25 references to Talking Heads recordings into the published ruling of federal judge Reynaldo Garza.

Part One: International Sheep of Mystery

With a style that veers between downright rude and merely impudent, Rufus Leaking isn’t your usual music reporter. He began an interview with funk legend George Clinton by introducing him as the “42nd President of the United States,” and spent most of the time asking him where he thought he could park the Mothership in downtown Washington, D.C. He virtually forced Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips to join him in a karaoke version of Starship’s “We Built this City,” even though neither of them actually knew how the song went. He gave members of Cypress Hill an impromptu anatomy quiz, compared singing actress Juliette Lewis to Corey Feldman, and confused Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst with Frank Sinatra (Bright Eyes, Blue Eyes, whatever). Yet musicians have clamored for a chance to appear on his obscure, low budget television show, whose roster of visiting talent could give the Lollapalooza, Coachella and Roskilde festivals a run for their money.

Who is this man? Actually, Rufus Leaking is a puppet with an identity crisis. Self-described on his website as an “international sheep of mystery,” he’s sometimes described in media accounts as a goat puppet. Whatever his barnyard origins, he’s the host of a wonderful Washington, D.C.-based children’s television show called Pancake Mountain, presently on hiatus while its creator, film producer Scott Stuckey (grandson of the roadside snack empire’s founders) revamps its format and tries to expand its reach. Previous episodes are available on DVD. Let’s hope Stuckey succeeds, because at its best, Pancake Mountain celebrates the simple pleasures of making a joyful noise, or at least a tremendous racket. In one of the inaugural episodes, D.C. punk pioneer Ian MacKaye used the show to introduce the Evens, his pop-savvy duo with former Warmers drummer Amy Farina. The Evens’ “Vowel Movement,” a charming ode to “six important letters,” makes you wonder what might have been if Fugazi and Minor Threat had smiled a bit and performed in matching jumpsuits.

Continue reading Return to Pancake Mountain →