Lists of Bests compiles all the lists of highly-rated books, films, and music into one place. Best of all, you can use their checklists to keep track of how many you have read, seen, or heard. For the curious, my page is here. It makes me realize how few books I’ve actually read… (via alison)
Category: Music
Two Music Documentaries
I’ve watched two very different documentaries about musicians over the past couple of days. Standing In The Shadows Of Motown (2002) gives some long-overdue attention to The Funk Brothers, who were the backing band for more than 50 Number 1 hits from Motown recording artists. While the film was enjoyable, it suffered a bit from a lack of historical context, as well as some glaring interview omissions (where were Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, etc.?). Since it was dealing with a large group of musicians, it took a sort of wide-angle look, but it didn’t look very deeply.
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (2002) is an entirely different sort of film. Director Sam Jones follows the band Wilco as they record their fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Along the way, original member Jay Bennett is fired, and the band are dropped by Reprise Records. With their completed album in hand, they are forced to shop it around to other labels for almost another year. This is a close-up view of a group of highly talented and creative people in the crucible, being ground down by the business side of the music industry, even as they are making the most ambitious music of their lives.
Both films feature lots of performances. In the Funk Brothers film, the band play old Motown classics, backing present-day vocalists, with mixed results. Ben Harper, for instance, doesn’t quite fit the Marvin Gaye mold. The Wilco film more seamlessly blends the performances into the flow of the film. Jones also filmed entirely in black and white, and though a first-time director, he’s an award-winning photographer and his sense of composition is flawless. Like Wilco’s music, the film is polished and beautiful.
Both films are worth your time, though, and if you are able to see them on DVD, both include lots of outtakes and extra music.
I Am A DJ
In cleaning up our storage locker, I came across some old cassettes I made of my short-lived career as a radio DJ. In 1992, I attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to get my teacher certification, and I decided to get as involved as I could, so I worked as a copy editor on the newspaper and DJ’ed a two-hour slot each week on WCAL, the campus radio station.
If I recall correctly, it was only a cable broadcast, so I might have had 20 listeners on a good night, but I taped my shows for posterity anyway. Listening to my inane banter now is downright embarrassing, but I am still proud of the music I played. I hope I might have succeeded in raising the bar musically for at least a few of the mostly-conservative students. I’m sure that my show was the only place you could have heard Sloan in Western Michigan at that time. And though I didn’t particularly like them, the Goo Goo Dolls were strictly a regional act at that time, and I played one of their songs to promote an upcoming show. I also mixed in things like poetry readings (Dylan Thomas, Rainer Maria Rilke) and even a “Backwards Masking Satanic Message of the Week” contest!
For anyone whose musical memory stretches back that far, whatever happened to bands like Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Daisy Chainsaw, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, The Darling Buds, and Chapterhouse?
By the way, my show was called “Where the Wild Things Are” (after the classic Maurice Sendak children’s book), and I began each week by playing a record of someone reading the story. The lead-in to my first track was always when the guy read: “And now, cried Max, Let the wild rumpus start…”
Obviously, I’d love to do this all again…
Nuggets
Great nuggets from Azerrad’s book. This from the chapter on the Butthole Surfers:
Often the whole band would rip apart stuffed animals onstage, like a frenzied pack of psychotic cannibals.
Hmmm. I think somebody from The Dismemberment Plan must have been to one of these shows…
And a tasty Minutemen anecdote:
In Florida, [Mike] Watt got food poisoning and suffered from chronic diarrhea for days afterward. “It got useless to keep changing my pants,” Watt wrote in the tour story anthology Hell on Wheels, “so I tied a shirt around my waist and rags around the bottoms of my pant legs and just said fuck it. After three days my pants were full to the knees. Luckily, my condition improved.”
Yet more Butthole Surfers fun:
Once, they had pulled up to the City Gardens club in Trenton, New Jersey, and were told their show had been cancelled in favor of the Replacements. (“We were replaced by the Replacements!” Coffey notes.) But the Buttholes pleaded poverty and successfully lobbied to open the show as Playtex Butt Agamemnons.
Best. Band. Name. Ever.
Our Band Could Be Your Life
If you’ve noticed that I’ve been listening to a lot of Minutemen, Black Flag, Mission of Burma, and Minor Threat recently, blame Andre Torrez. On his recommendation, I’ve started reading Michael Azerrad’s book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. Though I’ve been a Mission of Burma fan for a while, all of the other bands profiled in the book are fairly new to me. You see, I must confess that being a shameless Anglophile, I had discounted a lot of American music from the punk and new wave period until pretty recently. When I read Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s amazing Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, it restored my respect for New York bands of the period, and I think this book will do it for the American ’80s punk scene I had previously dismissed.
Incidentally, did you know that the criminally overlooked Mission of Burma have been playing together again since last year? There’s even a documentary being made about the reunion shows. Moby played guitar with them when they played in New York, too. Neat.