I brought along my camera to Burning Man this year, but I don’t like taking too many pictures while I’m there; I feel like it puts me in the mindset of being an observer rather than a participant. But one morning, I went for a long bike ride and took a few pictures on the playa.

This one was from the top of the Man’s tower:

And this one, from the Black Rock City post office in center camp, features my favorite sign anywhere at the event:

By the way, if some guy gave you an ashtray at Burning Man inscribed “World’s Smallest Forest Fire,” and you just went Googling to try to find out who it was–well, that was me. Howdy.

posted 5 September 2008 in Photos. 1 comment

For those of you just joining us: I recently unearthed videotapes of MTV’s top 100 countdown from 1988, and I’m working my way through the broadcast one video at a time. To see all previous entries in this series, click on the “1988” category in the right-hand margin of this website; I predict you will be delighted and horrified.

At position #83, the countdown features its first repeated artist: the Pet Shop Boys, who we previously saw at #92 with “Always on My Mind.” This video is set in a Vegasesque theater; apparently, the Boys originally intended to film it in the actual Las Vegas, but stayed away when they heard U2 were making a video there. When they saw the results (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”), they were a bit flabbergasted that the Irish quartet had chosen to film on the city’s sidewalks and backstreets.

The Pet Shop Boys instinctively go for the glamour: in this case, a backstage drama surrounded by showgirls (in costumes recycled, no lie, from the James Bond movie Octopussy). Our video opens with a closeup on the unblinking right eye of Chris Lowe; the camera pulls back to reveal his stoic visage. We then pan over the spangly showgirls hanging out backstage, surrounded by men wearing tuxedos, apparently the musicians who play during their performance. One showgirl chats with a trumpet player. Another, a bit ludicrously, is handing a lightbulb to a technician. A third is wearing great mirrored sunglasses that appear to have been taken directly from Lowe’s personal collection.

The camera pans past a tuxedoed Neil Tennant, not even slowing down as he sings “You always wanted a lover,” instead moving on to a beautiful girl with eyeglasses on her nose and pink and orange feathers on her head. The showgirls get up, presumably to hit the stage; the bespectacled one looks over her shoulder meaningfully and takes off her glasses.

Around the time of this video, a director or a musician (I no longer remember who), speaking of his own promotional clip, said that the record company had issued the directive to make a video that would seem obviously gay to a British audience and obviously straight to an American one. I think the Pet Shop Boys (and director Eric Watson) pulled that difficult feat off here. There’s zero sexual tension between the vocalists (Tennant and Dusty Springfield), but there’s plenty of longing glances and ambiguous smoldering stares among Tennant, Lowe, and Eyeglasses Showgirl. From any sexual perspective, the video works, bolstered by the gorgeous melancholy of the song.

In a dressing room, musicians and dancers peel out, leaving Chris Lowe alone with his trombone and his black tie. Tuxedo-clad men with brass instruments stride across an empty stage. (Lowe and Tennant are perfectly cast as anonymous members of a pit orchestra.) Tennant lounges on a carpeted staircase doing the “I bought you drinks / I brought you flowers” rap while the showgirls glide down the stairs on either side of him. Lowe practices the trombone in the dressing room. A hunky stagehand pulls away a red curtain and we cut to the legendary Dusty Springfield, 48 years old at the time of this video, and unfortunately, looking a bit too much like a charismatic drag queen. (By the way: her original name was Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien.) In closeup, Springfield shakes her shoulders and sings her section of the song. (In its construction–various bits patched together, all catchy but with no obvious chorus–this song bears a surprising resemblance to the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle With Care.”)

Tennant sings alone backstage, standing right in front of a fire extinguisher. We see the showgirls dancing in silhouette against a lavender background. Back to Tennant, whose lonely expression is slightly undercut by his ’80s poodle haircut.

In the indispensable Chris Heath’s book Pet Shop Boys, Annually, the Pet Shop Boys talked extensively about Lowe’s dancing in this video. “For my dance I didn’t want to do just any dance,” said Lowe, who added that he had all the crew removed from the set while he did it. “In America it’s one of our most successful videos, mainly because of Chris’ dancing,” Tennant claimed.

So we come to the section where Lowe dances: He’s walking across the stage in a narrow passage between two curtains, invisible to the paying audience. He leaps in the air and does a 360–we see this in slow motion, plus his image is also projected somehow on the curtain to the left of him. He takes a couple of rhythmic steps, and then sticks out his arms and spins around like a top. The camera pans away and returns to find him still spinning. He nods to the right with a little flourish and then walks away, with shadows of showgirls on the curtain behind him. It lasts about twenty seconds (maybe ten without the slow motion), and after all the Boys’ buildup, is possibly the funniest dance routine I’ve ever seen.

Cut to the showgirls, spinning and strutting and sashaying. One of them has big dangly earrings flapping about. We see them in silhouette against lavender, and then against a scenic fly with a woodland scene. We pan across a line of dancers as they raise their heads and look into the camera, one by one. Tennant, with knitted brow, stands in front of Lowe, who appears to have removed the fire extinguisher from the scene as his competition for the non-performing partner of the Pet Shop Boys. Lowe then pretends to play the trombone, not particularly convincingly.

A royal red curtain with gold fringe lifts, revealing Tennant, Lowe, and Springfield. Muscled boys in tanktops backstage pull on ropes. More curtains rise. The camera spins through an array of musicians and showgirls. At the end, the stage is empty: Tennant and Lowe and a few other men with horns stand absolutely still. The only person moving is Springfield, who’s dancing like it’s her first Saturday night.

From Annually:
Chris: “I want to know why we didn’t do the story about the construction worker in Atlanta!”
Neil: “That would have been corny as a video.”
Chris: “It could have been like Dallas!”

“What Have I Done to Deserve This?” hit #2 on the American pop charts in early 1988. It was Springfield’s last appearance on the charts before she died in 1999. You can watch the video here.

posted 4 September 2008 in 1988. 13 comments

As of last night, I’m back from the desert, and after many showers, I think I might have actually removed all the alkaline dust from my body. But I’m not counting on it.

While I was gone, the Barnes and Noble Review published a brief take of mine on the soundtrack album to Passing Strange, the Broadway musical by and about Stew, the lead singer of the Negro Problem; you can read it here. It’s been a lot of fun seeing Stew succeed; the first time I saw him was in the smallest basement room of the Knitting Factory, and now he’s won a Tony. (Any claim I might have to Negro Problem cred is trumped by friends who had Stew stay on their couch (at his own invitation), of course.) I am shocked to see that classic Negro Problem albums such as Joys & Concerns have now gone out of print–what’s wrong with the world today?

(I’m only now working my way through my electronic backlog, so if you sent me an email or commented here while I was gone, it might take me a day or so to reply.)

posted 3 September 2008 in Outside, Reviews. no comments yet

(I’m on my way home from the Nevada desert today. Until I get back, here’s one more installment of my 2006 double-album series.)

If not being able to edit an album down to a single vinyl disc of about 45 minutes is self-indulgent, then what’s not being able to able to edit down to a single CD? Excessive? Ridiculous? Loopy?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Guns N’ Roses. Their 1991 release Use Your Illusion was sold as two separate discs but was clearly one big album. Oddly, this was debated at the time. (The tipoff: calling the discs Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II.) Use Your Illusion was one of the longest albums ever released by a major rock act: its total running time of about three hours even beat out famously excessive triple-disc efforts such as Sandinista! or All Things Must Pass.

Since vinyl albums had become pretty much vestigial by the early ’90s—collectors could special-order them, but that was about it—we’ve boiled down a playlist that fits on one compact disc, without worrying about those old-fashioned “sides.” To uncover the great lost Guns N’ Roses album, it turns out you don’t need to use your illusion—just your iTunes software.

1. Civil War
2. Dust N’ Bones
3. Bad Obsession
4. Don’t Cry (Original)
5. Right Next Door to Hell
6. Bad Apples
7. November Rain
8. You Could Be Mine
9. Yesterdays
10. Pretty Tied Up
11. Garden of Eden
12. Estranged

(total running time: 65:37)

posted 2 September 2008 in Tasty Bits. 8 comments

Wow, The River has a lot of filler. How much? If you pare away all the generic rockers (e.g. “I’m a Rocker”) and other dross on Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 double album, you have plenty of room left over for “Roulette,” a thundering track about a nuclear accident. (It was recorded during the River sessions but inexplicably didn’t make the cut; you can find it on disc two of Springsteen’s Tracks box set.) Edited down, The River‘s top songs cohere into one of Springsteen’s best albums. The record’s themes come through even more strongly: desire, the responsibilities that come with it, and over and over again, the death that follows it.

I know, by the way, that although I’ve been dividing up these edited albums into side one and side two, you’re not going to be cutting wax copies. I’m thinking about the sequence of these records the same way the artists did before CDs came along: you don’t want to squeeze in much more than 23 minutes on a side, because the sound quality gets wonky, and each side of the record needs to cohere. That means side one should end with some punch (it’s anchored here by the title track) and side two is a new beginning (“Point Blank” is an intense homicidal ballad, but it’s too slow and long to fit anywhere else in the record). All hail the forgotten soldiers of rock ‘n’ roll–side-one closing songs and side-two opening songs!

Side One:
1. Hungry Heart
2. Independence Day
3. Cadillac Ranch
4. Stolen Car
5. The River

Side Two:
6. Point Blank
7. Ramrod
8. Two Hearts
9. Roulette
10. Wreck on the Highway

(total running time: 41:14)

posted 29 August 2008 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

While I’m away at Burning Man, here’s another rock question from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (along with my answer). If you want more of these, you can either visit the Secret Rock Knowledge, or scroll down to the bottom of this page and hit the button that takes you to Amazon to buy Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John? Or both.

How did the British punk tradition of gobbing start?

It isn’t recorded who hawked that first mouthful of saliva, although a good guess would be Johnny Rotten, who was known to spit on Sex Pistols albums when fans asked him to autograph them. Soon enough, fans were returning the favor when the band was onstage, spitting (or “gobbing”) on the Pistols as an antisocial sign of appreciation. The spontaneous gesture became codified in December 1976, on a package tour of the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned, according to film director Julien Temple: “There was this pent-up volume of gob, because everybody had read about spitting at punk groups. It was volleys of gob hitting, and they were leaning into it: John looked fantastic with all this snot and gob over his hair.”

You will not be surprised to learn that not all musicians appreciated being spat upon. Bob Quine, who was then playing guitar with Richard Hell, remembered a British tour as just being plain disgusting: “In the beginning of the set, at least they’d have beer to spit on you. But then they’d run out of beer and they’d just hawk up whatever they could. Meanwhile I’m singing background vocals, and spit’s flying in my mouth. Every night I’d go back to my hotel room and rinse my clothes out, wipe my guitar off, and hope my clothes would be dry the next morning.”

posted 28 August 2008 in Buy My Stuff. no comments yet

The conundrum for any music fan: would you rather have more songs from your favorite band on their new album, even if it meant the album wasn’t as good?

Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin’s 1975 double disc, epitomizes that paradox. The great tracks are among the band’s very best, but they get a bit lost when swamped by eleven full minutes of “In My Time of Dying.” The album sounds much better when reduced to a single record, but it’s hard to cut down, because the filler is pretty damn good. If you put together all the Graffiti tracks I’ve discarded from my edit, you’d have a short album that would sound better than Presence.

Side One:
1. Houses of the Holy
2. Trampled Under Foot
3. Down by the Seaside
4. Custard Pie
5. Black Country Woman

Side Two:
6. The Wanton Song
7. Boogie With Stu
8. Sick Again
9. Kashmir

(total running time: 45:12)

posted 27 August 2008 in Tasty Bits. 6 comments

When Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John? was published in 2006, providing all the answers you ever wanted to your musical questions–and some you didn’t even know you needed–the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked me to answer a few bonus questions. So I did. But unless you live in Georgia, you probably never saw them. This one would clearly belong in the rock death section of the Secret Rock Knowledge.

Was Ronnie Van Zant really killed by a flying “betamax guillotine” as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane went down?

“C’mon, let’s go. If it’s your time to go, it’s time to go,” Van Zant said on October 20, 1977, as he boarded Skynyrd’s plane. He had every right to be nervous-the day before, the plane’s right engine had caught on fire. Nevertheless, he got on the Convair 240 and fell asleep on the floor of the plane. His security guard Gene Odom says that as the airplane went down, he wrestled Van Zant into a seat and buckled him in. “Man, just let me sleep,” Van Zant complained-and then the plane crashed.

The “Betamax guillotine” legend-that Van Zant was decapitated by the plane’s VCR-is infamous enough that on the Drive-By Truckers 2001 concept album, Southern Rock Opera, the fictional band standing in for Lynyrd Skynyrd was named “Betamax Guillotine.” The legend’s not too far from the truth. “There was not another scratch on him, except a small bruise the size of a quarter at his temple,” Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle has said. “Ronnie was killed on impact by a single blow to the head by what the doctors told me was probably a TV or something like that. We were rock and roll, nothing was tied down. All these televisions and guitar cases and camera cases all this stuff went forward, probably at a hundred miles an hour.” So a VCR might have been the instrument of Van Zant’s demise, but his head remained attached to his shoulders.

posted 26 August 2008 in Buy My Stuff. no comments yet

Unforeseen side effects of the iPod: I probably couldn’t have put together Short Sharp Shocks without the help of iTunes breaking down my music library by length of song. And I wouldn’t have had the patience a couple of years ago to edit down classic double albums to single albums without being able to tinker with iTunes playlists.

While I’m off in the desert this week, I thought you might enjoy a few installments of that project, previously published under the Rolling Stone “Rock and Roll Daily” umbrella.

Some double albums represent a rock act having an extraordinary creative outpouring, coming up with too many great songs to fit on one disc. But only a few. Many more double albums are the result of ego, band infighting, and an unwillingness to edit down two overweight discs into a killer single record. Yeah, we’re looking at you, Use Your Illusion.

So how would various classic-but-flawed double albums sound if the musicians behind them had cut them down to single albums? Let’s look at five edited versions of major albums—all of which sound better with a haircut. If you don’t believe me, plug these playlists into your MP3 player and judge for yourself. You might never go back to the originals.

We start, of course, with the Beatles’ 1968 release known as The White Album. It was one of the very first rock double albums and set the brilliant-but-bloated standard for the format. Producer George Martin implored the Beatles to make a “very, very good single album, rather than a double,” but they ignored him. What if they hadn’t? What if John and Paul had made some hard decisions (while making sure Ringo and George still got a turn at the microphone)? The record might have sounded like this:

Side One:
1. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
2. Martha My Dear
3. I’m So Tired
4. Helter Skelter
5. Blackbird
6. Wild Honey Pie
7. Don’t Pass Me By
8. Julia

Side Two:
9. Back in the U.S.S.R.
10. Dear Prudence
11. Savoy Truffle
12. I Will
13. Happiness Is a Warm Gun
14. Rocky Racoon
15. Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
16. While My Guitar Gently Weeps

(total running time: 46:05)

(This is one mix I’ve modified since its original publication; originally, I mistakenly put two George songs back-to-back, which never would have happened.)

posted 25 August 2008 in Tasty Bits. 5 comments

A few months ago, I was invited by my friend Chris Noxon to join his Burning Sensations club. The rules of the road: about twenty people make mix CDs and send them out to the other members of the club on a biweekly schedule. So about once a year, you make twenty copies of a mix, and in return, you get a different mix in your mailbox every couple of weeks. (Yes, you can do this with your friends–start your own club now before people forget what CDs are!)

The level of mixology with the Burning Sensations crew was quite high, but two of my favorites were a mix of dirty R&B songs (from Dinah Washington to Lil Kim) called Risque Dissertation and a collection of global horn-driven music called The World Is Made of Brass. A majority of the mixes I’ve made in my life would fall into the “here’s a bunch of cool songs I discovered recently” category, but when my turn came around, I knew that this time I wanted to do a themed collection. I kicked around some ideas and started a few different playlists, but the one that grabbed me was short songs. I decided to experiment with how many songs I could cram onto a single CD. This was the result:

1. Modest Mouse, “Horn Intro” (0:10)
2. The Mountain Goats, “See America Right” (1:52)
3. R.E.M., “I’m Gonna DJ” (2:05)
4. The White Stripes, “Broken Bricks” (1:50)
5. Weezer, “You Gave Your Love to Me Softly” (1:58)
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Tick” (1:48)
7. The Beatles, “It Won’t Be Long” (2:09)
8. Curtis Mayfield, “Junkie Chase” (1:35)
9. Little Richard, “Keep a Knockin'” (2:16)
10. The English Beat, “Click Click” (1:27)
11. Prince, “Sister” (1:32)
12. The Kinks, “Two Sisters” (2:00)
13. Husker Du, “Never Talking to You Again” (1:37)
14. Fleetwood Mac, “That’s Enough for Me” (1:46)
15. Spoon, “You Gotta Feel It” (1:28)
16. Elvis Costello, “Clean Money” (1:57)
17. The Ramones, “Judy Is a Punk” (1:30)
18. Art Brut, “18000 Lira” (1:11)
19. K.C. and the Sunshine Band, “Boogie Shoes” (2:10)
20. Pixies, “The Thing” (1:56)
21. Wire, “Feeling Called Love” (1:20)
22. They Might Be Giants, “Robot Parade” (1:04)
23. Al Green, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (2:18)
24. Pavement, “Serpentine Pad” (1:15)
25. The Fall, “Prole Art Threat” (1:56)
26. Café Tacuba, “Eo” (2:12)
27. Otis Redding, “Stay in School” (1:10)
28. Queen, “We Will Rock You” (2:02)
29. Divide & Kreate, “Illiterate City” (2:08)
30. Fountains of Wayne, “Imperia” (1:56)
31. Nirvana, “Sliver” (2:09)
32. Aretha Franklin, “Money Won’t Change You” (2:04)
33. Bruce Springsteen, “Car Wash” (2:05)
34. Sleater-Kinney, “The Professional” (1:29)
35. X, “Year 1” (1:17)
36. The Smiths, “Panic” (2:18)
37. Bob Dylan, “I Threw It All Away” (2:23)
38. The Lemonheads, “Dawn Can’t Decide” (2:21)
39. The Hives, “Abra Cadaver” (1:33)
40. Blur, “Song 2” (2:01)
41. Dewey Cox, “Let Me Hold You (Little Man)” (1:51)
42. Elastica, “Vaseline” (1:23)

I was originally shooting for 45 tracks on the disc, in tribute to seven-inch singles, but I liked the mix better after I tightened it up and dropped a few songs. (So there’s actually a few unused minutes on the CD: the mix clocks in at 74:34.) Except for the opening sting from Modest Mouse, all the tracks are complete (if short) songs, not skits or jingles. Sequencing all these songs took a while, as you might guess. In pursuit of a steady rhythm, I got anal and trimmed the dead air off the end of a bunch of tracks. Messing around with the editing software, I learned that although songs can be padded with any amount of silence at the end (usually ranging from one to eight seconds), the industry standard is to begin each track on a CD with exactly a half-second of silence.

What sparked this particular mix? I’d been thinking about how the iPod has changed my listening habits: I have less patience for epic tracks, because I’m always curious to know what might come up next in shuffle-play. But a few bands have blossomed in this setting. The Ramones and Sleater-Kinney, who I always liked but found a bit exhausting over the course of a whole album, now give a random mix a quick jolt of energy and then step offstage.

(Back in the day, addressing the perception that they only played short songs, one of the Ramones said no, they were actually long songs played fast.)

Some notes on particular songs on Short Sharp Shocks:

#2, “See America Right”: I put this on the last mix CD I made (Victim of a Short Attention Span); repeating it must violate some unofficial rule of mixology, but I didn’t want to make a collection of short songs without this one.

#4, “Broken Bricks”: It’s amazing how a third instrument, even one as simple as a ringing bell, fills out the White Stripes’ sound.

#5, “You Gave Your Love to Me Softly”: A B-side to the 1996 “El Scorcho” single.

#7, “It Won’t Be Long”: I’ve always thought of this as the secret Beatles hit.

#9, “Keep a Knockin”: The opening drumbeat may sound familiar; try listening to it back to back with Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.”

#16, “Clean Money”: An outtake from the Armed Forces era, first made available on the Taking Liberties odds-and-sods collection.

#20, “The Thing”: A B-side to the 1990 “Velouria” single.

#23, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”: Green’s first single, recorded in 1968.

#27, “Stay in School”: The leadoff track on a 1967 Stax promo album, Stay in School. (This track is also sometimes called “Announcement.”) 5000 copies were distributed to radio stations in an effort to stop kids from dropping out.

#29, “Illiterate City”: As found on the Best of Bootie 2007 compilation.

#30, “Imperia”: B-side to the international version of the “Radiation Vibe” single in 1997.

#33, “Car Wash”: An outtake from Born in the USA, later released on Tracks. So far as I know, this is the only Springsteen song with a female narrator.

Any questions about other tracks, feel free to ask in the comments section. Another member of Burning Sensations offers his perspective here.

posted 21 August 2008 in Tasty Bits. 9 comments