(Photo and article from The New York Times)
A Guitar Maker Aims to Stay Plugged In
By JANET MORRISSEY
Can Fender Remain a Big Player in an Era of Sampler-Produced Music?
04 Oct 2012 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: fender, fender guitar
The Walker Brothers: The British Invasion in Reverse
02 Oct 2012 Leave a comment
(Source: Spinner)
It’s largely forgotten today: Smack in the middle of Beatlemania, there were three kids from California who actually had a bigger fan club than the Fab Four in the UK. The Walker Brothers, as they were known, sang dramatic ballads with cavernous orchestral accompaniment, and for a brief period in the mid-1960s they were, improbably enough, the brightest stars in England — the reverse British Invasion.
“So we lost the American war of independence,” gushed one radio host at the height of the Walker Brothers’ carpet-bagging fame. “So what! We’ve got the Walker Brothers.” The recent death of founding member John Walker is a reminder that this idiosyncratic pop group left behind a long list of admirers, ranging from David Bowie to Radiohead.
Born John Maus, the guitarist who called himself John Walker co-founded the group with Scott Engel, a bassist and baritone crooner who took his new partner’s adopted surname a decade before the Ramones played their own name game. Engel had a brief career as a would-be teen idol in the late 1950s, making appearances on Eddie Fisher’s variety show. By 1964 he was a masterful bassist and budding arranger.
When the two musicians met another Californian, drummer Gary Leeds, the Walker Brothers decided to take their chances overseas. Leeds, a former member of the Standells, had just toured the UK with P.J. Proby, a Texas-born rock ‘n’ roller who had become a star in England. In London, they quickly caught on with Dusty Springfield’s producer, Johnny Franz, who collaborated with Scott Walker to develop a symphonic pop template to rival Phil Spector’s famed Wall of Sound.
The group’s third single, a cover of the maudlin Burt Bacharach-Hal David song ‘Make It Easy on Yourself,’ was an instant smash, reaching the top spot on the UK pop chart. A follow-up, ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,’ was another chart-topper, and the group — particularly Scott Walker — were suddenly teen-magazine cover boys. Concert crowds grew hysterical. After losing dozens of costly outfits to attacking hordes of girls, the group had to resort to wearing cheap sweaters and T-shirts onstage.
For a moment, their music was everywhere in Swinging London. The Walker Brothers’ second No. 1 was allegedly playing on the jukebox when the notorious gangster Ronnie Kray walked into a pub and shot a rival point-blank. “The sun wasn’t gonna shine for him anymore,” Kray recalled.
Yet as the culture began moving toward psychedelia, the Walker Brothers fell out of favor as quickly as they’d earned it. A bizarre touring package featuring the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, Engelbert Humperdinck and an emerging guitarist named Jimi Hendrix made the group seem like ancient history overnight.
Meanwhile, Scott Walker was rebelling against the group’s commercial aims and lapsing into depression. A suicide attempt was rumored; the singer took a sabbatical on the Isle of Wight to study Gregorian chant. By 1968, the Walker Brothers were disbanded.
Scott Walker’s first solo album was kept from the top spot on the British chart only by the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ and near the end of the decade he hosted his own BBC program. But each of his subsequent solo albums sold less than the last. His former bandmates had no luck at all with their own solo careers.
A 1975 reunion briefly inspired Walker Brothers nostalgia in England, but the group soon drifted apart once again. After years spent in a self-made wilderness, Scott Walker made eccentric, well-reviewed comebacks with 1995’s ‘Tilt’ and 2006’s ‘The Drift.’ He’d become the Orson Welles of music, he complained: Everyone wanted to take him to lunch, but no one wanted to pay for him to make a record.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Certainly among the best imitators of Spector’s Wall of Sound. I always thought these guys were British. They were certainly more popular in the UK, where they charted 10 top-40 hits, compared to 2 in the U.S.
Alice Cooper Bites Head Off Chicken! (Well, Not Really…)
02 Oct 2012 Leave a comment
I thought I’d share actual video of one of the more infamous–and erroneous–stories in rock history. For years people told the story of how Alice Cooper bit the head off a live chicken onstage, a story that helped cement his shock rocker rep.
The truth, revealed in this documentary clip, was that someone in the audience threw the chicken onto the stage and Alice, not knowing chickens can’t fly, tossed it back, wereupon the audience tore it to pieces.
Bad for the chicken–who probably wondered, as we all do, what it was doing at an Alice Cooper show–but great for rock and roll lore.
Meet Jordyn Foley
01 Oct 2012 Leave a comment
Family member: Thank you for saying “Yes”
Simon Cowell: I didn’t!
If the show were filled with moments like this, I’d be a regular viewer.
Neil Young Explains Pono to David Letterman…Sort Of
01 Oct 2012 Leave a comment
Pono will give us “the best sound anybody can get” and Neil Young is already starting to transfer classic Bob Dylan albums to the new “Mother of all formats”.
Here’s hoping it truly makes the woeful mp3 obsolete one day soon.
Will Neil Young Save the Sound of Music?
01 Oct 2012 Leave a comment
in Articles, General Posts, Toward Better Sounding Music Tags: neil young, pono
(Photo and article reprinted from Rolling Stone)
Neil Young Expands Pono Digital-to-Analog Music Service
By Patrick Flanary
Aretha Franklin had never sounded so shocking, Flea decided last year, as “Respect” roared from the speakers of Neil Young’s Cadillac Eldorado. Stunned by the song’s clarity, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist listened alongside bandmate Anthony Kiedis and producer Rick Rubin while Young showcased the power of Pono, his high-resolution music service designed to confront the compressed audio inferiority that MP3s offer.
Beginning next year, Pono will release a line of portable players, a music-download service and digital-to-analog conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions. In his book out this week, Waging Heavy Peace, Young writes that Pono will help unite record companies with cloud storage “to save the sound of music.” As Flea raves to Rolling Stone, “It’s not like some vague thing that you need dogs’ ears to hear. It’s a drastic difference.”
Pono’s preservation of the fuller, analog sound already has the ear of the Big Three record labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. WMG – home to artists including Muse, the Black Keys, Common and Jill Scott – has converted its library of 8,000 album titles to high-resolution, 192kHz/24-bit sound. It was a process completed prior to the company’s partnership with Young’s Pono project last year, said Craig Kallman, chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records.
In mid-2011, Kallman invested with Young and helped assemble a Pono team that included representatives from audio giants Meridian and Dolby, according to insiders. Once WMG signed on, Kallman said that he and Young approached UMG CEO Lucian Grainge and Sony Music CEO Doug Morris about remastering their catalogs for Pono distribution. Neither UMG nor Sony officially acknowledged those conversations.
“This has to be an industry-wide solution. This is not about competing – this is about us being proactive,” Kallman tells Rolling Stone. “This is all about purely the opportunity to bring the technology to the table.”
The title of Waging Heavy Peace refers to the response that Young gave a friend who questioned whether the singer-songwriter was declaring war on Apple with his new service.
“I have consistently reached out to try to assist Apple with true audio quality, and I have even shared my high-resolution masters with them,” Young writes, adding that he traded emails and phone calls with Steve Jobs about Pono before the tech king’s death last October. Apple declined to comment on whether a collaborative or competitive relationship with Pono exists.
Apple’s Mastered for iTunes program, which launched last year with the release of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ I’m With You, requires mastering engineers to provide audio quality based on a listener’s environment – such as a car, a flight or a club. Those dissatisfied with Apple’s AAC format argue that it still represents a fraction of the high-resolution options that Pono promises to deliver. Engineers have debated the value of sound quality for years.
In early June 2011, after filing a handful of trademarks for his cloud-based service idea, Young traveled to the Bonnaroo Festival to perform with Buffalo Springfield. While he was there, he invited fellow musicians into his Cadillac for a Pono demo, including members of Mumford & Sons and My Morning Jacket, and videotaped their reactions for a potential marketing campaign.
“Neil’s premise is cool, and I think it’s exciting as a traveling musician,” My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James tells Rolling Stone. However, he adds a caveat: “I think that’s somewhere that he has to be careful: I’ve already bought Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ a lot of times. Do I have to buy it again?”
While Young acknowledges in his book that existing digital purchases will play on Pono devices, he points out that his service “will force iTunes to be better and to improve quality at a faster pace.”
“His reasons are so not based in commerce, and based in just the desire for people to really feel the uplifting spirit of music,” Flea said in defense of Young. “MP3s suck. It’s just a shadow of the music.”
Every Moment Has A Song 