Rock Town Hall, I asked you if you wanted a repeat of Hear Factor, the bold experiment in which Townspeople prepared mix CDs of challenging music they liked for me to distribute to other Townspeople who might feel especially challenged by each mix CD. Each Townsperson swore to listen to nothing but that CD for the next 3 days. They then reported their experiences to the Hall, at which time fellow Townspeople chimed in with their thoughts on the mix. It was pretty great, wasn’t it?
As I said, I asked if you wanted a repeat, and there was resounding YES! followed by prompt submission of a second round of challenging mix CDs. You guys were aces; I fell down on the job! The CDs hit just as I entered a pretty hellish stretch in work. I was traveling a lot and didn’t get to the post office in a timely fashion to distribute the CDs. Then I didn’t get there at all and started hearing from a few of you, you know, like getting shit. I deserved it, but I still held out on doing what I’d suggested we do once again. Sad. Continue reading »
I know you’re hungry for season 2 of Hear Factor, the interactive Rock Town Hall event in which Townspeople are asked to live in another Townsperson’s ears, listening exclusively to a mix CD from a possibly challenging slice of another Townsperson’s taste in music, and then reporting back their experiences to the Hall. If you weren’t around for last season’s Hear Factor and want to catch up on all the excitement, a fine summary of season 1/preview of season 2 can be found here. For a limited time, you can find links to downloads of the full mixes that Townspeople were subjected to in 2007.
I’m happy to report that submissions are rolling in, and I’m already getting some ideas of how I might redistribute these mixes so that they best challenge participants. As was the case last year, as I got to preview these mixes, there are some strong songs in all styles submitted. As a little preview of what may be coming the way of our participants, I’ve randomly selected a cut from each of the first 3 CDs I received and posted them here, without title or artist information, as our participants will receive their mixes!
If any of these are tracks you submitted, please don’t reveal that. Our hope is that participants will listen to their mix CDs without knowledge of the compiler. They will be welcome to guess at each compiler in their reports back to the list. Fear. Enjoy. What have you!
Rock Town Hall members will be sent anonymous mix CDs lovingly (sincerely) compiled by other Townspeople that may be inappropriate to a recipient’s usual tastes. For 3 days, each participating Townsperson will listen to no other music but the possibly inappropriate mix CD they have received. They will report back to the list. Highlights of their mixes will be posted for all to experience and chime in on.
On May 2, 2007, BigSteve and General Slocum reported on their anonymous, alien CD mixes. Hear Factor was off and running.
A year later, we think it’s time to stage season 2 of Hear Factor. If this is new to you, take some time to visit last year’s activities in the links provided throughout this post. If you lived through – and especially if you participated in – last year’s inaugural Hear Factor, feel free to share your reflections with newer members of the Halls of Rock.
Let me know, either in the Comments section of this post, or directly by e-mail (headstache [at] gmail [dot] com) if you’re interested in taking part in this year’s experiment. If we get a dozen or so participants, we’ll take a couple of days to further streamline the process before moving forward. I’m thinking we limit mix CDs to 10 songs or 45 minutes, whichever comes first, to allow participants the opportunity to better focus on a set of possibly alien music. Let me know if you have any questions.
Meanwhile, links to each of last year’s Hear Factor exchanges follow, including selections and full zipped files of the mixes our Townspeople lived with for 3 straight days. Continue reading »
Judging by the title of the mix I received, there’s little mistaking who put this mix of recent-vintage songs together. I assume Mr. Mod sent it my way because it had so much new music and because he knew I’d recently been scooping up Thin Lizzy‘s back catalog.
Overall, when I play this in the background, it’s a solid mix. When I try to break it down song-by-song I run into difficulties. For fair balance, you can download the entire mix here.
The CD starts with driving drums and off-kilter guitar that sounds like the prelude to one of those neo-Gang of Four bands that we all the rage 2 years ago. (Was it that long ago?) Then things settle down into on OK, ’90s, neo-proto-goth vibe. What was that band with the redheaded Scottish singer and Nirvana’s producer, Garbage? The song is called “Rideshare” and it’s by Beauty Pill. Don’t know a thing about them. Best thing about the song is that it ends like it begins.
A newer PJ Harvey song, “Big Exit”, follows. I like this one. It’s got a verse that sounds like what Patti Smith might do if she could sing and if her band didn’t sound like warmed-over E-Streeters, and the verse sounds a lot like Heart. There’s some Modern Rock cheese smeared across it, but this one delivers on the pounding beat. Continue reading »
Townsman Geo check in with his Hear Factor experience!
To start with, I misread the first artist and am surprised to hear The O’Jays kick off the mix with a duet between a hyperkinetic drummer and a noisy, simplistic guitar doing an instrumental. Oh, “The Jay Jays.” I see.
When the second song kicks in, I notice that it, like the first, has an untethered, uncompressed noisiness that I like. The Comet Gain song, “Record Collector”, reminds me of the verse to the Buzzcocks’ song, “Harmony in my Head”, but it never quite gets to the payoff the Buzzcocks’ chorus delivers. It does have an amusing dead stop in the middle, that starts back up with music so totally different after the break that I would’ve sworn it was one of those Pink Flag segues where a new song kicks right in and eventually you can’t hear the end of the first without hearing the start of the second in your mind’s ear.
I’ll admit that although I have heard the Plastic Ono Band Album, I haven’t rigorously explored every second- or third-tier rock band that has come down the pike. I know “Itchycoo Park” and I’m sure I’ve heard Ogden’s whatever it is, but I’m barely familiar with the Small Faces beyond that. I expect “Almost Grown” to be the Chuck Berry tune that I believe The Animals covered, but instead it’s an organ driven, nearly instrumental soul groove. I always think of McLagan as a piano player, but I remember back to his autobiography that he’s also played a lot of organ. Pretty nice.
So three songs in, and I’m trying to place the “theme” of the set as well as the source. I see Big Star and Velvet Crush down the list and I figure this to be some kind of rough power pop collection sprinkled with some English antecedents. I wonder why Mr. Mod aimed this one at me since it’s not something I quite despise, but I guess I do have a studied disinterest to this stuff. It doesn’t appall me, but even at its nearly best, it often doesn’t grab me, more admired than loved. Continue reading »
When I finally found my Hear Factor cd, conveniently stashed under the couch by Mrs. kpdexter, I was excited to see so many titles I was unfamiliar with. The Traffic titles were a pleasant surprise to me, I guess I never considered them a hippie band, though “You Can All Join In” certainly has that feel, generally a feel-good kind of song.
Now, “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” has always held a special place in my heart, and it excited me to see it here. I often reflect back on Halloween 1991, enjoyed at the Halloween Mecca, Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. A carload of us drove the 3-hour trip from Dayton to Athens, armed only with 12-packs of Milwaukee’s Best Light, a few packs of smokes, some low-grade weed (of which I did not partake), and a bunch of shitty cassettes, a mixture of Canned Heat, early Ween, some weird Beach Boys stuff, a few Dead boots, and a Traffic mix tape. Now, the ride down was relatively uneventful, the driver was a bit paranoid because of all the contraband, and the fact that several of us were underage as well, so we played it cool, we sipped some beers and played some music, and talked about shit, school, and whatnot. We played some crappy Dead tape on the way there, and all lamented the fact that we were unable to score any psychedelics for the trip. I remember a rousing version of Franklin’s Tower>Help on the Way>Slipknot, but not much else, it was a pretty standard setlist, nothing too earth shattering. Continue reading »
When a Townsperson sent in Blood, Sweat & Tears’ 1968 album, Child Is Father to the Man, I knew which Hear Factor CD would be staying with me. It’s well known around here that I consider the band’s version of “And When I Die” the song I hate most in rock. “Spinning Wheel” isn’t far behind. “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” is another song I dread hearing. All that brassy bombast couched in Love Generation threads creeps me out. I like my share of velvet-jacketed ’60 bombast as well as my share of hippie music, but the Blood, Sweat & Tears I’d grown up hearing got the mix all wrong, and I hold them responsible for the similarly brassy, bombastic sound of the bands Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire.
Before I gave this album even one spin, I tried to calculate whether it would be better or worse not having David Clayton-Thomas sing on this album. I knew this album was from their early period, when Al Kooper, was thought of as some kind of blues-jazz-rock visionary and still is in some circles that consider it worth talking to him about anything but his fortunate and vital role in Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”. Clayton-Thomas was the voice of these hits I grew up hating, but the specter of Kooper was no stroll in the park for me as well. As I’ve made clear, his work in merging big band sounds with pseudo-hippie rock crossed the line with me, a line that I grew up more than willing to toe with my cherished childhood collection of Joe Cocker records. Now that was some horn-driven hippie rock. Let it all hang out! No blackface routine and embarrassng oom-pa-pa’s from The Mad Dogs and the Englishmen. But I digress.
Child Is Father to the Man opens with an obligatory, for the times, “Overture”. To my surprise, it was a pleasant string-driven melody that was devoid of the brassy bombast I’d come to dread in the music of Blood, Sweat & Tears. I guess the overture has made a comeback in the last 10 years, with the spate of Elephant 6-related bands who feel the need to allow listeners a minute to settle in. Not bad at all.
With the first proper song, however, I got my first expected taste of BS&T. “Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know” opens with electric piano and white jazz-blues singing. In due time the song is punctuated by those big, brassy horn arrangements. Sweet Daddy-o, how I cringe at that sound! On Day 1 of my listening experience I wrote in my journal,
“Blood, Sweat & Tears must have helped a lot of high school band geeks feel like they were part of the revolution. And this must be the kind of music Paul Weller revisited to give him the strength he needed to start recording all those songs from his solo album that I skip,”
By Day 2 this song inspired the image of a greasy, pock-marked guy with a thin goatee dry humping a black Lycra-clad, halter top-wearing barfly on the small dance floor of a neighborhood bar. Thankfully things would pick up. Continue reading »
