Rock Town Hall • Rock Music Discussion

Gig-Day Rituals

Feb 282014

Tonight my band plays its first live show in a few years. We took the last few years off from playing live owing to apathy (our audience’s as well as our own), long before a bandmate’s illness sealed the deal. With our lineup reformulated, a new record to play live, and a refreshed ego (speaking for myself), I’m really looking forward to playing live again. I’m also trying to quell the slight butterflies I get by remembering my gig-day rituals. Let’s see what’s ahead, and I’m curious to learn your gig-day rituals.

Welcome to the Club, Sammymaudlin!

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 282014

Happy birthday, Sammymaudlin, fearless leader of The Back Office, old friend, album cover designer extraordinaire, funny man, soulful man, friend whose voice always reminds me of Ron Howard’s Richie Cunningham voice, and soon-to-be-my-faux-leather-clad running mate in The Big Easy, where I will don the leather fringe jacket. I know you don’t put a lot of stock in dates, but this one is worth celebrating—and milking—for all it’s worth.

Can I say how old you are? Can I at least say you’re now the same age that I turned last June? That’s not giving away too much, is it? Not everyone around here knows me and my personal details. Welcome to the club, if you know what I mean.

Let’s put aside all pretense and get to the parts you most desire: the gifts. Let’s start with your ideal cover band, who will be performing in New Orleans when we meet there next week:

NY/NJ/CA/RI/PA/IL…State of Mind?

Posted by ladymisskirroyale

Feb 272014

A friend posted this today on FB. It’s invites further discussion from the likes of us:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/25/here-is-a-map-of-every-states-favorite-band/#ixzz2uNGOSGVa

Bonobo? Really? It was making me verklempt. I had to look up the band.

Let’s talk amongst ourselves.

Radiohead: Pushin’ Too Hard?

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 252014

Your Friendly Neighborhood Gollum

Saturday night I watched an hour-long performance by Radiohead on Austin City Limits. It’s the second such hour-long televised performance I’ve watched by the band on PBS. A couple of years ago I saw some performance of them in a studio. In both cases, I was interested enough to keep watching, but despite being impressed by their arsenal of avant-garde touches; instrument juggling; and obscure and cool gear as well as the maximum effort that all the band members put into their music, I got very little out of the experience of trying to listen to and feel the music. It added up to a whole lot of nothing.

Surely, I’ve been missing something.

All-Star Jam

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 212014

Help these yearning cats out with good tidings in this All-Star Jam, won’t you?

Senses Working Overtime?

Posted by funoka

Feb 192014

A review of the new Beck album in The New Yorker by Sasha Frere-Jones says:

After listening to “Morning Phase” almost fifty times, I can’t find a single thing wrong with it.

The new album, which is streaming free on NPR right now, may be great, but I have streamed it only four times. I guess I’m blown away that the reviewer gave it 50 spins. I like to give new albums a good shot, but I usually throw it in the towel after five spins, if I’m not getting it. A recent exception is Bowie’s The Next Day. It took me a bit to warm up to it, it but I really like it now. But, I don’t need 50 plays to figure out if I’m going to like the new Springsteen odds & sods collection, or an Americana release, like Lydia Loveless.

My questions are: How many spins do you typically give a new album before making a judgement? And have you ever listened to any record 50 times in a short period of time?

I look forward to your responses.

When the African American Robed Choir Is Not Enough…

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Feb 182014

I know nothing about the phenomenon of the animated movie Frozen, but a groundswell of attention has reached me in recent weeks. I keep hearing about some song called “Let It Go,” which stuck on my radar because I wrote a song by that title years ago and chuckle at the notion of learning that one of my songs was selected as the big musical number in a Disney movie. Alas, it’s not my “Let It Go.”

Anyhow, I had not heard a lick of this song or seen even a trailer for Frozen until this morning, when an “Africanized Tribal Cover” of the song appeared on a friend’s Facebook feed. The prospect of an “Africanized Tribal Cover,” as the parenthetical title on YouTube promised, was too ripe to bypass during Exploitive Black Rock History Month. See what you think:

For those of you who’ve seen the movie, am I right to assume that the original movie version is not “Africanized” or even “tribalized”? Or was there a reason to “Africanize” the song? Is the Ice Princess, or whoever is the movie character singing the song, at least surrounded by an animated choir of robed Inuits?

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