{"id":15330,"date":"2012-09-03T10:26:21","date_gmt":"2012-09-03T14:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=15330"},"modified":"2012-09-04T07:13:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T11:13:15","slug":"all-star-jam-189","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/all-star-jam-189\/","title":{"rendered":"All-Star Jam"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EOPXvtZvb7g?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>The <strong>All-Star Jam<\/strong> is a place to pass along links of interest, news, and all sorts of things that just happen to be on your mind and that don&#8217;t have an outlet in your daily social circle.<\/p>\n<p>You may recall <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/roger-bechirian-interview\/\" target=\"_blank\">our excellent interview with producer\/engineer <strong>Roger Bechirian<\/strong><\/a> (Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, The Undertones, Dave Edmunds, Graham Parker, and the rest of the core two thirds of my teenage record collection). I&#8217;m proud to say we were way ahead of the curve in probing the depths of this man&#8217;s mind. Recently my favorite music magazine, <em>Tape Op<\/em>, followed our lead and interviewed the man. A <a href=\"http:\/\/tapeop.com\/articles\/90\/roger-bechirian-bonus\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Tape Op<\/em> web exclusive bonus bevy of photos<\/a> from Becharian&#8217;s personal archive of these legendary recording sessions is available <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/tapeop.com\/articles\/90\/roger-bechirian-bonus\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a><\/strong>. Check it out! Of special interest for more than a few of you, I bet, are some excellent photos showing the <strong>mic set-up on drum kits<\/strong> for the likes of Pete Thomas and Terry Williams.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Townsman Al<\/strong> passed along a link to an interesting post from musician <strong>Robbie Fulks<\/strong>&#8216; website, a piece entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/robbiefulks.com\/blog\/posts\/370-too-much-goddamned-music\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;too much goddamned music<\/a>.&#8221; As Al has mentioned before, Fulks would make a great participant here in the Halls of Rock. Let&#8217;s give a shout-out to this guy! Here&#8217;s just one of many great passages from his thoughts regarding the all-too-well-known process of attempting to cull a gigantic record collection:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If only we who produce music could trim the dross before it goes to market. We can&#8217;t, because it takes money and luck and a lot of trial-and-error to come up with the quantity of music from which\u00a0<em>good <\/em>is likely to emerge, and even then the good may only stand out in the fullness of time. Meantime, we need the resources to experiment and to fail, repeatedly.\u00a0The Cloud serves us admirably here. The artiste can put his efforts in the public square more quickly and cheaply than ever, and his followers can choose to subsidize the art without taking on the clutter. Attractively designed physical media can store and memorialize the small edge of this that proves valuable. That is, the songs fight out the first few rounds in the digital realm, and some time later are crowned with the honor of preservation in a more permanent and sensually appealing format. At first glance it may look cruel to consign a lot of effortful music to a likely digital oblivion. But most of our 78s and 45s are gone and forgotten, along with the devices on which we played them; and of course no music in human history before the late 19th century is on record &#8212; a loss that is philosophically mournable but that we all live with easily. And reducing the plasticware leads to elegant gains. Long after the Beatles are dead, your shelf may display a dozen playable Beatles objects but only one by Ringo Starr. The rest of Ringo&#8217;s songs will have magically vanished into the nether-regions of the Cloud, or somehow turned to water and nourished an arid subcontinent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I know we&#8217;ve got our Facebook pages, our Twitter accounts, and telepathic apps on our smartphones. That&#8217;s all great, but finding such nuggets through our assorted social media streams can be a chore. For every rock nugget posted on our social media streams I might have to sift through 99 photos of the healthy, exotic meal one friend ate last night; how adorable another friend&#8217;s kid is; or how outrageous a statement a public figure recently made in public.<\/p>\n<p><em>Mmm! <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Adorable!<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Outrageous!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Now, let&#8217;s rock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The All-Star Jam is a place to pass along links of interest, news, and all sorts of things that just happen to be on your mind and that don&#8217;t have an outlet in your daily social circle. You may recall our excellent interview with producer\/engineer Roger Bechirian (Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, The Undertones, Dave Edmunds, <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/all-star-jam-189\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15330"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}