GOD SAVE THE KINKS!

My ode to the Kinks………

     It must have been a few months ago – I found myself browsing through music magazines in a Borders and chanced upon a feature story on Ray Davies that utterly shocked me. I didn’t buy the magazine and I can’t exactly remember which one it was – it may have been a recording magazine of some sort since the story focused on the closing of noted Kinks recording studio “KONK” in London. The closing of professional recording studios is nothing new given the current state of the music industry and the economy in general these days (even Abbey Road has been threatened lately…….). What shocked me were the pictures of Ray sort of schlepping around the (very empty looking) studio, moving carts of equipment down hallways and looking generally pretty sad. Now, it’s possible Ray may have been playing it up a bit for the camera, but there was just a look of defeated resignation on his face that was ………… awful, really.

    Now, I’m not about to start pissing and moaning on about “poor Ray” – I’m sure he’s managed decently enough financially (I would bloody well HOPE so, anyway). But it seems to me there’s a rather conspicuous absence of any real ongoing appreciation for the Kinks these days. Essentially there were only four major English bands from the 60's that made serious ripples :  The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and The KINKS. Beatles are still popular, Stones are still stoning away, Who music can be heard on CSI – where’s the LOVE for the KINKS??

    The last time you could see the Kinks live was in 1996. That was the last year they released any new material – and this was even on a “live compilation” disc. The last totally new Kinks album was released in 1993. Uh, that’ll be 20 years ago in TWO MORE YEARS. Now, since that time Ray and brother Dave have had solo shows going on – Dave suffered a stroke a few years ago – Ray got mugged in New Orleans before that, but they’ve both survived and managed to make new music despite the adversities – just not TOGETHER, as THE KINKS.

    Recently, there have been overtures coming from Ray about getting the Kinks back together, but Dave’s not biting this time (the legendary feuding continues……..). Now, don’t get me wrong – I have a lot of respect for Dave and I’m sure he’s got some darned valid reasons for holding his ground. And, dammit, I respect him for that in an era of the “lame sellout” mentality we’re in nowadays. But, how shall I put this……it all makes me want to stand up and shout: “HEY! REMEMBER THESE GUYS?? THEY WERE PRETTY BLOODY AMAZING!! FOR GOD’S SAKE – GOD SAVE THE KINKS, ALREADY!!”

    I only saw the Kinks live once. 1985 - Eisenhower Hall - West Point. They ROCKED! It was a great show – Ray even jumped into the crowd and grabbed a girl and started dancing in the front row at one point – it was classic. I totally regret not seeing them at least once more. Over the years my appreciation for their music has grown – all the different eras – the snotty garage sound of the early days, the wistful & pastoral mid-60’s Waterloo Sunset period – heck, even the weirdo 70’s concept albums have some stellar moments (I’ll recommend “Schoolboys in Disgrace” in particular as a “lost classic”). And lets not forget those great late 70’s, early 80’s hits (wouldn’t you loved to have written a song like “Better Things”?).

    Last night it was the “Muswell Hillbillies” album – there are some truly sublime moments on that record. Oklahoma USA? Have a Cuppa Tea? You can download the whole record for eight bucks on amazon – when was the last time a record knocked you on your ass – do yourself a favor a score a copy of this – good for whatever ails ya. Have a cuppa tea, fer chrissake have a cuppa tea…….

    I posted this video on my facebook the other day:

– a live TV rendering of “The Village Green Preservation Society” from 1972. Now, I know this song (and the album of the same name) like the back of my hand, but watching this clip I was stunned at how LITERATE and INTELLIGENT these lyrics are. Well, it wasn’t a big hit song, yet still I can’t help wondering – could a major music act get away with something like this today?

    Alright – now its your turn – what’s your favorite Kinks song? Any albums you’re missing? Do yourself a favor and pick one up, download it, whatever……….. GOD SAVE THE KINKS!!!

Rock and Roll Radio

I was searching all sorts of useless info on my computer last week when I came across an Obit from last summer announcing the Passing of Stew Schantz. many people over the age of 35 back home in the Hudson Valley area would know Stew as either the man who put the K in K-104 (befor that they actually called themselves WSPK ten forty seven no kidding) and getting them away from an AOR format to a top 40 hit music format. Of course there is the rival 101.5 WPDH Listeners who will remember Stew as 1/2 of the "Stew and John" Morningshow with John Steffanci, this twosome invented the "Roofathon" which started atop the roof of 7-11 on route 9 which is still an annual event by the Mighty PDH.
Here is my beef, nowhere on WPDH web site or the WSPK K-104 site is there any metion of Stew or an in memoriam, sadly he's forgotten. It seems this is Radio in our millenium,it bears no heratage, theres no history or respect,and sadly at many of these stations there are no personalities on the air anymore. Here in Myrtle Beach my former program director at Y-103 back in the early 90's works for multimedia doing the morning show on the Talk station WRNN, however his voice is heard all evening and literally all weekend long as OTTO on classic Rock Wave104. I recently asked Dave about that and he laughed,Otto has a last name it's Otto Mated. in other words just a voice no person. There was an incredible Rock Station here WKZQ many years ago it 102 then 101.7 and it currently broadcasts on the 96.1 , when I was a kid I dreamed a dream to one day DJ and WKZQ alongside such legends as Mixon Dixon and Cazey Quinn because this station was for lack of a better word awsome. nowadays it's in the same building as wave 104 and they only play extrememly new songs by very new bands, though heavy it's one flavor while Wave plays the same Led Zeppelin tune (Black Dog) all day long, and neither will play a new album by a classic band...the current "Voices" are not memorable,there is nothing for them to strive to be the best of.
It seems to me that my Generation is the last to know Free Form AOR radio, stations that needed to earn our loyalty, DJ's we still remember by name (even if those powerhouses could care less) I remember Rock n Roll Radio and sadly Rock n Roll radio doesn't rememberJoey Ramone let along the BS'er Billy Smith ,Mixon Dixon, Stew SChantz, Joe Obrien, and among the living Saturday nights will allways be Dr. John Baron. Whatever happened to the Spirit of Radio that Rush sang about, Lest we forget where we first heard many of the greatest rock n roll ever....and who introduced it to us...this is Rock n Roll Radio Rock on

I didn't know Classical music was broken.............

NPR posed the question "How do we fix Classical Music?" and left the window open for folks to comment. A kind of democratic "What should be done about this?" deal. Though I believe the intended question really was - how can the "Classical" music world entice more people to listen - perhaps beyond the comfort zone of popular music? There are some interesting observations and theories. The LP cover above is an example of my own quest - I found a stone mint copy of this great Richard Strauss record at a thrift store this week for 50 cents! Old classical vinyl is plentiful and cheap and often can be found in beautiful shape. It's not all home runs, but for the price one can afford to experiment a little.
Here's one of my favorite responses on the NPR site:

            "G.B. Shaw said the greatest ideas are born as blasphemies and die as dogma. So it goes with the innovations of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. There is a young generation of musicians and listeners who are ready to be transported by anything, if it's compelling. The only real difference between a "composer" and a songwriter is in the degree of challenge the composer is willing to issue to a listener. Contemporaries freaked out over Beethoven's late quartets, and they were right to! It's audacious stuff. Today it might sound more familiar, unless you really listen to it. A composer asks to be really listened to. That's the only distinction I can make between popular and classical music. So compose what you love and expect us to really listen."

       A poster using the pseudonym  "Opervati" wrote the above quote and I think it's quite an astute observation concerning what composers might expect from listeners. Here's a link to the rest of the article - enjoy!
                             http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2011/01/27/133278615/how-do-we-fix-classical-music-heres-what-you-told-us?ft=1&f=1039

If you live long enough, your weirdness could be celebrated……..

       About seven years ago, I had a subscription to Discoveries magazine – a record collecting rag published every two months or so. In 2003, an interesting column popped up for a few issues and then disappeared – “Thrift store records and cheap red wine”. The author would scour his neighborhood Salvation Army for weird old vinyl LPs, buy some odd imported cheap red wine and write a critique – one LP per bottle of vino. It made for some entertaining reading, but the review about an enigmatic classical pianist by the name of Nyireyghazi was one of the most persuasive pieces of writing about music I’ve ever encountered. I found a site where somebody copied this whole article (though the author's name is misspelled) and you can read it here:               
                http://www.tinhuey.com/TSRCRW-04.htm

It’s a great read – the author is a pretty talented writer and musician named Lane Steinberg. The line from the review that really grabbed me was “This record makes Skip James sound like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.” To me, this was a glowing recommendation – almost like a challenge. “Must get my hands on a copy of this,” says me. But somehow, I got sidetracked and forgot about the article until about a month ago when I uncovered the old magazine.

I had to scour ebay for a vinyl copy since this is not on CD (and not likely to be in the near future I reckon). I spotted a cheap one as a “buy it now” deal and while I was waiting for it to arrive I started checking out other Liszt stuff on youtube to get a feel for what the music sounds like when performed by reasonably sane musicians. I was surprised to discover I knew at least one Liszt piece pretty well – the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. You know it too! Remember that Bugs Bunny cartoon – you know, the one where Bugs is playing the piano? Okay here it is:
        http://videosift.com/video/Rhapsody-Rabbit-Bugs-Bunny-plays-Hungarian-Rhapsody-No-2
So that’s Liszt. Anyway – Liszt was a character in his own right and composed some pretty far out stuff for the era in which he lived and died (1800’s).

But back to Nyireyghazi. There are now a few tribute websites devoted to this mad pianist – one of them has a link to a TV report from the 1970’s profiling Nyireyghazi’s rediscovery. Here’s the site where you can see the documentary:
 http://www.nyiregyhazi.org/nyiregyhazi-documentary/

Through this site I discovered a biography was written about Nyireyghazi that was published three years ago (small wonder these things get published at all). Amazon came through here with a $4 paperback edition. I’m about halfway through the book now and what a crazy life! Did the creators of Forest Gump know about Nyireyghazi? Here’s a quick glance at who he was:               
        A child prodigy (played for the Queen of England at 8 years old!), virtuoso by his 20’s, but several factors collided which left him drifting – sometimes homeless on park benches for……….* gulp *    DECADES………… occasionally rubbing shoulders with movie stars, gangsters, politicians  and racking up a total of TEN WIVES over the course of his life. He was rediscovered in his  *gulp *  70’s (!!) whereupon he cut records for Columbia, toured Japan and then………drifted back into pretty grim poverty. And that’s the SHORT version of what could possibly be described as the most improbable, WTF life of a musician that I’ve ever encountered.

The album finally arrived a few days ago (the package was bent in shipping, but amazingly the records were not damaged - kind of appropriate to the music somehow). I sat listening to it as I was typing. This is possibly the most pain-soaked record I’ve ever heard in my life. If Lester Bangs had heard this record he would have LOVED it. Nyireyghazi’s technique was shot to hell by the time he cut these sides, but the soul really shines through. This is not “pristine” and shiny classical music – it’s raw, in your face and real, but still somehow dignified (an irony since the musician in question had, well, a pretty loose interpretation of the concept of dignity – he lived like a rock star in more ways than one!). Arnold Schoenberg apparently loved him. Otto Klemperer hated him. Audiences were divided too – pretty much through his whole life. The Columbia record unfortunately does not reflect the pristine technique that reviews of his earlier performances speak of. But it does reflect his aesthetic – which is controversial still and raises the question: “Does so-called Classical music demand precision over soul?” Are these qualities mutually exclusive? Can a performance be artistically valid if the performer takes liberties with the composition and makes mistakes? What is music all about, anyway?

I think Nyireyghazi was probably doomed to be a fringe-artist anyway – no matter how gifted he was as a young man, he carved out a pretty obscure niche as a controversial interpreter of a Romantic composer/pianist (Liszt) who had fallen out of favor (and still isn’t widely regarded) with the general public. In his own way, he was as far out as Sun Ra, almost as ubiquitous and misunderstood in his lifetime, but – and this is really saying something – I think not destined to be as widely remembered. Now if Nyireyghazi had performed wearing a space helmet………………..

78's can sure sound GREAT!

    This is a picture of what 78 collectors call a "Scroll Victor" - if you look at the record label there's some scroll-work to the design. These discs are noted for being some of the best sounding 78 discs ever produced. How good can they sound? Well, I don't have any (yet) in my own collection - someday I'd love to be set up for these things, but there are folks with their own youtube channels that specialize in uploading quality videos of records from their collection - and even with youtube's compromised sound you can hear just how awesome these things can be. Here's one example from 1932:

 
This particular youtuber has his own channel as well - full of this stuff. See here for more:
                      http://www.youtube.com/user/Prozoot#g/u

Apparently, many of these RCA Victor recordings were made in an old, deconsecrated  church in Camden NJ - with one single microphone! Pretty stunning sound for such spartan conditions, eh? Enjoy!

Roads Paved with Vinyl

These ramblings of mine are not about a particular artist, album or even production. You'll not read about the high fidelity quadrophonic seperations, or the benifits of an adamantium tipped needle. I want to talk about the experience of a record collector, and the elation of 'The Find'.

There is something about knowing that a day is put aside to go off to a far off town, gussing up the car and having wonderful conversation with a knowledgeable fellow musicologist (and Better Friend) to find a used record store. The travelling is always something special when you see unique places in clean town that aren't so familiar and so everyday hum-drum. Sampling different Cole Slaw with a diner-burger.. These are just the small points.

The excitement of the voyage from the car door to the store door. (hoping they haven't closed down or that they're open on Sundays). Hearing the scratchy old records played on equipment valued at just above my car. Searching through unorganized bins to find the secret treasure you've never seen before, or haven't seen since you were a kid, or a cover that is so funny (or so bad, or so weird) that you HAVE to have it!

Who remembers looking at album covers, searching for hidden meanings that relate to the music that you're listening to for the first time? Staring at the colors and shapes trying to figure out just what it all means. I remember. I remember discovering the Yes-Fragile album for the first time. I swear I went on the 'Trip' all the big kids were talking about as I listened with my headphones and stared at the cover.

Remember the 'goodies' you'd find in a new record once you took off the cellophane? The Earth, Wind and Fire poster, the Magical Mystery Tour booklet with the GREAT pictures and terrible prose? or the oversized Band-Aid with a poem scribbled on it. (10 points to you if you know what album that was in!) My cellophane never lasted till I got home; most often it didn't make it through the parking lot. The inner sleeves, the smell of virgin vinyl... Ahhh!

And who remembers the bargain bins at your local department store? Can anyone describe the feeling of getting the last elusive Utopia album that completed your set of Rundgren discs? after searching for 2 years? for $1.99?!?!?!

Or in that used record store discovering something you once has and loved, and forgot about. that you recognize immediately with just that split second glance...and it all comes back.

Or seeing that NRBQ at Yankee Stadium album..(the cover is an empty Yankee Stadium with a teeny tiny itty bitty NRBQ guys in the bleacher) that always makes me laugh! I'm smiling thinking about it now! Ever open an album to find colored vinyl or a bonus 45? Can't get that from iTunes!

These things only a record collector can feel, its reserved only for us

and we haven't even played the Mutha yet!

Christopher Ceriello

What exactly is this record about?

Anyone?