Rickrolling is the Web 2.0 equivalent of the old bait-and-switch: Promise footage of Madonna covering Sonic Youth on your tragically hip music site, but instead deliver video of Rick Astley’s debut single, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” You’ve been rickrolled! The meme is apparently giving way to its bastard step-child “buttrolling,” in which the unsuspected viewer is unwittingly lured into watching Samwell’s astonishingly frank party invitation What What In the Butt (Ha Ha! Made you click!)

But where Samwell hits you over the head (with his prodigious butt, presumably), Santeri Ojala, aka YouTube trickster StSanders took rickrolling to a whole ‘nuther level when he started over-dubbing video of guitar gods Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Clapton, Steve Vai and Eddie van Halen with his own obviously skilled but painfully bad guitar solos.

Yngwie, corpulent in skin-tight leather, riding the coattails of symphonic elegance, sounds like an air guitar hero from your junior high lunch line (don’t think back - it hurts too bad):

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Herbie Hancock’s tribute to Joni Mitchell “River” is gorgeous in every way, and wholly deserving of its recent grammy (one of only two jazz records to have won Album of the Year in the past 50 years, yeesh). Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, Joni herself, Hancock’s lush keyboards, horns by Wayne Shorter… what more could an old Joni head want? The kindling power of the album inspired Salon’s Gary Kamiya to write a moving muse on the duality of rock and jazz in his life

Luckily, around this time the rest of the high-culture spinach on my plate started to taste better, which encouraged me to stick with jazz. I had known, in a dutiful art-history way, that Cézanne’s landscapes were better than pretty ones by some officially accredited hack; now I started to actually see them and like them. As a sophomore in high school I had bought an old 78 rpm set of Debussy’s “Iberia” because I thought it was an antiquarian ticket to cultural gravitas; now I realized that you got an incredible rush out of the end of the first movement. The kicks started getting easier to find. The same thing happened with jazz. The dusty old high-culture drugs kicked in there too. I might have started out listening to jazz because it was good for me, but the more I did, the more I realized that I liked it. Those schmaltzy tunes turned out to conceal beautiful modulations — quieter, less obvious than those in rock, but with a complex logic that grew on you. As I learned to follow the mathematics of jazz, I started to be able to listen without so much interior strain.

Worth a read.

Playing a round of Scrabble (no, not that kind) with the wife tonight, needed some good thinkin’ music to get in the groove. What better choice than a far-from-pristine LP copy of Donny Osmond’s 1973 opus, A Time For Us? But lo, what should greet my hungry eyes when sliding the record out of its sleeve? This tantalizing grid of original Osmond product offers, each one better than the last (pardon the stitched-together scan).

I’ve always wondered what would happen if you actually tried to order something you found in a 30-year-old comic book or, in this case, record sleeve (assuming you had the balls to actually cut up the sleeve to get to the order form, leaving your prize records defenseless against the cardboard outer sleeve). Would your money go into a black hole? Or would some sweet old lady sitting bored at a desk in front of a warehouse full of long-unsold merch cheerfully put your order together and send it on its way? It’d definitely be the purple tank top for me.

The order form is on the reverse, and emphasizes the Osmond’s Mormon roots: “Utah residents add 4.375% sales tax.”

Always wanted a tubular fish tank that could encircle a room, maybe even go up stairs, exist underfoot… basically some way to enmesh the meditative qualities of “ambient fish” into my life. Will probably never get my wish, but while I’m waiting, the Chemical Brother’s “Salmon Dance” will have to do.

I knew from repeated experimentation — and subsequent disappointment — that Van Morrison records had stopped being worth owning sometime between Veedon Fleece and Wavelength — and even that mid-70s block was a marginal, iffy period. To have a truly psychedelic experience with Van required a large supply of candles and a Mexican Talavera candlestick, a painful breakup or some other source of profound melancholy, and an evening or two of total, incense-drenched immersion in Astral Weeks or a few of the more floaty tracks from Moondance or The Bang Masters. Van at his apex was a powerful force - the passion of Joe Cocker, mind-melded with the mysticism of Nick Drake.

Creem Magazine rock writer Lester Bangs on a live Van performance from the Astral Weeks era:

Just those words, repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands there with eyes closed, singing, transported, while the band poises quivering over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.

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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).

Karl Marx viewed “the economic formation of society as a process of natural history,” where individuals could not control or direct the growth of commerce. The result is that capitalism inevitably creates an infinitely complex web of social interconnections. Meanwhile, the Russian constructivists were more interested in portraying man and mechanization than they were in “fine art” (ironically, a lot of Constructivist collage is mighty fine). And so is this video by Belarussian band Lyapis Trubetskoy, whose work is so popular in Russia it’s apparently become prime karaoke fodder. The socio-economic jungle, natural history, contructivist themes, and some damn fine collage work come together in Trubetskoy’s “Kapital”:

I can only imagine the amount of capital it must have taken to produce the video.

via WFMU

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

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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Something you probably didn’t know about proto-spudboy, de-evolutionist, and original jocko homo Mark Mothersbaugh: He’s been creating a mixed-media postcard every day — for over 30 years. Originally created as personal diaries, they’ve become an obsession, and now go on tour with him. The postcards combine media and styles freely — painting and illustration, found objects, unexpected backing materials. Some of them are gorgeous, some borderline art brut, but these have very little of the scent of late-model Devo. “I’ve probably got around 30,000 of them filed away now….and I keep making more every day,” Mothersbaugh says. His Beautiful Mutants series is also interesting, but the Photoshop tricks there are much more predictable than his more original paper-based mashups.

God made men, but monkeys applied the glue.
-From “Jocko Homo”

Forget Kenny Rogers (and really, please forget Kenny Rogers). The musician best deserving the title “The Gambler” is our favorite Sonoma County rancher, Tom Waits. On July 10, Anti- will release Healing the Divide, the long-anticipated album version of a semi-legendary 2003 benefit concert at Lincoln Center. The concert features four performances by Waits with Kronos Quartet and Greg Cohen, including the previously unreleased “Diamond in Your Mind,” which may be familiar from Solomon Burke’s version. Other performers on the concert album include the throat-singing Gyoto Tantric Choir, sitarist Anoushka Shankar (Ravi’s daughter who isn’t named Norah Jones), the ubiquitous Philip Glass with kora player Foday Musa Suso, and Tibetan flutist Nawang Kechong in a duo with Navajo flutist R. Carlos Nakai. Internationally renowned impresario the Dalai Lama is the opening act. Sales from the album will support efforts of Healing the Divide, an organization founded by humanitarian and fugitive kisser Richard Gere, to provide health services to Tibetan monks and nuns living in refugee settlements.

That may sound like a safe bet. But as Monica Kendrick of the Chicago Reader has noted, Tom Waits’ sales pitch for the album is a new variation on Pascal’s wager. “I’m no fool,” Waits noted, “It’s a spiritual insurance policy. Hell, at my age, the next group I put together, everyone may be playing a harp. All kidding aside, I owed His Holiness a favor. He did all my papers in school.”

Even Waits’ musical selections for the show hedge his spiritual bets, ranging from “Way Down in the Hole,” a Jesus-thumping gospel blues traditional enough to have been covered by the Blind Boys of Alabama, to the self-explanatory “God’s Away on Business.” As he sings in the latter, “there’s always free cheddar in the mousetrap baby, it’s a deal, it’s a deal.”

Mmmm… Skinny dipping on a cool autumn night, river rocks basking in the moonlight, perfect banjo and ukulele* strings glancing gently off rippled water. The sweetest canary floating through the pines, crooning in French. Kurt Hoffman and Meg Reichardt (aka Les Chaud Lapins, aka The Super-Turned-On Rabbits) perform Il m’a vu nue at Midnight Ukulele Disco, lovely and just a little bit naughty.

* Banjolele, to be exact. Via Clusterflock.

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.

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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Sadly, Don Aicardi’s comment about my previous Dylan-does-Dr. Seuss post is true: Dylan Hears a Who is no more, and you can blame the Doctor’s handlers. The message at dylanhearsawho.com notes: “At the request of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, LP, this site has been retired.” That brings this episode a bit of resemblance to that of Bruce Springstone, the 1982 moniker of Baltimore journalist and cartoonist Tom Chalkley, who completely nailed that wheezy working-class Jersey drone. To his credit, Springsteen got the joke and just sent a postcard to Chalkley saying “Heard your record. Cute.” But Hanna-Barbera got hot and bothered, filing a cease-and-desist order that terminated production after 35,000 copies of the record (including mine). Hanna-Barbera’s nastiness was perhaps predictable, because one of the record’s highlights was the cartoon cover art of drummer John Ebersberger featuring Dino the dinosaur in the Clarence Clemmons role (any resemblance of Clarence Clemmons’ sax riffs to those of an actual dinosaur was, I’m sure, just coincidental). For a novelty record, the music holds up as well; truth be told, I’ve probably played my vinyl copy of the “Bedrock Rap/ Meet the Flinstones” medley more often than “Born to Run” itself over the last quarter-century.

On a related note, the miracle of YouTube has brought back Little Roger and the Goosebumps’ proto-mashup of “Stairway to Heaven” and the Gilligan’s Island theme song, which caused quite a ruckus among self-righteous stoners back in 1978. For what it’s worth, Robert Plant eventually met Little Roger, claiming that he always liked the parody and that Jimmy Page was the humorless bore who successfully prevailed on Led Zeppelin’s legal team to get the record banned. That must have been a very busy legal team–during the same period, for example, the Zeppelin boys threw a couch out of the 11th floor window of Chicago’s Ambassador East hotel, apparently hoping that Joe Walsh’s accountants would pay for it all.

If you’re in the mood for a more challenging reworking of that Zeppelin warhorse, don’t miss the terrific 2006 version by Rodrigo y Gabriela, the most accomplished metal-influenced Mexican acoustic guitar duo in all of Ireland.