Recently at Stuck Between Stations:

Tooth Imprints on a Corndog: Me on fortuitous audio collisions: Tape print-through effects, the Backyardigans, Dark Side of the Rainbow, and Scandinavian jazz weirdo Solveig Slettahjell.

Hotter Than July: A Summer Playlist: Roger Moore on Dick Dale, Tuareg rockers Tinariwen, Blitzen Trapper, The Kinks, The Replacements, and more. Which tracks are fueling your summer?

The Residents: Music for Melting: Roger Moore gets re-acquainted with a classic arctic chill. Have to admit, it’s been probably 20 years since I’ve listened to this, but now he’s got me digging through Residents back-catalog too.

Bo Knows Qaddafi: Roger Moore eulogizes the late great Bo Diddley, and relates the gunslinger’s sometimes embarrassing politics.

Carrie Nation: Roger Moore says ex-Sleater-Kinney guitarist cum ThuderAnt Carrie Brownstein is his favorite American rock guitarist of the last dozen years. I personally don’t “get” Sleater-Kinney, but do dig her writing at Monitor Mix.

matthewsperry.org is a site I maintain in honor of a musician friend who was tragically laid down by a car while on his bike five (wow) years ago this June. Every year, Matthew’s musician friends gather forces and put on several days of amazing benefit shows in the Bay Area. Details on the Sixth Annual Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival have been posted, and this year is shaping up to be great.

The festival tradition of commissioning new works for large ensemble continues with a page from Matthew’s composition notebook: Treasure Mouth, which requires a band to follow along to lyrics as fast as they can be written out for them by others — call it improv karaoke.

Recently at Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore on Barack Obama’s attempt to shake his image as a closet Pink Floyd fanatic and the “Us and Them” mentality that has dogged Roger Waters. Meanwhile, Floyd’s inflatable pig floats out of control into a neighboring golf course.

Hillary Clinton noted that “there is no clear evidence that Barack Obama is an America-hating Pink Floyd fanatic. As far as I know.” “But let me tell you,” she continued, “during my administration, we’ll have no time for laser light shows, ponderous guitar solos, vague anti-capitalist lyrics, and 23-minute songs about albatrosses. From day one, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves for the working people of America, pausing only for some Carly Simon, James Taylor and maybe a few aromatherapy candles.”

Also: Roger on Thao Nguyen’s “Bag of Hammers”

This week at Stuck Between Stations: Roger Moore on the lasting influence of Cuban bassist Israel Lopeze - Cachao’s Legacy: Two Nations Under a Groove:

Although Cuban bass virtuoso Israel “Cachao” Lopez took his final breaths this week, it’s hard to imagine this humble giant, who played in more than 250 groups from the 1920s on, as not having a pulse. Cachao would have been legendary even if he had retired around 1940.

More at the site.

This week at Stuck Between Stations: Rickrolling Yngwie (me) on StSanders’ sublime video overdubs of guitar gods Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Clapton, Steve Vai and Eddie van Halen with his own obviously skilled but painfully bad guitar solos.

Already we’re seeing spin-offs. It’s one thing to watch Eric Clapton’s face and fingers scrambling after bad college-level jazz, but what do you do with real jazz? Check the great Oscar Peterson quartet ripped to shreds by an equally talented pianist calling himself Tibenham:

For those about to adopt Dali’s paranoicritical method, we salute you.

Carmina Burana (Alternate Lyrics)

I’m almost convinced the original Latin is somehow an encrypted version of something much more surreal. The brain is a strange and wonderful place.

Thanks mnep

Righteous CD cover meme image pool happening on Flickr these-a-days.

1. First, you’ll need a name for your band. This will be the first article title on WikiPedia’s random page selector.

2. Now for the all-important album title. Grab the last four words of the very last quote on the quotationspage’s random quote selector.

3. And of course, the album art. Yours will be the third picture, no matter what it is, on Flickr’s most interesting page.

Run your elements through the Photoshop sausage grinder, emulating the style of an album you already own (if you like), and out comes an album cover that looks like it could be at home in the Indie or Alt.Whatever section of your local record store.

To get yours into the pool, you’ll need to join the pool, then go to your uploaded image and click the “Add to pool” link right above it (I’ve always thought Flickr made the process of playing in photo pools unnecessarily complicated).

I made one.

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.

This week at Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore finally gets around to releasing his best-of-year list… for 2006.

I can’t complain about multiple poll winner LCD Soundsystem, the brainy dance band that tossed off the best rip I’ve heard on New York’s Michael Bloomberg (“your mild billionaire mayor’s now convinced he’s a king”). I’m also thrilled at the top-ten consensus for M.I.A.’s Kala, which gave a trans-global boom-boom-boom to those of us who have, like the National, spent too long feeling half-awake in a fake empire. Still, there’s a problem in treating lists like these as canons of coolness. They call to mind my favorite 2007 music review, which was so fake it’s real. The Onion reported that Pitchfork gave a rating of 6.8 to “music”—not any one recording or genre, but its entire history. It seems music, while brilliant at times, is weighed down with too many “mid-tempo ballads,” and worse, “the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement.”

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 but this tantalizing grid of original Osmond product offers, each one better than the last.

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.”

Songza: Dang near any song you can think of, at your fingertips. Amazing, in many ways (not so in others - almost everything is low-fi, and you can’t download anything). But amazing that it exists. Get obscure as you want - it’s probably there. Where is all this audio coming from? Watching the status bar, seems like a lot of is being hoovered out of YouTube videos, but there must be many other sources as well. What a time we live in.

This week at Stuck Between Stations:

Me, on violinist Joshua Bell’s recent experiment playing in a D.C. subway:

Violinist Joshua Bell’s virtuosity is so renowned that Interview magazine once said that his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.” A few months ago, Bell walked into a D.C. subway station, flipped open his violin case, and played his heart out for spare change — on a $3.5 million 1713 Stradivarius.

… Of course almost no one paid any attention. Context is everything, and we only hear what we’re prepared to hear. More on context, presentation, perception in the piece.

This week at Stuck Between Stations:

- Me, on Van Morrison’s 1967 contractual obligation, in which he “mails it in” like no one has ever mailed it in before:

I can see by the look on your face
that you’ve got ringworm.
I’m very sorry to have to tell you, but you’ve got ringworm.
It’s a very common disease.
You’re very lucky to have … ringworm
because you may have had … something else.

Audio at the site.

- Roger, on the unlikely roots of Jamaican reggae and soul in Canada.

Canadian reggae and soul, eh? If you expect that combination to go down as easily as curried goat with a side of Canadian bacon, you may be surprised.

This week at Stuck Between Stations, Roger surveys the history of bad urban planning… with a playlist. Each dutifully dissected example of urban planning gone horribly wrong is accompanied by its own soundtrack. The video of a pair of Norwegian youths lip-sync’ing The Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone” (the same song that “unintentionally made Rush Limbaugh an animal rights activist”) is worth the price of admission alone.

The Red Hot Chachkas are an eclectic Bay Area klezmer group who, once upon a time, played at Matthew and Stacia’s wedding (Matthew is our dearly departed friend whose life was cut short by an inattentive driver in 2003). Soon after the wedding, Matthew joined the Chachkas as a basisst, and played with the group until his death. The Chachkas have written a song for Matthew: Suite Matthew.

I’ve spent the past few nights converting Matthew’s memorial site from Movable Type to WordPress, getting comments going again, fixing old links, re-embedding media, and just sprucing up the place in general. Working on it has made me miss Matthew all over again. He used to send the most hilarious links by day, then make the most intense music by night. He used to give the best hugs. He used to cook the best chicken. I miss you, Matthew.

Twelve years ago, at a party in Boston, I found myself in a friendly argument about how to complete the lyric “Blinded by the light…” Seemed like everyone at the party had a different idea about what the real lyrics were. When I got home that night, I posted the list of responses I had written down to an early version of Birdhouse and invited people to send theirs. Amazingly, responses started to roll in via email faster than I could post them (manually). I opened it up to mishearances of other songs, and before long I was experimenting with publishing HTML out of databases.

I registered the domain kissthisguy.com and, over the course of a decade, went through a bunch of homebrew Filemaker and MS Access solutions before finally learning PHP/MySQL. The site’s been a great platform for learning about and experimenting with database and templating systems, and has always been good for a chuckle (though weeding through the volume of crappy submissions has always been a chore, mitigated only in the past couple of years by the current public voting system). The site’s been tremendously popular for something I work on only in spurts separated by long periods of inactivity, and I even lived off its ad revenue while writing the BeOS Bible. But the volume of submissions - up to 200 per day at points - eventually became a Sisyphysian task I knew I’d never get out from under. And I’ve known for a long time that without a lot more TLC, the site wasn’t maximizing its potential.

Half a year ago, I was contacted by an entrepreneur / investor / music fan who had been following the site for years, who was interested in buying it. The decision was tough - it had always been my baby, and I was proud to have done a lot with a little. But I’m also increasingly realizing that my life is like death by a thousand paper cuts - a zillion small involvements keep me permanently spread too thin, and I’ve been feeling like I want to clear more time for living. So we negotiated for a while and came up with a fair deal that would leave me as partial owner, but without further maintenance responsibilities. A few months ago, I sold kissthisguy.com and began the long process of cleaning up code, converting ad spaces, documenting the back-end, and getting the site ready for its next incarnation. A new company has been created to back the site, and some really solid backing is appearing to push the site in all kinds of directions I never foresaw.

I’m really proud to have created kissthisguy, and it’s been a great ride. But I’m also happy to let it move on in this way - I know that with my schedule, the site would just have lingered in the “lightly maintained” way it had been for years. Now it’s got new life and an inspired new owner. We haven’t said anything about this on the site yet, but check back in the coming months to see where it’s all going.

This week, Stuck Between Stations combed through a Denny’s shortstack of YouTube bookmarks to find videos that simply will not escape the brain, no matter how many times you call the sheriff to force their eviction. The visual equivalent of ear-worms, these A/V train wrecks take up residence in the corpus callosum, either because of or despite their badness, and lodge there for keeps, like grains of sand in your Juicyfruit. There are elements of awe and sadomasochism at work here. It’s not just that these videos are “so bad they’re good” (though there’s plenty of campy indulgence); we’ve come to genuinely love these “bad” music videos, and offer no apologies. In Vol. 1, Roger and Scot subject themselves to South Indian breakdancing music, the bizarre-but-relevant soul stylings of Tay Zonday, a troupe of angry geriatrics covering The Who, an airborne David Hasselhoff, the worst Star Wars theme song cover ever taped, and Leonard Nimoy’s foray into Hobbiton.

Recently at Stuck Between Stations:

New Stuck writer Zoe Krylova on “freak folk” standard bearer Devendra Banhart: This is the Soft Voice of the Evening.

We’ve been gifted with a gorgeous, strong, shining cabinet of drawers to open and marvel at. It is made of recycled wood. It has been refinished. There is mother of pearl inlay. And each compartment holds some news.

Also: Roger Moore on guitar guru Henry Kaiser’s musical expedition to the South Pole: Henry Kaiser in the Sweet Sunny South. The video of Kaiser using the steel marker that is the exact south pole as a guitar slide is required viewing.

Call me a freak, but I’ve never actually heard the music of Nirvana, except for “Teen Spirit,” which is popular enough to be unavoidable, and the Unplugged album, which I bought because it had covers of two Meat Puppets tracks. OK, so now I’m listening to Nevermind for the first time (having a bit of trouble figuring out why Cobain is so famous - most of it sounds as lame now as the rest of grunge did in the summer of ‘91).

Amazon just opened up their MP3 music store, and it’s huge - not just in size, but in what it means for DRM’d music. 2.3 million songs for starters, all in standard MP3 format in excellent fidelity (256kbps), and all DRM-free. iTunes charges extra for the privilege of getting hi-fi tracks without DRM; with Amazon it’s the default.

iTunes has historically had clear advantages over web-based music stores from a UI/performance/integration perspective, but Amazon has worked hard to make the problems of doing all of this without a dedicated/integrated app go away. I’ve been begging eMusic to add an inline music player for years now, but nothing has changed. Amazon gets it right on the first try.

Amazon does require a helper app if you want to download whole albums though (which is the only way I buy). The helper app is available for Windows and Mac right out of the gate; Linux version coming soon. I found the Mac version buggy - it promised to transfer tracks directly into iTunes, but didn’t. And the preferences panel refused to open until I relaunched the app. I’m seriously considering dropping the eMusic subscription I’ve kept up for years. Will have to study more to see how their catalogs compare.

The eMusic subscription model is a mixed bag. On one hand, it’s a killer deal. But like Netflix, it’s only a deal if you actually use it. So every month I dutifully surf through my saved items and grab my 60 tracks, even if I’m too busy to digest them properly. The upside is that it’s sort of a commitment to expose myself to something new every month. Amazon’s pay-as-you-go model makes more sense financially for occasional buyers, but without the subscription goading me to discovery, I can imagine myself buying - and discovering - less music. You have to be more pro-active to keep new tracks flowing.

The critical missing piece at Amazon is the lack of informational context. iTunes includes reviews and metadata from the All Music Guide, and eMusic hires actual music writers to generate tons of interesting/useful summary info and magazine-style essays. Amazon relies entirely on customer reviews. If there are none, you’re on your own. Not a terrible thing, but I do like to learn a bit about the artist before diving in. [Correction: Amazon does include contextual information for some artists, but not for albums (that I can see).

Hrm… their Captain Beefheart section includes two albums I’ve never heard or heard of, while their Meat Puppets selection includes almost nothing (and none of the good stuff). Give ‘em a break - it’s a fresh service. But you’d think it wouldn’t be hard to get SST on board.

Anyway - the important thing is the precedent this establishes. If Amazon can do DRM-free, non-proprietary digital distribution deals with these major labels, it’s the final nail in the coffin. DRM is over (for music anyway). Tears shed by no one.

Catching up on the past month at stuckbetweenstations (working backwards):

M.I.A., with the Radio On: Roger on how British/ Sri Lankan aural graffiti artist M.I.A. cribs lovingly from Jonathan Richman.

Das Kapital: Scot, short blurb on an incredible music video by Russian socio-economic soldier / popstar Lyapis Trubetskoy.

John Coltrane, Transcribed to Limericks: Roger’s sui-generis limerick transcription of John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland, including the bonus track available only on CD:

Afro-Blue

A fleet-fingered drummer named Mongo
Wrote a rhythm best suited for bongo
But Trane tore it asunder
Elvin thrashed through the thunder
You could hear it from Jersey to Congo.

Listening to the Water: Roger, with a New Orleans odyssey on the second anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Doldrums: Rock Film Redux: Scot, on the tradition of film being played behind live rock performances, emphasis on the films of Scott Hamrah and Chris Fujiwara behind the “post-rock” (sorry) jams of Boston’s Cul de Sac.