New Rock Music

The cover of Thick as a Brick by Jethro Tull.

Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth.
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth.

How would Gerald Bostock have gone in his NAPLAN tests? He was, it was said, something of a wizard with the pen and ink, back in the days before computers. Would his parents have allowed him to sit them?

Perhaps they might have thought there was a political agenda going on in the background. Can’t have political meddling in the playgrounds of young minds. Perhaps they didn’t mind; they were, it has been shown, ambitious for their son.

But then, whatever happened to Gerald Bostock? And should we care?

First, who is Gerald? Forty years ago, he was a young scamp, dubbed “Little Milton”. He won an award for his poem Thick as a Brick, presented by the Society of Literary Advancement and Gestation.

His parents, David and Daphne, however, lied about his age. He was really nine when he wrote it and 10 when he won. His local village newspaper, The St Cleve Chronicle Linwell Advertiser, profiled him and his family, printed the epic poem, and ran a second more scandalous story on how a local lass blamed Gerald for getting her pregnant. Poor Gerald also had his award rescinded after four psychiatrists, upon hearing his poem on the BBC, concluded it was the result of someone with “an unwholesome attitude towards life, his God and country”.

Ostensibly, it was because he was alleged to have said an offensive word after reading the poem. The word, the paper reported, was “g–r”, which didn’t exist. It created a furore. The judges twitched, and gave the award to Mary Whiteyard, aged 12, for her poem He Died to Save the Little Children.

But Gerald didn’t exist, either. He was the product of that constantly imagining mind of Ian Anderson, singer-songwriter, flautist and guitarist of Jethro Tull. Thick as a Brick (a poem more than 3000 words in length) was the lyrical canvas upon which Anderson set his prog-rock opus. One can use that last phrase without embarrassment, for it was at the time progressive rock and it was long: Side 1, Thick as a Brick Part 1; Side 2, Thick as a Brick Part 2.

Little Gerald was the locus of Anderson’s view of the struggle between the individual and the state, the mainstream and the conforming moulds of society. And surely, the winner of the poetry competition, little Mary Whiteyard, was Anderson’s shot at anti-filth crusader Mary Whitehouse in Britain in the 1970s).

Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout!

Forty years on, Gerald is 50. How has life treated him? Which roads has he travelled? It’s here that Anderson has made the concept interesting, for he gives Gerald five alternative lives: different shifts in the wind that shape a person’s destiny. The “what ifs, maybes, might have beens, soft petals on a breeze”.

Says Anderson on his website: “The theme of this anniversary “Part Two” album is to examine the possible different paths that the precocious young schoolboy Gerald Bostock might have taken later in life, and to create alter-ego characters whose song-section identities illustrate the hugely varied potential twists and turns of fate and opportunity. Not just for Gerald, but to echo how our own lives develop, change direction and ultimately conclude through chance encounters and interventions, however tiny and insignificant they might seem at the time.

“In the development of the piece, the divergences of life’s infinitely forked roads finally give way to an almost gravitational pull which results in convergence to, perhaps, a pre-ordained, karma-like conclusion.

“As we baby boomers look back on our own lives, we must often feel an occasional ‘what if’ moment. Might we, like Gerald, have become instead preacher, soldier, down-and-out, shopkeeper or finance tycoon?

“And those of more tender years – the social media and internet generation – may choose to ponder well the myriad of chance possibilities ahead of them at every turn.

“Odd chap, life …”

TAAB2, as the sequel is called, is purely Anderson’s vehicle. Indeed, the CD labelling is “Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson TAAB2“. His old Tull chums do not appear, not even guitarist Martin “Lancelot” Barre, with whom he toured just a few months ago in Australia. (And a jolly fine show it was too in Melbourne even if Anderson’s voice was straining in the upper register.)

The CD packaging echoes the newspaper design of the original, but updated, thus the newspaper is now www.stcleve.com. (Go to it to find all that’s happening in the three parishes of St Cleve, Linwell and Little Cruddock.)

For instance, there’s this:

Headline: “New life for the Old Library?”

Antique Book-seller Matthew Bunter, purchased the Old Library in Linwell village last month in the hope of reopening in due course as an online book download centre and erotic literature emporium. “It will perfectly supplement my more traditional range of literary wares,” said Mr Bunter, former church warden at St Olive’s. “Got to move with the times before the times move with you,” pondered Matthew, with wry humour.

The music, in parts, also echoes and samples the original. They’re a necessary link in the chain for the narrative, for this is a work that doesn’t instantly draw you in. Without the startling freshness that imbued TAAB1, Anderson has had to use the same paints and brush as are now well-recognised in rock, but layer it as one would a novel. Hence, it needs to be listened to without distraction. (In fact, a few years ago Anderson told this writer that there was no new rock music any more, nor would there be; all the parameters had been set.) TAAB2 reveals itself slowly and, because of that, for those accustomed to instant gratification, it could be considered a difficult work.

Anderson acknowledges this: “The conceptual and heavily lyrical nature of the beast, however, might be out of place in the attention-span-deficit world which we seem to occupy these days. But, having toured in 2010 and 2011 in Italy, Latin America, Australia and other countries where passions run high, I decided that maybe the world – or our little corners of it – was, in fact, ready for a bit of more substantial and weightier fare.

“Starting with lyrics and then thinking of the music is not normally the way I work, but it was here. A title, a few words or a verse or two and then the acoustic guitar was immediately to hand to conjure up a full song section out of the growing lyrics. Having a plan was important. Stories to tell made it all easier. The imagination-filled process of thinking how things might have turned out for the young and older Gerald kept me fascinated. Maybe you will be too. And maybe not.

“Ah, well – you can always go and watch The X Factor and the Eurovision Song Contest.”

What would Gerald be doing now? Would he be having tea and biscuits, cardigans and small comforts in the ‘burbs or champagne and cocaine in the City? How much of life is luck – there-but-for-the-grace-of stuff — and how much is destiny? In his various ways, Gerald is everyman. How did we get to this place where we stand now? Do we remember the turning points, or even recognise them, while measuring out coffee spoons?

Was there a plan? Were those building blocks of Gerald’s youth merely bricks?

Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

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Article source: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/blogs/wokkapedia/jethro-tulls-little-milton-at-50-20120516-1yqe3.html

CHOM DJ keeps new rock music alive on the city’s radio landscape, Brendan Kelly writes. Page A22

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Article source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/todays-paper/Walker+rocks+sundays/6576560/story.html

Musical version of a romantic movie offers some astonishing stagecraft

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

BROADWAY REVIEW

Better look out, “Spider-Man” — here looms up “Ghost The Musical,” a wildly flashy new Broadway spectacle likely to haunt your claim for special effects awesomeness.

Some astonishing visual effects and striking production designs often make “Ghost The Musical” – aw, let’s just call it “Ghost” — amazing to behold at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where this not-so-bad musical romance opened on Monday.

Of course, my eyes and ears practically were falling out of my old silvery head by the time this relentless music video of a show was through, but spectators more appreciative than I am of extreme barrages of visuals and sound might enjoy its blinding excesses.

You’ve seen the 1990 Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore-Whoopi Goldberg movie, right? It is a romantic fantasy about a murdered New Yorker who communicates with his grieving girlfriend through a dubious storefront psychic. That golden oldie, “Unchained Melody,” was its musical theme.

Expect to hear that evocative vintage song again here, several times, as well as plenty of new rock music by Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard, who furnish a swift and pulsating Eurythmics-style score for the trim script provided by Bruce Joel Rubin, the film’s screenwriter, who faithfully tracks his story.

Their effective musical storytelling positions songs in appropriate plot points and packs several gleaming tunes, notably a rhapsodic “Here Right Now” for the lovers, an expansive “Suspend My Disbelief/I Had A Life” anthem for the first act finale and a rambunctious “I’m Outta Here” production number for the balky medium winningly portrayed here with infectious big mama gusto by newcomer Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

If the overall impression of the score resembles a film or music video soundtrack more than a Broadway musical that is because Christopher Nightingale’s densely-layered arrangements and orchestrations are so metallic and overblown. Sci-fi effects and ghostly echoes filter through Bobby Aitken’s sound design, which blasts the sound from every direction in the auditorium.

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Article source: http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/new-york-theater/review-ghost-the-musical-materializes-on-broadway

16 April, 2012

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Article source: http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=1049170&c=1

His death was announced by the company he founded, Marshall Amplification. The Associated Press said the cause was cancer.

Mr. Marshall was part of the English music scene as a drummer, drumming teacher and owner of a store in London that sold drums as the new rock music was gathering momentum in the early 1960s. Musicians urged him to add guitars and amplifiers to his wares. One of them, Pete Townshend of the Who, said he told Mr. Marshall that he wanted something “bigger and louder.”

“I was demanding a more powerful machine gun” to “blow people away all around the world,” Mr. Townshend told NPR in 2002. “I wanted it to be as big as the atomic bomb had been.”

With his sixth prototype, Mr. Marshall and his helpers came up with a harmless-looking black box with a speaker inside and controls on top. It would become the basis for the formidable wall of amplifiers used by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and almost every other major rock guitarist in the ’60s and ’70s and by the next generation of guitarists as well, including Kurt Cobain, Eddie Van Halen and Slash.

This acoustic artillery came to be called the “wall of Marshalls” or “Marshall stacks.” Mr. Marshall became known as “the father of loud.”

The Marshall amps were cheaper than the ones made by Fender, which produced a more precise sound. But the emerging rockers wanted something rougher and rowdier. In a tribute on Twitter, Mötley Crüe’s bassist, Nikki Sixx, said Mr. Marshall had been “responsible for some of the greatest audio moments in music’s history — and 50 percent responsible for all our hearing loss.”

James Charles Marshall was born in London on July 29, 1923, to parents who owned a fish-and-chips shop. He was stricken with tuberculosis of the bones and spent much of his early youth in a plaster cast from his knees to his armpits. When he was 13, sinking family fortunes forced him to take jobs in a scrap-metal yard, a jam factory and a shoe shop. Having learned to tap dance at 14, he was hired as a dancer and singer with a 16-piece orchestra. He took up drumming and rode his bicycle to performances, pulling his drum kit in a trailer.

During World War II he worked at an engineering firm after failing his draft physical and read engineering books on his own. After the war he taught drumming and eventually had 65 students.

He used his teaching profits to buy his music store. One of the musicians who came into the store regularly was Ken Bran, who visited with his band, Peppy and the New York Twisters. Mr. Marshall hired him as a service engineer.

Mr. Bran suggested that they build their own amplifiers, and brought in a young engineer, Dudley Craven, to help them. They collected ideas from musicians about creating a fuzzier, more rambunctious sound then in demand. The sound became known as “the Marshall crunch.”

The first model, made in 1962, attracted 23 orders the first day. Two years later Mr. Marshall had 16 people in a factory making 20 amplifiers a week. Exports began in 1964 with an order from Roy Orbison. More growth followed as the company supplied mammoth sound systems to acts like Deep Purple and Elton John.

One of Mr. Marshall’s biggest breaks came in 1967 when Hendrix visited his showroom. In just months Hendrix would have a huge hit with his album “Are You Experienced,” but at the time, Mr. Marshall recalled, he thought the guitarist was “just another American chap wanting things for free.” Hendrix assured him that he intended to pay, and ultimately bought four complete stage setups.

“He was our greatest ambassador, without a doubt,” said Mr. Marshall, who considered Hendrix the best guitarist ever.

Mr. Marshall is survived by two children, two stepchildren, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, The A.P. reported.

A connoisseur of Cuban cigars and a single-malt Scotch bottled for him, Mr. Marshall many times refused to sell Marshall Amplification. “You can’t take it with you, you can only live in one house and drive one car at a time,” he said. “It’s the name that means something to me — because it is my name.”

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Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/arts/music/jim-marshall-88-maker-of-famed-fuzzy-amplifiers-is-dead.html

Jim Marshall, 88, who made rock and roll rawer and noisier by inventing the amplifier that helped define guitarists from Jimi Hendrix to members of countless garage bands, died of cancer Thursday at a hospice in London.

Mr. Marshall was part of the English music scene as a drummer, drumming teacher, and owner of a store in London that sold drums as the new rock music was gathering momentum in the early 1960s. Musicians urged him to add guitars and amplifiers to his wares. One of them, Pete Townshend of the Who, said he told Mr. Marshall that he wanted something “bigger and louder.”

“I was demanding a more powerful machine gun” to “blow people away all around the world,” Townshend told NPR in 2002. “I wanted it to be as big as the atomic bomb had been.”

With his sixth prototype, Mr. Marshall and his helpers came up with a harmless-looking black box with a speaker inside and controls on top. It would become the basis for the formidable wall of amplifiers used by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and almost every other major rock guitarist in the ’60s and ’70s and by the next generation of guitarists as well, including Kurt Cobain, Eddie Van Halen and Slash.

This acoustic artillery came to be called the “wall of Marshalls” or “Marshall stacks.” Mr. Marshall became known as “the father of loud.”

The Marshall amps were cheaper than the ones made by Fender, which produced a more precise sound. But the emerging rockers wanted something rougher and rowdier. In a tribute on Twitter, Motley Crue’s bassist, Nikki Sixx, said Mr. Marshall had been “responsible for some of the greatest audio moments in music’s history – and 50 percent responsible for all our hearing loss.”

Mr. Marshall was born in London to parents who owned a fish-and-chips shop. He was stricken with tuberculosis of the bones and spent much of his early youth in a plaster cast from his knees to his armpits. When he was 13, sinking family fortunes forced him to take jobs in a scrap-metal yard, a jam factory and a shoe shop.

During World War II, he worked at an engineering firm after failing his draft physical and read engineering books on his own. After the war, he taught drumming and eventually had 65 students.

A connoisseur of Cuban cigars and a single-malt Scotch bottled for him, Mr. Marshall many times refused to sell Marshall Amplification. “You can’t take it with you, you can only live in one house and drive one car at a time,” he said. “It’s the name that means something to me – because it is my name.” – N.Y. Times News Service

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Article source: http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/146501665.html

Das Honky Tonk Festival traf die Geschmäcker jeden Alters und ludt alle Freunde der handgemachten Live-Musik dazu ein, sich auch von anderen Spielarten der populären Livemusik inspirieren zu lassen. So lockten die Spanier „Arte Canela“ mit ihrem Temperament sogar den ein oder anderen halbwegs rhythmischen Hüftschwung des Rheinenser Publikums zu ihren Gipsy, Latin, Rumba und Folklore-Klängen aus der Reserve.

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For the past two weeks, the blogosphere has been hard at work deconstructing the “meltdown” that is Bradford Cox, the mastermind behind Deerhunter as well as his solo project, Atlas Sound. At an Atlas Sound show in Minneapolis on March 2, a heckler’s request to hear “My Sharona” turned into an hour-long, improvised rendition by Cox. As the frontman’s musings on “the death of folk and the birth of folk” interwove the hour-long jam, Cox commanded the heckler to strip on stage for the crowd, which later shook its chairs in the air — as per Cox’s request. Atlas Sound’s reflective, dream-pop quality fails to match up with what critics are calling an “outburst” by the performer, but for those aware of Cox’s bombastic sensibility and verbose response to the media, we all knew that the Content Farm would have a field day with this one.

“‘Oh, he’s fucking crazy, he’s melting down, blah, blah,’” Cox told Pitchfork in regard to the media buzz. “It’s not like fucking Lana Del Rey carved an upside down cross on her cheek and defecated all over herself on stage at fucking Bonnaroo.”

Take what you will from Cox’s articulacy, but critics are too busy wading through Cox’s metaphorical brooding to see that, dark humor aside, he brings up a valid point. During the interview with Pitchfork, he says:

The saddest thing is that nothing can happen for an audience of 400 people anymore. Now it has to be on the Internet and it has to be broadcast so widely. That intimidates people. Maybe that’s the issue that makes people want to be more inhibited onstage. It makes people more self-censoring. That’s the reason people think I’m a nutjob, because I don’t give a fuck who reposts or how I sound.

This isn’t a new argument — music journalists are quick to pick up concert buzz, and YouTube videos saturate the Internet with unneeded content — but the extent to which we suck the live experience dry is notable. It’s not enough to be present at the concert; we have to deplete the essence of the experience by compartmentalizing every aspect of it. To do otherwise would negate journalism’s fundamental penchant. We like to classify, to identify cause and effect.

But some performances do not require our analyses. A fan heckled Bradford Cox, and he paid heed to the request. “I am a performance artist,” he told the audience. “I must play what you want to hear.” “My Sharona” is not the paradigm of hour-long cover jams, but it happened. Some fans left, perturbed, but most remained and rallied in this nameless energy with Cox.

The intimacy of live music is difficult to trace. It’s why 80,000 people attend Bonnaroo every year. Virtually no one would submit himself to Nashville’s oppressive heat, the inordinate amount of dust that accumulates in the lungs whilst there or days without sleep were it not the crux of the live experience.

Blog fiends love to slap on titles like “Exploding Bradford Inevitable,” prematurely pegging a given artist as a newfound iconoclast within fill-in-the-blank genre. These declarations yield perceived authority. Yet, we cannot let a performance exist in its organic form — because an amorphous, 60-minute cover of “My Sharona” is too much of an anomaly to get lost in the great abyss of the Internet.

This isn’t to say that Bradford Cox’s sloppy rhetoric deserves accolades. George Harrison may act as a better reference. “It’s all well and good being popular and being in demand,” he told Rolling Stone in a 1987 interview. “But, you know, it’s ridiculous.”

Harrison wasn’t aggressively disparaging the media, but his point is not lost on the live experience years later. As one critic attributes Cox’s popular status in “indie rock” to unwarranted hype, and as the same publication lays claim to his “iconic personality” in “new rock music,” he is the one to tell sources, “I am not an indie rock musician. I don’t even know what the fuck that means.”

The epithet is immaterial. But it’s all a part of the content farm. We farm, we farm, and we farm.

Excerpt No. 1 of “My Sharona” cover:

Excerpt No. 2 of “My Sharona” cover:

Excerpt No. 3 of “My Sharona” cover:

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-pulcinella-murray/bradford-cox-my-sharona-cover_b_1384967.html

The music industry has certainly changed over the past 15 years, and in my opinion, not at all for the better.

The advancements of technology have allowed digital distribution to expand exponentially, in particular illegal downloading, and it has caused actual record sales to plummet significantly. Just 10 short years ago, it took millions of album sales to reach number one on the Billboard records sales charts. These days, moving a few hundred thousand units in your first week of sales is enough to get you to number one.

One of the major effects of illegal downloading is a narrowing of the playing field of music genres that are commercially successful. The remaining three genres that still actually turn a profit are Rap/Hip-Hop (Drake, Lil’ Wayne), Country (Lady Antebellum) and Pop (Lady Gaga, Adele). And even someone as popular as those artists mentioned are now, his or her level of popularity in the late ‘90s and early 2000s would have yielded up to three times as many record sales.

It’s difficult to argue that Lady Gaga is not the biggest music artist of any genre right now, because she is. Her second full-length album, Born This Way, sold 1.11 million copies in it’s first week. That seems pretty good, but she’s the only artist these days that can even touch that. Also, compare that to the record holder for most albums sold in a week (N’Sync: No Strings Attached) at 2.42 million in the year 2000; she didn’t even come close. Since these are the only genres that yield record sales worthwhile to major labels, other genres, particularly all forms of rock, have taken a major hit. Granted, well-established rock acts like Green Day, Pearl Jam and The Offspring continue to make records and sell reasonably well, but truly good new rock music has become a rare occurrence.

The last awesome rock album that came out was Rise Against’s fifth album release Appeal To Reason. That album pumped out truly amazing songs such as “Savior” and “Audience of One” that were huge hits on the rock charts, and it was Rise Against’s most commercially successful album until the release of Endgame in 2011. However, Appeal to Reason was released in 2008 and is still 450,000 copies short of going platinum (1,000,000 copies sold), something a band like Limp Bizkit was able to do with their sophomore album Significant Other a total of six times back in 1999 and 2000.

The commercial streamlining of music has also stifled creativity, and every new pop hit is a clone of the last. Almost all pop music today consists of the same dance beat and hooks that are repeated way too many times. Just because a melody gets in your head easily doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy about it. Where did the good, thought out and best selling music go?

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Article source: http://northernstar.info/opinion/columnists/article_eabeb170-72f2-11e1-aee5-001a4bcf6878.html

‘American Idol,’ Billy Corgan: Smashing Pumpkins Singer Wants to Judge

2012-03-16

Story by Cat Badra

‘American Idol’s’ New Judge: Smashing Pumpkins Frontman Billy Corgan?

Billy Corgan, a judge on “American Idol?” It doesn’t sound like a likely fit, but the Smashing Pumpkins frontman isn’t opposed to the idea. Quite the opposite! After his March 13 SXSW panel discussion in which he let his thoughts roll out about the music industry, the famed grunge singer and songwriter acknowledged that he would still accept a position judging on “American Idol” if it came his way.

“I’d love it,” Corgan told Spinner. Corgan then went on to explain that while he believe a lot is wrong with the music industry today, “Idol” is not the problem, but instead “society’s inability to culturally offset the effect of those shows on the music industry.”

“I don’t have a problem with ‘Idol’ or ‘X Factor,’ I have a problem with when those things are not given the proper contextual hue,” he said. “If there’s an ‘American Idol’ there should be a proper alternative counterbalance — if there was hair metal, there was grunge, know what I mean?”

Corgan added that he likes shows like “Idol” for being obvious in their goal, unlike most new rock music, which he calls “Laptop Rock.” “Laptop Rock is not the adequate response for ‘American Idol’ — and everybody knows it.”

Corgan and the Pumpkins have been releasing a string of killer webisodes celebration of their recent “Gish” and “Siamese Dream” reissues. Watch the latest video describing ‘90s Pumpkins hit “Disarm,” which includes an acoustic performance from Corgan, via this link. (Photo via YouTube.)

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Article source: http://audioinkradio.com/2012/03/american-idol-billy-corgan-smashing-pumpkins-singer-judge/