Townsman Christian writes:
Hey,
This is Christian, at Fritz’s place watching the Super Bowl, joining Fritz in some scotch tasting and posting as him.
I am trying to convince Fritz to join me to go see Jandek in Richmond next month. He’d never heard of Jandek. If the rest of you haven’t, click here.
Give us your opinions here! The curiosity factor alone should be worth the trip.
Hey diddle diddle. Here’s your chance to fiddle over this year’s big shew. Any rock-related ads or references beside Sheryl Crow’s hair color not fading away? Anyone disappointed that Prince didn’t wear football pants for his performance, a la early-80s Jagger?
So a favorite figure of RTH controversy – so controversial that Mr. Mod dares not utter his name – is performing at halftime during this year’s Super Bowl. I just wanted to be sure we had as many laptops hummin’ as possible during that performance – we need to fully and finally iron out our differences on this guy, and I reckon a real-time assessment might be just what we need to come to terms.
I look forward to your comments.
All-Star Jam. Share your innermost feelings here. How ’bout a few questions to prompt said innermost feelings? Here goes:
Have a fantastic weekend.
Some of you may remember me telling this story before, but I’ve never had the chance to tell it as I plan to do now. You may want to click on the following song as you begin reading this tale. It’s a pretty number that sets the initial tone of Psychic TV’s 1983 release, Dreams Less Sweet. Go ahead, check out “The Orchids”. It’s really pretty.
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While doing my annual re-evaluation of The Small Faces’ Odgen’s Nut Gone Flake album this morning, I couldn’t help thinking about how much mileage and forgiveness the album has probably garnered among rock fans thanks to the cool, die-cut cover sleeve in which it originally appeared. I’d show you a picture of it, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, but any 2-dimensional, digital image I can find doesn’t do it justice: the sleeve was die-cut to a circle, perfectly containing the album itself with no extra space around it. Very cool, and the motivation for saving up the spare pennies from my bookstore clerk years to buy an expensive used copy in the mid-80s!
Surely, I ran home that night, dusted off what seeds and stems I could gather, scraped out some resin from my bong, and braced myself for what would be one of those psych-rock fanboy moments a young music geek chases until he’s reached the end of the rainbow and has paid good money for one too many Idle Race albums, eventually hitting rock bottom with a desparate grab at the collected works of SRC.
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From the late 1940s until, arguably, the early 1960s, music fans in search of “serious,” academically rigorous and technically exacting music – that was not of the classical idiom – frequently turned to big band leader Stan Kenton. Kenton’s band offered everything these brainy music listeners sought: music engineered (and I choose that word very carefully) for maximum impact, a well-considered rationale for each and every composition, technically gifted soloists – really, everything the brainiac-aesthete desired.
Today, nearly 30 years after Stan Kenton’s passing, his legacy remains, taking many forms. Though the likes of Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe may have fallen into relative disfavor, modern-day Kentonites find much to enjoy in the posthumous releases of Stevie Ray Vaughan, the latest Eno album, and — if approached from the right angle — The Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, Jason Falkner, Polyhonic Spree, and many more. That guy in college who rhapsodized over the animal sounds Adrian Belew could coax out of his battered Musicmaster? Kentonite. The bass player in your band, who can’t talk about Sly and the Family Stone without going off on a tangent about how Larry Graham invented “poppin'” and “slappin'”? Kentonite. The Zappa freak who’s still trying to explain why you should care about Frank’s all-synclavier album, Jazz From Hell? Kentonite, all the way.
And it’s easy to fall prey to Kentonite thinking. It makes you feel smarter than the average bear. It helps compartmentalize loose, wiggly rationalizations for liking unpopular things. In a place like Rock Town Hall, we’re expected to have reasons for liking things – and that’s why the charges of Kentonism fly so freely around these parts.
So…are you a Kentonite? Of course you are!
