DudeAsInCool

John Mayer lives two-thirds the life of a rockstar by fabian toepel & mareen fischinger Crazewire grabbed John Mayer in Cologne, Germany while on his European tour. The show reminded him of good ole' times because only 100 came to see him play the rundown factory-like Gebäude 9. During the conversation, Mayer admitted his squareness, talked about life on tour, and revealed his musical future. On the topic of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll he only confessed, "two out of three." First time in Europe? John Mayer: No, actually this is my second time. I was here back in June. What's different? We speak different languages, I know that for sure. But when you travel for work it almost doesn’t matter what’s outside your window. What matters is that you happen to be in the place you’re supposed to play in at that time. So, I really haven’t gotten the chance to go out and see the local sights, which I would love to do. The way I make peace with that is one day I will come back with somebody who hasn’t been here, and I will not really have been here either. They will be saying “Well, you’ve already been here”, and I will say “Not really, I was in a hotel for a long time” – so, I really don’t know all the differences, but I wish I did. What do you miss the most when you’re on tour? Oh, everything! You know I’m a product of my environment as we all are. In a way it is good because it forces you to really survey what it is inside you that you can take with you everywhere you go, and what it is that you didn’t pack, that you really need. We call touring in Europe the “gentle jail” because you don’t have any of your stuff. It’s luxuries that you don’t have – not the luxury of America, but the luxury of being in your environment. What else do you do on tour, besides the shows? I write songs, play guitar and listen to music. I love going online, too. Chatting with friends and stuff is a good way of keeping in touch. And also, I love graphic design and I spend a lot of time doing that. I do all my merch and I did the album cover. I’m learning. So that would have been your day job, if you hadn't become a rockstar? Yes, probably. Either graphic designer or filmmaker. Do you write songs while you’re on tour? Is there a special pattern you follow writing them? I always mess around. I don’t promise myself that I will write songs, but I will definitely come up with pieces. And if I write a song on the road-- that’s great. But most of the time it’s just collecting little pieces. I mean, that’s how I write songs: I bang around on the guitar and I think I have a brand new song. And it’s really not, it just turns out to be a part. I always think about lyrical ideas, but I don’t start putting lyrics in until the music is there. I don’t wake up, jump out of bed and go “Oh my God, I got to write this down.” I have to kind of suggest it to myself while playing guitar, it’s almost like I split it into two people. The guitar player plays and I listen and I go “cool” and that’s where I jump in. It’s really fun. Do you ever think that you could fill stadiums with your music? I still don’t know if it can fill them. We haven’t gotten to stadiums yet, but it’s amazing that the tour is sold out. We are on tour for a long time, and we play in ten thousand seat arenas. I don’t know what I thought exactly. I never put a number on it, but I’m amazed. Because whatever number I would have put on it, it would have certainly been lower. I thought I was going to play two thousand seats for the rest of my life. You feel silly when you go up there for playing arenas and think “Oh, that’s stupid. Let’s be realistic!” My music is just me and the band. We have lights and effects, but I know what you mean: it’s not exactly arena-ready music. I like that and I think people like that. They like that there’s an artist that doesn’t fit in any category. That is what Room for Squares is. I don’t know where I stand. I’m always the guy at the party who is in somebody’s way and has to move. I still don’t know where I’m supposed to stand in the music community. I’m a square myself in the sense that I don’t really have a place, I don’t really stand amongst the others. Most of your listeners are college-aged -- do you always intend to play just for this audience? I want to play for anyone who listens. And that’s what we are doing. People who go to college go to shows. I think there is a listening and a show-going audience. And the show-going audience is a certain demographic of people. Listening audience is hopefully nine to ninety. I got people coming up who I think are going to ask me for the time because I’m too old, and they say they love my record and I go, “How did you get my record?” Anybody and everybody is invited. If you’re cool and you can share – come on in. Are we entering a new era of musicians? There are so many young, talented songwriters playing like Ryan Adams, Bright Eyes, Ben Kweller. All in their twenties. Its really hard for me to calculate what I’m doing based on its contributions to a whole era. I can only think about my music in the way that it is, making it better and moving it forward. I think in terms of being part of a movement that would be decided by someone looking in. I can’t tell, and it would make me feel horribly responsible for it. I’m just one guy making music I would have made if I was the only person doing it or if I was the one hundred and thousandth person doing it. I think there is a lot of other people doing it, too. Trends exist in the industry – I don’t really know. I’m a part of something – I certainly didn’t start it, but I’m a part of this thing that makes kids want to write lyrics and sing melodies. And I think that’s great because for so long it was about learning two guitar accords and finding a band name and then you were ready. Now people are writing and really crafting, which is cool. Of course, you can always have too much craft; sometimes you just want some beat. Is that when you listen to when you’re at home? Or do you personally prefer acoustic music? No, I hardly listen to any acoustic music. That’s the thing-- whenever you see an artist play, so much of what they listen to is different. For example, Stephen Chopek who supports me with the drums used to play jazz. And I never thought he could work in my band. Sometimes, what you play is not what you listen to. I go home and I listen to jazz, blues, and to pop music. As long as it has emotional content. That’s what I like. Could you imagine changing your style for the next album? It’s going to change a little bit. It’s not going to be so crazy. It’s going to become a little more electric – but not heavier – still smooth, just electric smooth. Oh, maybe that’s the title of the new record: Electric Smooth! No wait, that’s horrible! The record is also going to be a little less sunny than No Such Thing (I remember somebody saying that it had a tropical light). It will be more complex. I like the idea of producing record after record, and them all being completely different. Hopefully, I won’t lose too many fans in the process. Most of your songs seem autobiographical. Could you imagine writing a political one? No, I could never write a political song. To write a political song you’ve got to have knowledge, and I don’t have a broad enough knowledge of politics. In terms of the autobiography of experiences in the record, some of the things never happened. But emotionally speaking, they are incredibly autobiographical. You know, I can’t write a song unless I can connect with it on an emotional level. I go “Oh, I know what that must feel like.” And if I can’t say that, I can’t write the song. Some of the things that happen in the songs aren’t realistic in terms of my life, but the feeling that they create is absolutely real. It’s just using those experiences that you made up to drive the point up – based on a true story. You once said that you wanted to “spread the word" in Europe. Tell me about your gospel. I want everyone in Europe to hear about me so that if they want to listen to my music they can. That doesn’t mean I want everyone in Europe to love me, I just want as many people as possible to be introduced to my music. And if it doesn’t work, it will go away. Is there a special message behind your songs? If there was one consistent thread, it would be about understanding and trying to feel understood in a life that is very hard to understand sometimes. Are you religious? Yeah. Slowly but surely. It’s a weird topic of conversation because, to me, it’s too personal unless I was a fully-realized practitioner of religion. The journey to my possible–hopefully eventual– full understanding is such a personal thing, and I’m still on that journey. Do you live the life of a rockstar? You know, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll? No, I don’t. Two out of three. Everybody has the choice of how they want to live their lives and they have their choices of how they want to live their success. I like to live my success as if it’s not a surprise. Some people live their success as if it is a surprise. And they make the most out of it as if it would disappear the next day. I don’t feel like it’s going to, and even if it did I wouldn’t want it to go down to being stupid. It’s just a job, and I love doing it and I want to get better at it. It doesn’t really lead itself to that much behavioral difference at all. Do you cook? No, I microwave. Just like a rockstar should. But, I have one more question -- do all American rockstars wear such big watches? I love this watch! I bought it as a gift for myself. There is a company called IWC in Schaffhausen, Switzerland that makes them. It’s one of the biggest watches that they make. I also have a big hand. You can probably even see what time it is from over there. This watch is all the luxury I travel with! I take my watch off before I go to bed, I put it back on the next morning, and I think “I’m doing alright!” Crazewire.com

It's rare for a rapper to make a goodbye album -- generally the marketplace kicks you out of the game first. But Jay-Z is a rare rapper. The dominant figure of the post-Biggie and --Tupac era, he spit cool and witty with devastating flows, dropped classic albums, influenced MCs, changed pop culture and built a tall stack of dollars in the process. Time will tell whether or not The Black Album is Jay-Z's final release, but it certainly is a goodbye album. He's settling scores and letting us deeper into his life than ever. He talks in depth about his parents, giving his mother, Gloria Carter, time to shine on the opening song, "December 4th." On the Eminem-produced "Moment of Clarity," he invokes the memory of his father, Adnes: "Pop died/Didn't cry/Didn't know him that well/Between him doin' heroin and me doin' crack sales." But by the end of the verse, he has forgiven his late father and says to him, "Save a place in heaven till the next time we meet forever." The Black Album has a dream team of producers, including Kanye West ("Lucifer," "Encore"), Just Blaze ("December 4th"), the Neptunes ("Change Clothes," "Allure") and Timbaland, whose obese club-banger "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" easily wins the prize for best beat, with Rick Rubin's raucous, rock-drenched "99 Problems" a close second. Given one last chance to make an impact, Jay-Z has come up with one of the better albums of his career, though perhaps a shade lesser than his very best, Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint. Still, we've witnessed not merely a Hall of Fame career but one of the top-shelf greatest of all time, up there with Rakim, Big, Pac and Nas. And like every great rapper, Jay-Z has never been afraid to tell us he's Number One. On "What More Can I Say," he rhymes, "Pound for pound I'm the best to ever come around here/Excluding nobody." He could be right. TOURE (Rolling Stone 937, December 11, 2003) • 4 Stars

LOL. He was kind of a child prodigy. Met him once at the studios - quite charming; his music is not my cup of tea either.

Cold Chillin' With Kool Keith An interview ... -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 7/2001 Easily one of the most talented, hard-working artists in the music business, rapper/musician/producer Kool Keith is undeniably also one of the most innovative and unique. Never one to fall in with the norm, Kool Keith has always marched to the beat of his own drum. During his prolific career, he has amassed a discography unmatched in the rap world; a discography so extensive very few are sure exactly how much material he's actually put out. Almost as extensive as his track record is his stable of personas, alter egos that run the gamut from extraterrestrial to ghetto to just plain weird. His newest persona, Black Elvis, debuted on Black Elvis/ Lost in Space, an album that showcased naked beats and Keith's first go-round as sole producer. Black Elvis... was also Keith's most commercially successful album to date. Now with the release of his newest album, Spankmaster, there's no persona, just Keith. And his freaky vibes. As an original member of the Bronx's legendary Ultramagnetic MCs, Keith, despite his unusual antics, had gained mad respect in the underground hip-hop scene. After releasing numerous joints with Ultramagnetic MCs, Ultra (a duo consisting of Keith and Tim Dog from the Ultramagnetic MCs), working with producers such as Kutmasta Kurt and Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, and appearing on a yet-to-be-figured-out number of other projects, Keith finally gained national recognition with the Dr. Octagon persona (a crazed gynecologist from the year 3000 who travels back in time to 1996), a project that had paired him with DJ Q-Bert. The album, Dr. Octagonecologyst, was based in science fiction and unlike anything anyone had ever heard. However, on the heels of his growing popularity and commercial viability, Dr. Octagon was killed by Dr. Dooom, another persona, in an effort to squelch major label woes. In light of Keith's track record and rumors of mental instability, the prospect of interviewing him was exciting. After all, Keith is that rare thing in the rap world - a rapper's rapper. He is also a self-proclaimed freak to the inth degree and is notorious for his highly sexual lyrics and exploits. I didn't know what to expect. However, once I caught up with him, backstage and fresh off the House of Blues stage (earlier that day he'd been featured at the Warped Tour), I had the pleasure of vibing with a hospitable and engagingly funny personality. True, he is different, but he is hardly the raving lunatic some interviewers have painted him to be. Check out what the Spankmaster had to say about his latest offering, accusations of misogyny, the Internet and the music industry in general. How is Spankmaster different from previous albums? All my albums are made different. I think Spankmaster is one of the albums I took into diversity of sound... Spankmaster doesn't sound like Dr.Octagon and Octagon don't sound like Spankmaster don't sound like [black] Elvis. I think it's one of the most progressive projects I did, specifically it differentiated in the way of giving you a different type of sound, I did different programs, especially the drum sounds plus the whole cadence was different. I think I rhymed it on more bouncy type of cymbal beats in a Kool Keith way with a lot of different tempos. I didn't rhyme on one and two beats, I rhymed on more like a lot of bass cymbals and the whole album was more like I did an album in my head. A strip club album. Strip club? Kind of a more techno feel, you mean? Well, its basically a strip club album basically like the whole kind of... programmed differently without sound, futuristically made, kind of like the next level stuff for myself. Instead of me rapping on just the 1 - 2 hip-hop beats... something totally different. Instead of me doing something with a predictable artist or if I was working with something normal like a hip-hop album. I just did something more different. What drives the need to be even more "different"? Is it all work or does it come from a personal subconscious growth? I've done so many hip-hop albums already I got tired of just hip-hop. I think a lot of kids that are into hip-hop are not knowing that hip-hop got to move on. The beats change, I mean you got a lot of artists out there advancing new sound, new technology, new beats everything sounding very futuristic, so I feel it would have been boring for me to do another hip-hop record. I can't do another hip-hop album right now I feel like... I'm not trying to do a R&B album, I'm not trying to do a crossover album, I just feel like I need to do a totally different album than just your average hip-hop stuff. So, if Spankmaster isn't a hip-hop album what is it? It's hard to explain. I think it's Kool Keith next type stuff. I think this stuff I work on... I mean it's just advanced. I mean I'd say it has the elements of techno, it has the street bottom, it has the elements of a strip club, it has the elements of some hard shit, but it's different. I sing my own choruses. I think it's the kind of album people wouldn't expect me to do. Is it done with a persona in mind or is it just you? I did it in texture. I planned that album when I made it... the tracks I picked out, the synchronization, the arrangements of all my tracks I did that way, you know what I'm saying? Ok... What do you say to people who accuse you of hating women? In what way? A bad way a loving way? I don't really say I dislike women. I write the most sexiest records out. I think I write more exotic records. I think I write more outspoken than the average rapper. I think I'm not scared to say anything I want. You have girls that sing about guys ain't paying their bills and men are this and men are that and I write about women who want to go out for free, they don't want to pay for the dinner, they try to get over, they wanna leave... I write a lot of songs about my impressions from a man's point of view. If you want to say you got to take a woman out to a fancy restaurant, I write songs about hey I'm not taking you to a fancy restaurant, I wanna take you to McDonald's. I think people hate the kind of humorous way of me saying that. I'm not a glamorous guy so I'm not gonna write about living a life of champagne - ...bling bling... All the singers are singing I wanna take you to the Bahamas and drink pina coladas. I be saying stuff that's kind of more real. I wanna go make some peanut butter and jelly. I'll write a song about girl why don't you grab a peanut butter sandwich. I think people get mad because I make more direct records. I'm not against women. I'm not against men. I just write about me telling my side of how I would say something. Like sometimes you ain't got to go out. I mean the world is a place where it feels like a woman has to go out everywhere in society, you have to buy her and cook her a meal and stuff. You feel it should be more 50 -50. Not even that, I'm just saying why can't we have a slice of pizza? Like how come I can’t be rated for me buying a slice? It's not that I'm cheap, how come we can’t go to Subway? I just don't feel like I need to add more to the glamorous life. So you're not a romantic. It's basically take it or leave it? I think I speak more for a person who doesn't have all the big cars. I have that type of life. I can go to a strip club or I can spend money on a girl. I can make money from my shows. I can make money from my records, floss and buy jewelry and stuff. I think I speak for the guy who is just s a regular guy who says yo I don't wanna go to an expensive restaurant. Really he has to go because society makes him go cause he has to say I have to impress this woman. I feel like hey why don't we go to Winchell's and get a donut and some hot chocolate. You know? What's the matter with that? Why should I pain't a big picture for no reason? I feel that that's a big part of me. I've always been a direct guy. I think I write the truth, that's what I think. I don't wanna write stuff that's not me. I don't wanna tell you I can buy you 20 cars, 8 diamond rings, a refrigerator full of Krystal and Belvedere. That's not me. I wouldn't feel good writing that. For my sexual point of me making records I think it has a direct thing towards women. I think guys would make a record like "I wanna hold you caress you and kiss you." I make a record like Sex-style. Just very direct to the point. Men sing a lot of songs that are very censored. (sings) I wanna hold you and touch your heart and give you my life - Hey, have you been listening to the radio lately? There's some pretty explicit stuff out there right now! You mentioned that you can’t make another "hip-hop" album. Do you feel that hip-hop is limited? What are your views on the rap industry? Everybody's slow right now, there's nothing happening musically, everybody's all on cable television and being manipulated by all the television right now, what's on cable telling people what to listen to and stuff. It's a shame that 90% of the people are fooled, everybody's absorbing all that shit. There's nothing you can do about it, everybody's so hard-headed and stealth with their selection. I think it's in chaos right now. There's a lot of old program directors still in music so we lost it right there. we need a young culture to be on a big station like hot 97, Power or the Beat to tell people let's program some future records. Let's add this to the play list. So we're stuck right now basically. Stagnation. Everybody's still in the 70s and 80s musically, still making remakes. When the millennium came everyone rushed to make futuristic albums at the last minute. But it was too late. I had BEEN making futuristic records way before a lot of the groups that came out, but now everybody is running to make their albums sound new, but it sounds too made up. It wasn't natural. Like when you listen to some of the stuff I did way before the millennium came. I'd been making futuristic records - Dr. Octagon, yeah... - so it was like when the ball dropped everybody panicked and started going into the studio just trying to make something weird like anything. It's very stagnant. Agreed. How do feel about, you know, hip-hop bands? You mean the punk rock stuff? Nah, like hip-hop bands. Do you see it going in a direction where there are like more instruments, like what the Roots have been doing for years? I don't know... I never got into that era of the urban soul stuff. I didn't see rap come that way. I seen rap come from a street pole and lamps in the street. So when I seen it get into that culture that fucked me up. It's cool. It offers diversity but I didn't like it because it took rap into a different process with that soulful stuff. I mean like even with like Arrested Development it made rap look more... antique. Country. It was more experimental, no? I couldn't adapt to it. I know a lot of people who collect Erykah Badu, they collect Jill Scott, they listen to Macy Gray, they listen to all those ethnic groups... hey, what's up? {Two guys walk up} Guys: Yo, good show man, that was very nice. Keith: Thanks. (exchanges pounds and turns back to me) That stuff didn't turn me on. I just felt like it was taking me out, that whole era, that part of music. It was more like... complaining to me. The Black movement, I didn't see Rap in that phase with the dashiki. You know they had the whole thing back in the day when A Tribe Called Quest, you know... what was that movement called... Zulu Nation... That era of the tribal effect. I just couldn't get into it. I mean I know my African roots and stuff but I just didn't see rap like that. I thought of rap I thought of Grand Master Flash and I thought of about what they went through. I didn't think of rap with that type of south feel and that look and the hay and all that. So a lot of those groups I didn't get into. I was always on the future type of stuff. So like in an ideal world, to project in ten years, in your ideal world where would you like to see rap, where do you think its going? We're so far behind now, I'd like to see it go to the future, I'll tell you that. The companies that sign these groups, you got on one hand everybody complaining and the other hand the materialistic stuff, but anything real like the future stuff , nobody, it's like they're late on that. What is "future rap"? What does it look like, smell like? Future sounds, new keyboards sounds, new technology, new drums just a whole new concept of music, you just put it on your headphones. I think the Neptunes are pretty future, Timbaland is future, something you can put a CD in and feel competitive. You could listen to a CD and feel that took a little bit of art to do. Like Stankonia perhaps? I didn't get into Stankonia. Once again, I don't listen to anything in that Black movement range. Ok. Who do you listen to? Who inspires you? Who do you listen to right now and be like "damn that shit is dope?" I listen to Esham (one of his artists). But I'm more into production right now. I'm listening to more beats right now for production. I haven't heard anybody that really twiddled my ears. I listen to certain people make beats. I open my mind. I listen ti everybody's music but I'm still hearing stagnation. Like I'll get open on somebody's project like they will start their album off with 4 good beats, but they'll make a mistake. They ll put a remake here in the middle of the album, two remakes and that turns me off right there. It's like everybody does that so it's hard to get into somebody's album. I listen to Timbaland. I think Missy Elliot is pretty creative, I mean at least trying to take it to the future. They got future beats. I think the Neptunes got beats. But still at that particular level of commercialism I listen to those projects I still hear some stagnation in a lot of the stuff. I mean my records are very different. I listen for ideas from different people. Not to copy, I just listen to see what's out there that I could make different from. I don't use it like the industry does. Do you get inspiration from music outside of hip-hop? I listen to drum 'n bass. That's about it. That's the only futuristic thing out there. Really. The industry is so stagnated. I'm getting ready to work on some singers. What do you think about the hip-hop summit and the current political atmosphere surrounding the hip-hop industry? I don't follow that part of the music industry. I'm totally out of that scene. People pop up with a lot of stuff, seen such and such in this magazine and that magazine, was I there. I don't really participate. I'm very alienated. As I get older, I 've shied away from a lot of convention. I've just been making my records. How do you bridge the gap between the commercial money making machine and the global community that is being affected by hip-hop? A lot of people want something for nothing. You can’t get mad at the commercial people cause they buy records. When you see a guy at tower records who buys 20 cds he's a commercial guy this is a regular. At least he's buying something. Look at the average kid who doesn't buy records complain, "Ah, I didn't like that album, I didn't like the beats on that project," you now you can’t satisfy em, "I didn't like the album cover." He's not buying his favorite artists record. It doesn't help either. So it's like the underground world no longer exists economically cause they're not giving money back to their supporting artists. They want everything free, dub cassettes, cds, there's no contribution. How do you feel about the role of the Internet in changing the music industry's business model? I didn't buy my computer yet. I heard the Internet is very powerful. You gotta get a computer so you can check out my website. I've been a George Washington type of guy. I still got my pen, my paper while everybody has 2 way pagers. I don't have one, I threw mine away. I just feel like technology, it doesn't impress me. What! I thought you were futuristic? I'm futuristic as far as fashion, clothing, home life. I think a lot of the high technology is distracting. You got 2 way pagers going off, cellular phones going off. It's a certain kind of technology I don't need. It's spending money. They want you to buy something new and make you spend your money again. I don't try to keep up with all that technology. They'll make a two way pager then they put a tv on it next year. What would you, Kool Keith, like to say to the millions of hip-hop Internet heads out there? Don't be too persuaded by the media, television and marketing. Open your mind without the manipulation of the media telling you what to buy. I buy records without the radio telling me to go buy 'em. MTV. Open your mind to other things, just be creative and original. Leave the 70s and the 80s alone. And the 90s. Ifè Oshun – RapAbout.com

Country rock was big for a spell. The Byrds, The Band.. The Dead... Riders of the Purple Sage. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I know this is old wave, but its still worth listening to. PS Speaking of the New Riders--theyre one of our advertisers!

Sure. Actually the others havent yet, cause they're probably doing other stuff--but I know they will be happy you're here. Feel free to post articles, whatever.. this is a community site. so if there is anything that interests ya, goferit--as you can see we are in the early building stages... :)

welcome to beatking. i hope you enjoy your stay.

The economy is starting to improve. But file sharing on Kazaa is up,too. Interesting contradictions. The lawsuits arent working in my opinion.

Send lawyers, guns and money CD sales have rebounded ever since the music biz started suing file-sharers. The industry is convinced there's a connection. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Eric Boehlert Salon.com Nov. 6, 2003 | In early September the major music record companies, desperate to stop a prolonged downturn in CD sales, took the drastic action of suing 261 of their own customers for illegally downloading thousands of songs off the Internet. Critics in the press and the online community mocked the move, suggesting the stuck-in-the-past industry had hit a new low. Some even predicted that rather than solving the problem the lawsuits would ignite a consumer backlash that would end up driving down sales even further. Two months later the industry is quietly basking in a rare CD sales boom. Thanks to a run of seven consecutive up weeks in which album sales have increased compared to corresponding weeks in 2002, business is suddenly surging. The sales uptick comes as welcome relief to executives who have watched over-the-counter business plunge for three years straight while the industry has shed tens of thousands of jobs. Just as there is no direct evidence proving that file-sharing led to the industry's sales decreases, there is also no proof that the lawsuits have spurred file-sharers to mend their piracy ways and head to the stores. There are a variety of factors that, taken together, could explain the rise in sales, including cheaper CDs, simultaneous release of superstar albums and the debut of Apple's iTunes, which allows consumer to download singles legally, and may be driving fans into record stores to buy entire albums. Still, the coincidental timing of the sales boom, immediately after the lawsuits were filed, is raising eyebrows in the industry, and is sure to offer support to those who want to continue to bring legal pressure to bear on individual music consumers. Since 2000, CD sales have skidded 15 percent, according to Nielsen Soundscan, which monitors sales. Worse, revenues during that span were down 30 percent, says the Recording Industry Association of America. The sales reversal has been particularly shocking considering that since CDs arrived in the marketplace during the mid-'80s, sales had never fallen in back-to-back years. Prior to the recent autumn sales surge, business year-to-date for 2003 was down 8.5 percent. In just over a month that gap has been cut to 6.2 percent. During one gigantic seven-day period in late September, U.S. album sales shot up 16 percent over the corresponding week in 2002. The lingering question on the minds of many is whether the RIAA lawsuits, and the avalanche of press attention they received, worked as planned. In other words, did the legal action instill fear in enough consumers to convince them to give up illegal downloading and return to the record shops and pay for CDs, just like the old days? Or at least convince them to sign up for legitimate online music subscription services, such as Apple's iTunes Music Store, MusicMatch, eMusic and the relaunched, no-longer-free Napster? "It's certainly possible that people who a few months ago would have said, 'I can get this for free online,' are now paying for CDs," notes Josh Bernoff, an analyst for Forrester Research. "If the lawsuits turned people off from stealing music and prompted them to buy music legally, then that was a gain for the industry," adds Geoff Mayfield, director of charts for Billboard magazine. "We just don't know yet." Wendy Seltzer, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which offers legal aid to people targeted in RIAA suits, dismisses any connection between the lawsuits and the sales rebound. "There's far too little data to draw any conclusion. There are all sorts of other explanations that can be offered up to explain the [sales] increase, such as the economy taking an upturn." Still, there are some telling indicators that suggest that rather than alienating consumers, the much-derided lawsuits may have inspired them to buy more CDs. The most obvious link is the timing between the filing of the suits and the beginning of the sales increase. The RIAA went to court on Sept. 8; the very next week the CD business began its rebound. Previously, the comatose industry hadn't posted a seven-day sales increase in 105 weeks, since just prior to Sept. 11, 2001. There's also anecdotal evidence that consumers are having second thoughts about illicit file-sharing. Last week, in an exchange that's been repeated often in recent weeks, the Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed an engineer who used the old Napster to download 2,000 songs. In the wake of the RIAA lawsuits, his illegal file-sharing activity is way down. "The risk," he said, "isn't worth it." Pg. 2 So How come file-swapping on Kazaa has actually increased this year? On the flip side, file-sharing activity on the leading peer-to-peer music-trading network Kazaa is up this year. According to BigChampagne, a company that tracks file-sharing, last year on average 2.5 million people worldwide at any given moment were logged on to Kazaa. Today, that number has ballooned to 4 million. So does that mean the RIAA lawsuits had no impact? Not necessarily, says BigChampagne's CEO Eric Garland. He says of course Kazaa's numbers are up, since "file-sharing is not a static activity; it's been snowballing for three years now." The question is, "Would Kazaa's trajectory this fall have been more aggressive without the threat of litigation?" In other words, is file-sharing activity up less than it would have been if the RIAA had done nothing? "That's a great question that cannot be answered," says Don Van Cleve, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, who reports that after suffering through some of their worst years ever, several member stores are now reporting robust sales again. The debate about what effect file-sharing is having on CD sales has raged for years. Today, most people in the music business assume that online piracy, and specifically the mainstream file-sharing revolution ushered in by the old Napster, triggered the unprecedented downturn in CD sales. But many in the tech and online community reject the correlation. Instead, they argue the CD recession was due to overpriced titles, weak product and a slumping economy. Some even suggest that file-sharing actually spurs sales, because music fans are exposed to new acts online, and if they like what they hear they'll go out and buy the better-sounding authorized disc. "It's too early to say that lawsuits are responsible for the increased sales, but it's probably a factor," says Billboard's Mayfield. Other factors include the recent surge in consumer confidence and spending. Also driving foot traffic at record stores was the announcement by the industry's largest label, Universal Music, that it was slashing prices on its top releases across the board. The unprecedented move effectively cut the sticker price for new superstar CDs from $17 or $18 down to $14, and, at many discount outlets, as low as $9.99. It's clear that Universal's price slashing has helped fuel business in recent weeks. But it's also worth noting that the move did not kick-start sales; Universal's cheaper CD prices didn't go into effect until nearly halfway through the seven-week sales boom. The other key factor pushing sales is easier to explain: a bushel of hit records. Led by rappers (Outkast, Ludacris, DMX), rockers (Dave Matthews, John Mayer, A Perfect Circle) and crooners (Rod Stewart, Barbara Streisand, "American Idol's" Clay Aiken), a parade of marquee names has posted impressive numbers. "I think the onslaught of bigger, better new releases has everything to do with" the mini-sales boom, says indie retailer Van Cleve. But again, it's not that simple. Since the industry does nearly twice as much business in the make-or-break fourth quarter as it does during any other, record company release schedules this time of year are always stacked with superstars. Last year was no different; Jay-Z, Shania Twain, and Eminem CDs all arrived on shelves early in the 2002 holiday shopping season. Yet as Mayfield at Billboard notes, year-to-date sales actually declined in last year's final quarter. What's different this year is the threat of legal action looming over file-swappers. It should not come as a surprise that the 261 suits may have worked as a deterrent. Several recent surveys have made it plain that if file-sharers thought illicit downloading might lead to a stiff penalty, they would cease and desist. "We did a survey of young consumers online," says Bernoff. "We asked if fear of jail or fines would stop them from downloading, and 68 percent said yes." In the wake of the RIAA lawsuits, a majority of respondents told Newsweek's pollster the crackdown would make them less likely to continue swapping songs. Despite the fresh CD sales rebound, nobody inside the music business thinks it has solved the file-sharing riddle. But industry executives may take comfort in the idea that at least some consumers can be scared straight.

Sex and Music. Ah - the perfect fit. But can you remember what music was playing the first time you made love? This is what we were listening to: The Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today

NY Times • 1/26/03 By JON PARELES In the lobby of the Ed Sullivan Theater, two perky handlers for ''The Late Show With David Letterman'' were giving their nightly pep talk to the people headed for the front rows. They encouraged laughter, the more enthusiastic the better. They warned against whistling, which could overload the microphones. They also had one more caution. ''If you hear sad news, don't make that sympathy sound,'' one instructed. ''You know, 'Awwwwww. . . . ' '' Advertisement The audience understood why. The show's only guest would be Warren Zevon, the songwriter known for the twisted humor of songs like ''Lawyers, Guns and Money,'' ''Werewolves of London'' and ''Poor Poor Pitiful Me'' and for troubled love songs like ''Hasten Down the Wind'' and ''Accidentally Like a Martyr.'' Zevon, 56, is a dying man. He has mesothelioma: the same kind of lung cancer, he dryly noted, that killed Steve McQueen. He has been informed he has only months to live. And in the part of that time that he is not spending with family and friends, he is writing and recording songs. ''I just thought right away that I wanted to work,'' he told me this fall over bacon and eggs in Hugo's, a restaurant near his apartment in West Hollywood. He was dressed like a junior faculty member, in jacket and jeans; his energy came and went. ''This is a good job. It's been a good job. Work is the most effective drug there can possibly be. ''I'm on the periphery of a lot of despair, of course,'' he said. ''You'd have to be stupid not to be. I have my moments when I'm not too thrilled about this whole deal. But at the same time, the songs have never come like this, so I'd have to feel more gratitude than anything else. I'm probably in the intensest creative period of my life.'' Zevon and his longtime bassist and collaborator, Jorge Calderon, have been writing whenever ideas strike them -- including, Zevon says, via cellphone conversations ''from the aisle of the health-food store. I have to move fast, because I don't know what's going to happen.'' The album in progress is sometimes somber, sometimes rowdy, and while the new songs are conscious of mortality, they're not daunted by it. In one called ''My Dirty Life and Times,'' Zevon sings, ''Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me/Some days the sun don't shine/Sometimes I wonder why I'm still running free/All up and down the line.'' Zevon says: ''I've talked to people who have, you know, paralyzing illnesses and those kinds of debilitating illnesses. And compared to that, this is a walk in the park, however it turns out. But there's certainly a limit to how explicitly I want them to tell me it's going to go.'' The Letterman appearance, in October, was likely to be Zevon's last public performance. He had a long connection to the show; when the band leader, Paul Shaffer, took time off, Letterman called on Zevon to lead the band, and Letterman makes a cameo appearance (shouting ''Hit somebody!'') on Zevon's 2002 album, ''My Ride's Here.'' Now he walked onstage as the band played ''I'll Sleep When I'm Dead,'' a Zevon song from 1976, and bluntly described his situation. ''I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years,'' he told Letterman. ''It's one of those phobias that didn't pay off.'' Letterman asked Zevon if his condition had taught him anything about life and death. ''How much you're supposed to enjoy every sandwich,'' Zevon answered. Weeks later, Letterman was still struck by the reply. ''Here's a guy looking right down the barrel of the gun,'' he said. ''And if a guy wanted to indulge himself in great hyperbole in that circumstance, who wouldn't forgive him? But that was perfect, the simplicity of that. If this guy is not a poet, who is?'' Zevon can calmly itemize some of the things he doesn't have to worry about anymore. High cholesterol. Getting fat. Going bald. ''Technology's on the decline, and that's a comfort to me,'' he says in a staticky phone conversation. (Page 2 of 4) But between jokes, he has been saying goodbyes and rationing his time. He had been a constant reader and moviegoer; a conversation with him is peppered with references to Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Thomas McGuane, Czeslaw Milosz, Martin Scorsese and Krzysztof Kieslowski, along with musical idols from Igor Stravinsky to Paul Simon to Jimmy Webb to Ian and Sylvia. Now his reading time is limited. He carries a small copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's ''Duino Elegies'' with him, because, he says, ''Rilke seems to write about a universe where everybody's dead except for a brief shining moment when we're not.'' He has also been playing the DVD of ''The Maltese Falcon'' over and over, he says, ''to watch Bogie smoke.'' Zevon was a lifelong smoker himself. And during the 1970's, he led the fast life of a hitmaking Los Angeles songwriter. He drank; he took drugs. ''I ran around like a psychotic,'' he says. He did his time in rehab during the 1980's. During the summer of 2002, he had been exercising when he started to feel chest pain and shortness of breath. He thought he had strained a muscle, but it didn't go away. Eventually, Zevon's dentist -- the only doctor he saw regularly -- insisted he go to a physician. From there, the news was bad. Zevon decided to make a public statement about his illness in September, and he has allowed a video crew from the cable channel VH1 to follow him as he makes what he expects will be his final album. ''It's a very weird situation because I keep asking myself how I suddenly was thrust into the position of being travel agent for death,'' he says. ''You know, spokesperson for the doomed. But then of course the whole point of why it's so strange is that I had already assigned myself that role so many years of writing ago.'' Death has been the black-humored punch line in Zevon's songs from his first albums to his most recent ones, ''Life'll Kill Ya'' and ''My Ride's Here.'' (The ride in question is a hearse.) The cover picture on ''Genius: The Best of Warren Zevon'' shows a skull. All three albums were finished before his illness was diagnosed. Throughout Zevon's career, he has always sung about calamity -- the murderous rampages in ''Excitable Boy,'' a junkie's downward spiral in ''Carmelita'' -- with a stoic, matter-of-fact baritone. His songs are full of uneasy laughs, not all of them on other people. Zevon commands a following among listeners, including a surprising number of authors, who admire his pithy storytelling. In songs like ''Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,'' he packs a screenplay's worth of incidents into a four-minute song. The journalist and novelist Carl Hiaasen was one fan who ended up collaborating with Zevon on lyrics. They met when Zevon showed up at a reading to thank Hiaasen for citing one of his songs. ''Some of the songs I liked best he couldn't remember having written,'' Hiaasen says. ''There are gaps in the tapes from his wild days.'' When he got the diagnosis, Zevon told Hiaasen: ''This is a lot harder for you than it is for me. If you had gone to bed as many nights as I did in the old days knowing that you had taken so much stuff that could kill you and not knowing if you would wake up, this is not as shocking as you think.'' evon had oddly matched parents: a Mormon mother, often in fragile health with heart trouble, and a Russian Jewish father whom he bluntly describes as a mobster. He was born in 1947 and named after his mother's brother, who died in World War II. ''I grew up in this family with a dead war hero kind of hovering over us,'' he says. ''And my father was a gangster. So I was working the way any artist does, working through those two ideas, kind of linked together. If there's a logical explanation for why you write, then this seems reasonably logical. ''People write because it seems like it'll be an easier job than carpet laying, that they might meet more girls,'' he says. ''And they write because the world strikes them as being a marvelous place, and they want to keep bringing that to everybody's attention. You know, a scary place, a menacing place, an exciting place because it's scary and menacing. But mainly, kind of glorious.'' (Page 3 of 4) Zevon was in junior high school, studying classical piano, when he had the chance to watch recording sessions with Igor Stravinsky and the conductor Robert Craft. But he soon decided classical music wasn't for him. ''I felt that it was music of another time,'' he says. ''I couldn't add anything, and it wasn't necessarily so relevant anymore.'' Still, he never entirely renounced it; it's easy to hear Aaron Copland in Zevon's piano parts, and for ''Genius,'' Zevon wrote a string arrangement that flaunts unlikely harmonies. Advertisement As a teenager Zevon started playing guitar and writing songs, and by the late 1960's he was already placing them. One, ''She Quit Me Man,'' was on the soundtrack of ''Midnight Cowboy.'' Another, ''Like the Seasons,'' was the B side of ''Happy Together,'' the Turtles' 1967 No. 1 single. ''That paid my rent for years,'' Zevon says. His first album, ''Wanted Dead or Alive,'' appeared in 1969 and was generally ignored. But songs like ''A Bullet for Ramona'' already revealed the gift for the pulp-fiction narratives that would run through his songs. He didn't start with any plan, he says. ''I was writing any damn thing I could. It would be anything that I could somehow stumble, stagger through and write, whether it was a folk song or a Burt Bacharach imitation. But I always knew when something was going to be worth working on, however long it took. And then I'd work on it for a year, sometimes just waiting for the words to come, waiting for the third verse. Or the bridge -- that can take 14 years. Or else you rationalize that it doesn't need a bridge.'' During the early 1970's, Zevon wrote jingles and led the Everly Brothers' backup band; he spent a summer playing piano in a bar in Spain. Back in California, he fell in with a coterie of songwriters who were melding folk, country and pop into the soft rock that would dominate the mid-1970's. In 1976, Linda Ronstadt made Zevon's ''Hasten Down the Wind'' the title song of an album, and Jackson Browne produced Zevon's first mature album, ''Warren Zevon.'' While royalties from Ronstadt's albums rolled in, Zevon built his own following. His 1978 album, ''Excitable Boy,'' reached the Top 10. But he was out of control. His songs turned sketchier, his performances unstable. He announced in the early 1980's that he was fighting alcoholism. And in the years of Madonna and big-haired metal bands, Zevon's songwriting -- smart tall tales set to piano marches and Celtic-tinged guitar tunes -- grew further out of sync with the pop mainstream. There was a five-year gap between albums, from 1982 to 1987, before he reappeared with the album ''Sentimental Hygiene,'' backed by members of R.E.M. It included ''Detox Mansion,'' a sardonic view of a celebrity rehab center. Like many of Zevon's funniest songs, it has a distinctly vulnerable spot: ''It's tough to be somebody/And it's hard not to fall apart.'' Along with other songwriters of his generation, Zevon was settling into a steady midlevel career. He made his most recent albums for an independent label, Artemis, and toured every so often, sometimes with a band, sometimes on his own. He supplied an occasional song for a television show (''Tales From the Crypt,'' ''Route 66''). And he continued to write his terse, telling picaresques, like ''Mr. Bad Example'' (a pre-Enron vision of amoral greed) and ''I Was in the House When the House Burned Down.'' He was not a major star, but he could still headline clubs, field requests from longtime fans and meet his heroes. During the sessions for ''Sentimental Hygiene,'' Bob Dylan showed up to pay his respects. ''When I walked into the studio and they said, 'Bob Dylan's here,' I said, 'Why?' 'To see you.' '' Zevon pauses. ''That's worth a million records to me.'' Dylan was in Los Angeles in October performing at the Wiltern Theater, and word had got around that he was singing some Zevon songs on tour. Arriving backstage, Zevon was greeted with the double takes a ghost would get. Johnny Depp eagerly volunteered to play ''very bad guitar'' on any session, anytime; Zevon said, ''I'll see you again.'' A studio musician too eagerly told Zevon that he looked much better than he would have expected. Soon Zevon was ushered upstairs to Dylan's dressing room, where the two songwriters traded a long glance. Dylan mumbled something about how sad he was to hear about Zevon's illness. ''I have come to value every moment,'' Zevon replied. A few moments later, they were trading shoptalk on songs and musicians, and soon enough, it was time for the show. Dylan fixed a thoughtful gaze on Zevon. ''I hope you like what you hear,'' he said. (Page 4 of 4) That night Dylan would sing three Zevon songs without introduction or comment: ''Mutineer,'' a love song that begins ''I was born to rock the boat''; ''Lawyers, Guns and Money''; and ''Accidentally Like a Martyr,'' in which, for a moment, he did an unerring impression of Zevon's voice. Zevon listened with concentration, soaking up the moment as his idol paid tribute to him. But fatigue set in; he had to slip out before the concert ended. ''There are levels past which things no longer connect,'' he told me afterward. ''There's nothing to relate them to; there's no way to really analyze them. To hear Dylan sing not just one song, but another. . . . It's a big thrill, but beyond the honor, it's just so strange, beyond even computing.'' As news of his illness spread, Zevon found himself with all the eager sidemen he could ask for. The sessions have drawn his longtime friends, like Jackson Browne and Dwight Yoakam, as well as admirers like Bruce Springsteen and Dylan. One day in November, Browne, Ry Cooder, T Bone Burnett, the actor-director Billy Bob Thornton and his collaborator Calderon all converged for a 12-hour marathon; Zevon's 33-year-old son, Jordan, was there, too. ''It was like 'This Is Your Life,' unplanned and unrehearsed,'' Zevon recalled. One song they recorded was ''Prison Grove,'' which got started, like many Zevon songs, with a title phrase that struck him as both odd and singable. ''Jokingly we refer to it as my Robert Redford in prison song,'' Zevon said. ''On another level it's really serious. Afterward, Jorge said, 'You know, your body's the prison.' And I said, 'Whoa, he knows me better than I know myself.' '' Cooder said after the session: ''It's not easy for him. It's hard work, recording. All the routine stuff about studios -- 'Do you like the playback? Do you care about the microphone?' -- I said: 'Man, just let that go. You don't have time.' This guy has to make every minute count. ''It's unbelievably sad and unbelievably brave,'' Cooder added. ''You get that kind of intense focus, and every word and every note is heartfelt. Plus, he is so funny. His asides while he was playing piano over the earphones, his remarks, I hope they keep it and make it part of the record. Everything is accentuated and becomes meaningful in an oblique way. There's subtext all over the place. I went around in another mental atmosphere for quite some time after that.'' In the back of his mind, Zevon grudgingly admits, he's wondering about posterity. He's hoping he'll be remembered better, he said, than the ''bad watercolor'' of Humphrey Bogart on the box for the ''Maltese Falcon'' DVD. ''Mostly I'm thinking about the next verse of the next song, 'Disorder in the House,' '' he says. ''But, you know, I'm also thinking and hoping and wondering if all these things mean something. ''The songs aren't all written,'' he continues. ''You don't know where they're going to go. That's the fun of the job. There's the usual malarkey, the usual gags, the usual stuff. And also a few songs written by way of kind of being farewells to people, goodbyes to people, gratitude to people. Expressions of, you know, this was a nice deal, life. But I don't think it's exactly weighted with sentimentality. ''We're not setting out to write doomed-guy songs. I'm not an agenda writer. I don't think you should set out to tell people, 'This is how the world looks from one's last few days on it,' any more than I think you should set out to tell people here's who they should vote for to be the mayor of Fresno, California.'' In fact, as he has been recording, he has noticed that the new songs are not as fixated on death as the ones he had been writing for the last three decades. He has recorded Bob Dylan's dying-cowboy song, ''Knockin' on Heaven's Door,'' but now that he is facing death directly, it has receded from his music. ''Somebody who won't go to the doctor for a normal checkup is fearful and nervous,'' he says. ''But once you find out what it's like on the other side, you can go beyond fear.'' Jon Pareles is a music critic for The Times. http://www.xnet2.com/patti/archives/0301/msg00282.html

He can play honky-tonk just like anything Dire Straits founder David Knopfler talks about his DIY solo career, Bush and Clear Channel's deals with the devil and why he hates "Sultans of Swing." - - - - - - - - - - - - By Bob Calhoun Nov. 10, 2003 | While so many members of the big classic-rock acts have strip-mined every last bit of their fading stardom with endless reunion tours and gigs at Indian casinos, Dire Straits founder David Knopfler has purposely escaped into obscurity. Knopfler started Dire Straits with his virtuoso brother Mark in 1977 and the band was quickly propelled into AOR stardom with the haunting hit "Sultans of Swing" off their self-titled 1978 debut album. As Mark handled the guitar solos, David's moody chords moved the melody and propelled the tune as it spun its tale of a down-and-out jazz band passed over by changing times and tastes. David's contribution to this late-night radio mainstay gives him a piece of rock 'n' roll immortality that few can equal, whether he wants it or not. David quit the band in 1980 before the runaway success of the "Brothers in Arms" album and the MTV stardom somewhat perversely gained by the anti-MTV hit "Money for Nothing." While his brother and former bandmates packed people into arenas, David embraced a DIY musical ethic and started recording his own solo records with little care for industry expectations. On his latest album, "Wishbones," Knopfler captures the soul of his earliest work and combines it with Biblical references ("Jericho," "St. Swithun's Day") and angry political rhetoric. On the song "Karla Faye," about the first woman to be executed in Texas since the Civil War (on Gov. George W. Bush's watch), Knopfler chides the now president with more intensity than can be found in a half-dozen Democratic presidential candidates. "Karla Faye, Karla Faye/ You gotta die for Georgie boy," Knopfler croons over a sad piano tune, "'Cause Georgie boy is on his way/ Georgie Porgie pudding and pie/ Blessed the girl then let her die." Salon caught up with David Knopfler by telephone in his Santa Monica, Calif., hotel. He talked about his current small-venue tour, his early days with "the Straits" and the contemporary fusion of music, business and politics in what he calls "the devil's courtyard." Tell me about forming Dire Straits. The most distinctive thing about that band was the guitar interplay between you and your brother, combining folk with jazz chords. Well, more folk back then. There were a few jazz chords slipped in, but we weren't really jazz. We were playing together since we were tiny, so it was a very intuitive and instinctive thing. Every time Mark went out I would kind of steal his guitar and copy what he'd been up to. I used to play in a school folk club and I was writing my own songs. I didn't know if you were allowed to, then. I was only about 12 or 13 so I would come in and say, "This is a traditional Irish song ..." I thought you weren't supposed to write your own songs, so I kept that a secret. It's funny now if you think about it, but I thought that I was doing something that you weren't supposed to do and that I would get into trouble. How did you come up with the division of guitar labor between Mark and yourself where you're playing rhythm and he's playing lead? When he was playing lead I had to cover basically, so I would be playing rhythm. I was never a lead guitarist and I'm still no lead guitarist. I have really no interest in doing that. Mark was always really the star performer. When you were putting together that first record and you came up with "Sultans of Swing," did you ever imagine it would become the almost inescapable anthem that it is today? I hate that song. It's an albatross. It's made me a lot of money but I hate it. It was never my favorite song then either. No, I had no concept that it was going to be huge. In fact, it was a piano song originally and it migrated into a strange, kind of hybrid "Greensleeves"-y kind of thing with a 1950s rhythm groove to it. It was an odd track altogether. Back in the 1970s there were these haunting ballads and haunting big rock songs like "Hotel California," "Stairway to Heaven" and "Dream On." They're all songs about being trapped or about futility. "Sultans of Swing" is one of them. What do you think that that was about? I haven't really considered it, to be honest. I have no idea. You're probably better at that than me. You're the writer. Vietnam was the deal and Woodstock and I suppose that there was a kind of post-Woodstock malaise with people kind of falling around not quite sure where they were at. England just kind of followed slavishly in the American tradition. I started writing songs when I was very young but my own songwriting didn't really get serious until after the Straits. I didn't get professional with my writing until my first solo record in 1983. I really don't know what the 1970s songwriting was really about. There was angst in it but then there's always been angst in songwriting. It was nothing new. I mean, Henry VIII wrote "Alas my love you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously" in the 16th century. Is unrequited love any different now? _________________________________________________ Next page | "The Straits were meant to be a cult band ... an English Little Feat, not some sort of household name" You left Dire Straits before the success of "Brothers in Arms." Do you ever second-guess yourself for that? Oh, no. It was the best decision I ever made in my life, and it wasn't really a decision. It felt like if I didn't take that step I would be crushed by a 1,000-ton weight. I felt this weight coming down towards me hurtling through the sky. What made you feel that way? I felt that I was losing myself in the process of the machinery of fame and celebrity and I didn't think that it had much to do with what I was interested in. Which was what? Songwriting and creative art -- the artist aspect of it. The Straits were meant to be a cult band. My ambition for the Straits was that we were going to be like an English Little Feat, not that we were going to be some sort of household name. I didn't ever want that for the band. It turned into this mega-million thing that was never meant to happen as far as I was concerned. It kind of failed when we did that. It kind of frightened me, our success. Listening to your new solo album, "Wishbones," it actually sounds like Dire Straits' first couple of albums. I haven't taken any great detours. I've just carried on doing what I do. All my albums are just a continuation of the same line. Several songs on the record, such as "King of Ashes" and "Jericho," have these biblical themes. What led you to that? We can blame St. Bob [Dylan] for that, I think. I think he kind of wrote the book on that one, didn't he? He was the first one there for all of us on that one. He was the one that sort of tipped us with songs like "Tell your Ma, tell your Pa, our loves are gonna grow ooh-wah, ooh-wah" [actually from the song "Talkin' World War III Blues"]. He opened it all up, didn't he? With songs like "Gates of Eden." He wrote the book on it. I was an 11-year-old just eating that stuff up. I think that's part of it. The other part is that I do actively pursue the questions. I do investigate the issues of the questions. I've been reading Joseph Campbell for the last 15 years. I'm aware of those issues as long as I'm allowed to. In the 1950s you weren't allowed to -- the songs had to be in a cartoon formula. If you're writing "Spider-Man" comics and then one day someone says, "Have you ever seen this play by this guy named Shakespeare called 'Hamlet'?" You suddenly go, "You can write about that too? I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know that the rules allowed it." I think what the 1960s and '70s did do, to get back to your earlier question, was to open up the possibilities of what was legitimate and what was OK to call a song. Now there are no restrictions on what you can and can't do when you're making your work, so why not? If the shoe fits ... In the United States in 2003, as far as religion and the Bible are concerned, the radical right wing has totally absconded with it and controls all debate about it. Well, I don't think they do. I think that the margins are huge. What the right have done -- the extreme right I think they are really -- they've tried to con us into believing that this is mainstream. The truth of the matter is that the margins are now so big. I work in the margins. Anybody who works in art rather than commerce is working in the margins. I think the margins are now so huge that the mainstream is completely buried. They have to spend billions on advertising and marketing to bullshit us about the fact that they're the mainstream. They're not the mainstream. They're just pressure groups lobbing money and bullshit. The margins are going to win. The margins have got it. There are more liberals in the margins than there are right-wing people in the mainstream. It was always the way. I mean Thatcher and Reagan were a minority clique that stole power just as this bunch have with their money and their oil. They're not going to thrive forever on this bullshit. They're just telling us bullshit and lies and expecting us to swallow it. George Bush is just bullshit from start to finish. He was bullshit before he was president too. Everything that he said and did was absolute bullshit too -- that's why I wrote "Karla Faye." That was my next question. You chastise him pretty hard in that song. I think he deserves it, don't you? I think that he got off lightly there. I think anyone who can sneer at somebody on death row, and anyone who has the possibility of offering a reprieve and redemption and just says "God bless you" after icing them, is going to go to a special kind of perdition. There's a special place in hell for someone who can do that. _______________________________________________ Next page | "The margins are where you find nice people -- relationships that are about power and money aren't worth having" Because you speak out so strongly against Bush on the album, do you worry about any kind of backlash from Clear Channel, the chain that owns so many radio stations and seems to be so conservative? (Laughs.) Yeah, like Clear Channel are really going to play me! That's really funny. I thought that you meant it seriously but of course you don't. You've got to be ironic. I'm so far away from the possibility of Clear Channel ever playing me. I have moved from the Straits to the most remote recesses of where art is or where art can exist. The possibility of me ever becoming a mainstream artist now so escapes my consciousness I can't even begin to think about it. I'm playing tomorrow night to 130 people. This isn't Clear Channel territory. I don't care about the great monoliths. To me it's all the same thing as the Halliburtons and the Monsantos. Clear Channel is just another great, horrible conglom that cares about the money. It doesn't interest me. All that shit is the devil's courtyard. Anything that George Bush or the big corporations are interested in are the devil's courtyard. Don't go there. If you get caught playing in the devil's courtyard, sooner or later you have to make a Faustian pact and sooner or later you'll have to pay for that pact. I just don't go there. I leave it alone. I work in the margins. The margins are where you'll find the nice people. You'll find real friends. You'll find honesty. You'll find integrity. You'll find relationships that will last you for a lifetime and will be there to support you in the bad times, which are the only relationships that matter anyway. Relationships that are all about power and money aren't worth having. Do you find that because of the conglomerates and the Clear Channels and the Viacoms, there are fewer niches for an artist like you? They think that they know where the ballpark is, but if the public don't turn up and don't buy the tickets and don't show up for the game, what have they got? No one's listening to their radio stations. They're actually in big trouble because they can't fool the people forever. People are going elsewhere and buying independent records. They're going to independent stores. They don't want to drink their coffee in Starbucks anymore. They're looking for independent coffee shops. The radio stations that the students are playing music in are better stations. Every action produces a reaction, so I'm not worried about them. Martin Luther King only had a fan base of three when he started. Gandhi was only minding his own business when he took a walk to get some salt and ended up overthrowing the British Empire. You can't set out to overthrow an empire, but if you have to get some salt then get some salt. If you have to write some independent songs that are honest, just write them. If you have to do a day job stacking shelves, so be it. I could go back to social work tomorrow and enjoy it. I loved being a social worker. It wouldn't give me any sense of loss at all to be helping people for a living. How is the music industry different now than it was in the 1970s? It's a lot tougher if you want to make it. The record companies now are talking about million-dollar budgets. When a major wants to sign a new artist they budget a million dollars because of the marketing that it requires to get noticed. They need to bang people over the heads very loudly with very large hammers until their ears bleed. It's become a very expensive operation. I noticed when I went into Tower Records last week in Nashville that the No. 1 album in there was Warren Zevon's album. It's ironic, really, that you have to die to get there but there he was. Warren spent his whole life never going anywhere near it. He had "Werewolves of London," but he basically never went anywhere near the charts with anything he did. "My Shit's Fucked Up" is one of the best songs that he ever wrote. One of the best songs ever written by anybody. A sublime little song that probably nobody knows about. If you're making good work, does it matter if you're selling 50 copies or 50 million? I would say to any young artist who's making the work just to enjoy the work. Now you're going out on the road in support of "Wishbones" and playing shows in more modest venues. Is there ever a moment of sympathy for those Sultans of Swing that you're so tired of -- the characters in that song? I'm one of those characters now. I've almost grown into the role, haven't I? I've been sliding down the pole since 1980 since I left the band. There's not a great bit of difference between what my band did playing to 300 people and a pub band. We're almost in the same league. I don't think I'm a celebrity. I've got more time for the guy driving my taxi than I've got for myself quite often. salon.com

Soul survivor Al Green has never matched the nuanced, whispered restraint of his early-'70s classics. But a long-awaited reunion album with producer Willie Mitchell reminds us of his greatness. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Thomas Bartlett • Salon.com Nov. 17, 2003 | If ever there was a voice that sounded like a caress, it was the voice of Al Green. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the ways that microphones changed the course of singing, allowing voices and inflections to develop and flourish that could never have been heard acoustically. More than those of any other singer I can think of, Al Green's true talents would have been obscured without a microphone to deliver them to us. In the late 1960s, Green was already a good soul singer, channeling bits of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, but with a smoother delivery than either of them. In the early '70s, he learned to do what made him great, what made him sound like Al Green: He learned to whisper. It's that hushed voice that carried "Let's Stay Together" to the top of the charts, making it the most successful soul single of the '70s. But despite the enduring popularity of that song, Al Green himself has never quite caught the public imagination, never become the icon he deserves to be. His frequent cameos on "Ally McBeal" probably did more than anything else to raise his name recognition in the '90s, but the man and his music remain relatively obscure. Between 1971 and 1973, Al Green made three consecutive albums for Hi Records, "Let's Stay Together," "I'm Still in Love With You" and "Call Me," that rank among the greatest, and the most underappreciated, soul and pop records of all time. He made good records before ("Gets Next to You") and after ("Is Love"), but the qualities that made him great can be found in their purest form on these three records. Those were important years for soul; there were also high points for Marvin Gaye ("What's Going On," 1971; "Let's Get It On," 1973), Curtis Mayfield ("Superfly," 1972), Isaac Hayes ("Shaft," 1971) and Stevie Wonder ("Talking Book," 1972; "Innervisions," 1973). Green's records may not be able to compete in terms of the critical praise they have received, but that injustice is just waiting to be corrected. Unlike Gaye, Mayfield, Hayes and Wonder, Al Green was not, by nature, a self-producer. Some of his later efforts prove that he was talented in that role, but his best work was done with Willie Mitchell at the controls. Rarely has there been a more perfect match of singer and producer. Mitchell constructed a sound to match Green's increasingly featherweight vocals, each pushing the other into more and more delicate territory. Where a less subtle producer might have surrounded Green's voice with lovely, string-saturated mush, Mitchell's genius was in the restraint and clarity of the sound. There are strings, to be sure, as well as a horn section and some backup singers, but they are arranged with a striking cleanliness and economy of line, never intruding on each other, let alone on Green's vocals. Stirring underneath, as translucent and ghostly as the strings are clear, are guitar, bass, and organ. They are played by the Hodges brothers, Tennie, Leroy and Charles, in-house musicians for Hi Records, and among the self-effacing bands ever assembled. Their work on these records is restrained and subtle, a band walking on eggshells, but somehow still relaxed and loose. Anchoring the whole sound, and mixed unusually loud compared to the rest of the band, are the drums, played sometimes by Howard Grimes, sometimes by Al Jackson. Jackson is the more aggressive drummer of the two, pushing the beat forward where Grimes always holds it back a little, but both play with admirable simplicity. Mitchell, a brilliant engineer as well as producer, somehow managed to layer all these sounds in such a way that leaves an ocean of space, somewhere between the rhythm section on the bottom and the strings and horns on tops, for Green's voice. And Green, for his part, filled that space with the most deliciously tender pillow talk that has ever come out of a singer's mouth. On these three records, he never once raises his voice, never pushes it, never makes an aggressive sound. Where other singers let their voices crack at emotional moments, he retreats even further back into a whisper, as if turning inward. That's what makes the singing so unusual. It's sexually charged, albeit in an unthreatening, testosterone-free kind of way, but it's also deeply introspective, almost meditative. Green is also a far better songwriter than has been generally acknowledged. Of the 27 songs on these three albums, he wrote 13 and co-wrote eight (the remaining six are covers). It would be absurd to pretend that he was a brilliant lyricist. He strung together more or less standard love song lyrics, usually reaching for the easy rhyme. He made up for his verbal clichés by breaking into brilliant wordless improvisations in the midst of his songs. His compositions are of a delicacy that perfectly matches the singing and production. It's surprising to listen to some of the hits ("Let's Stay Together," "I'm Still in Love With You") and realize how harmonically ungrounded and oblique they are, shifting from pastel-colored chord to chord without ever seeming to settle on a root. The album "Let's Stay Together" is, of course, driven by its title track, Green's first No. 1 single, his biggest hit, and something of a manifesto for Green and Mitchell's newly subdued sound. Taken as a whole, it is the meatiest, most robust record of the three, with a touch of gritty Southern soul remaining from Green's earlier days. "I'm Still in Love With You" is a more tender album, Green at his most romantic. It has two more brilliant and successful singles (the title track and "Look What You Done For Me") but the real treasures are to be found among the album tracks that never made it to the radio. Green's first foray into country music, a cover of Kris Kristofferson's "For the Good Times," is six-and-a-half minutes of heartbreak and bittersweet nostalgia, Green harmonizing gloriously with himself on the chorus. Better still is the Green original "Simply Beautiful," which lives up to its title gracefully and is arranged with a minimalism far ahead of its time. [/u]As good as those two albums are, the really great Green-Mitchell record was next As good as these two albums are, "Call Me" is better, the apex of Green and Mitchell's work together. From start to finish, it sounds as if Green is whispering into your ear, giving the album an intimacy rarely achieved elsewhere. On almost every track, Green recorded a second vocal track, sometimes murmuring his agreement with the lead vocal, sometimes punctuating with a muted cry. Often his two vocals intertwine, becoming difficult to separate, enfolding each other in a wordless embrace. Green's inventiveness in these passages is exhilarating. He's as in love with his voice as we are, but he knows better than to show off or to push it. His improvisations on this record are so subtle, so subdued, that they sound as if they're happening inside his head (an effect that jazz trumpeter Miles Davis often achieved). Green and Mitchell collaborated on five more records after "Call Me," and while all of them are good, with more than a few moments of brilliance, they are significantly less satisfying. This is not all that surprising: A sound that is based on an aesthetic of restraint can only hold up for so long. I don't know why it is, but every time an artist creates a truly delicate aesthetic, it appears to disintegrate after a few years, and inevitably loses its luster. At the same time, Green was beginning to move away from a secular life, and secular music. In 1974, his ex-girlfriend Mary Woodson broke into his house, poured boiling grits all over Green in his bathtub, and then shot herself. Green took this as a message from God that he should join the ministry. Two years later, although he was still recording soul records, he had been ordained pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, where he still preaches today. Three years after that, he fell off the stage at a Cincinnati concert, injuring himself badly. Green saw this as a further sign that he should quit secular music altogether, so he began performing and recording only gospel. If you want to disappear from the pop-culture consciousness, there's no better route than immersion in religion. After the initial shock waves caused by Bob Dylan's late-'70s conversion, he became practically invisible during his born-again phase. With Al Green, there wasn't even that initial shock. He just faded quietly into semi-obscurity. In the intervening 24 years, Green has produced a steady stream of gospel albums that, while often excellent, have never approached the heights of his early '70s work. These records have been largely ignored. Most critics and music snobs (I'm no exception) will dig happily through record bins to find old Mahalia Jackson albums, but have little or no interest in contemporary gospel. Today's Daypass sponsored by Counting Crows In recent years, Green has started to put secular songs back into his set lists, though he still focuses primarily on gospel. I heard him in concert a few years ago at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and it was a confusing experience. The first hour of the concert was gospel, with lengthy preaching sessions between songs. Green exhorted the audience to take Jesus Christ as their personal savior, and as I recall, 26 of them accepted the offer then and there. They were blessed by the Rev. Green right on the spot, TV preacher style. His evangelical mission accomplished, Green had a huge tub of long-stemmed red roses brought out on stage. For the next hour he performed a set of his greatest hits, while running through the hall offering roses to any pretty girl he saw in exchange for a kiss. Green recently reunited with Mitchell to make "I Can't Stop" (just released on Blue Note), their first album of secular music in 27 years. (Mitchell produced one of Green's gospel albums in the mid-'80s). I was ecstatic when I heard the news, expecting a magical return to the form of 1973. In retrospect, that was a foolish expectation. The album is a disappointment. On the surface, not much has changed: the same arrangement style, a fresh batch of songs in Green's signature style, even two of the Hodges brothers back on guitar and bass. But the magic is gone. Green's voice is as supple as ever, but he's more interested in pushing it now, less content to let it be effortless. Mitchell's production is more of a problem, though: The sound is thicker now, the band no longer so perfectly tentative, and that magic space that he had carved out for Green's voice has been filled in, leaving everything sounding crowded and constricted. Still, now that I've adjusted my expectations, it's a pleasure to hear this amazing team at work again. "I Can't Stop" will not bring Al Green back to the top of the charts. It will not revive his reputation as the greatest of the smooth soul singers. But I hope it will remind people of the music he used to make, prod them into exploring beyond the obvious splendor of "Let's Stay Together." If so, they will find some of the most dazzling overlooked treasures of popular music. There are few pleasures in life more intense than to have Al Green whispering in your ear.

THE ROLLING STONE REVIEW When Eminem crossed over to pop, he freaked out. But when Kid Rock crossed over, he just grinned, threw up a middle finger and kept going, crossing right through the mainstream and coming out the other side. He embraced the "White America" that Eminem scorned, conjuring up a fantasy of backwoods life that looked a lot like his fantasy of ghetto life: guns, drugs and lots of fucking. There was the smash Devil Without a Cause, the cash-in compilation History of Rock and then Cocky, a rather uninspired album that became a late-breaking success because of the hit single "Picture," with Sheryl Crow, a thug-love duet for Nascar fans that stayed on the country charts for months. By now, Kid Rock's shtick should be wearing thin. But his Kid Rock is a monster: raucous and clever and unpredictable. It's one of the best hard-rock CDs you'll hear this year, carrying on the shitkicking tradition of Hank Williams Jr., ZZ Top, Guns n' Roses and Bad Company. They're all here: Williams shows up to help sing "Cadillac Pussy." ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons adds vocals to "Hillbilly Stomp," a country-funk hybrid that evokes Parliament's "Little Old Country Boy." And "Run Off to L.A.," another Crow collaboration, recycles Axl Rose: "They say all we need is just a little patience/But what do you do when your woman's too high-maintenance?" As for Bad Company, the album's first single is a cover of "Feel Like Makin' Love." Like Eminem, Kid Rock is a shrewd cultural politician, always stopping just short of claiming to be something he isn't. "I Am" includes a risible declaration of Southern pride: "I am Georgia, I am Memphis, Tennessee." But there's a twist: "I am everything that Hollywood wants to be." And he's also Boston and Florida and both Dakotas -- no more or less real, in other words, than his audience. You can hear this audience reflected in the music, a mishmash of dusty cowboy songs and riff-rock rants and piano ballads. It's almost all convincing (even the occasional raps), thanks in large part to the underrated Twisted Brown Trucker Band, especially guitarist Kenny Olson, who gives Kid Rock the snarling, sinuous riffs he needs. Mainly, though, this album is proof that Kid Rock knows what he's doing. He is whatever he says he is: a coke-sniffing star and a hardworking "redneck," but also a "single father, part-time mother." The album includes the obligatory too-much-touring ballad, "Cold and Empty," which doubles as a prom song and triples as a tribute to the fans who make his populism credible. "It's the life I love," he sings, "but it's you I can't live without." KELEFA SANNEH (RollingStone 937, December 11, 2003) • 4 Stars

THE ROLLING STONE REVIEW This three-disc set, recorded live on the Great Lawn of New York's Central Park in September, is a decent place holder for Dave Matthews Band fans until the next album. Those familiar with the band's live sets won't find many surprises here, but Central Park nonetheless catches DMB on an up night: Saxophonist Leroi Moore and violinist Boyd Tinsley turn out nimble, flamboyant solos on classics such as the rollicking "Ants Marching." The guest star is ex-Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes, who contributes vocals and guitar to a mournful version of Neil Young's "Cortez, the Killer." When DMB stretches out, it focuses on group interplay rather than extravagant soloing, as on an eighteen-plus-minute version of "Two Step" that riffs on "New York, New York" before evolving into a low-key, jazzy jam. Though the quintet may be one of the most bootlegged live acts in existence, Central Park is the live DMB record nonfanatics would do well to start with. CHRISTIAN HOARD (Rolling Stone 937, December 11, 2003)

that dude needs a valium; at least krell was entertaining in his cutting remarks.

If you dont watch it, Im not only going to edit those remarks, Im going to have Seph come online to harass you

Bring me back some leftovers from Grannies. Hmmm....

Well you have to hand it the RIAA - just when you thought they couldn't get any sleazier, they surprise you...

Kublia Tec - Al Gromer Khan (New Earth Label)

Good find, Mr. M. We need to stock those forums with relevant stuff.

lol

my misinterpretation,y, i thought you were working on some other designs.. M--how would this work for others?

nice looking. i think yoda was working on some others. is the idea for people to choose the typeface they want?

I remember the kid from the doc and he seemed very happy to be in Neverland. My guess is that the mother is the greedy culprit here..