Category Archives: music business

Books: Killer Rock Books For Summer – Alex Chilton, Bob Dylan, Kiss, Allman Brothers & More

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There’s a great overview of recent music books by Howard Hampton at the New York Times today.

He covers books about the Allman Brothers, Alex Chilton, Kiss, Bob Dylan and Earth, Wind & Fire, plus rock journalist Lisa Robinson’s memoir.

All rock biographies/memoirs agree on one point. As Gregg Allman tells it in “One Way Out,” an exhaustive oral history of the Allman Brothers Band by Alan Paul, escaping the workaday lot of “a shock-absorber washer-jammer in Detroit . . . is why I became a musician in the first place.” Or as Joey Ramone sang: “It’s not my place in the 9-to-5 world.”

Whatever form the music might take, it promised a palatable alternative to the routine assembly-line life. Learn how to play an instrument, be able to clutch a mic and project some personality or attitude, and you too might ascend from the pits of menial-labor, desk-job drudgery, or the “Do you want fries with that?” service industry. Not only were shimmering nonunion perks like sex, drugs and fame on the table, but you could sleep until the afternoon, not be penalized for lapses in hygiene or deportment and, with luck, get paid to be utterly irresponsible. What wasn’t to love?

You didn’t even have to be a musician to tap into that life. In 1969, you could be a young substitute teacher in Harlem who started working after school in the office of a syndicated music writer/D.J./would-be record producer named Richard Robinson, and in no time find yourself skating down a yellow brick road of free record albums, concert tickets and record company buffets straight into the spanking new field of rock journalism (while marrying the boss in the process, a union that would also stick). As Lisa Robinson says in her winning THERE GOES GRAVITY: A Life in Rock and Roll (Riverhead, $27.95), she wasn’t like the “boys who had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer”: She took over her new husband’s column and was off to the races.

A dedicated Manhattan girl, she adopted a very laissez-faire, New Orleans attitude to the rock circus — let the good times roll over you and leave the existential-metaphysical-political implications to others. Robinson wasn’t a partyer, though. She came for the music and the warped conviviality of the milieu (a professed “drug prude,” she passed on the cocaine hors d’oeuvres). Observing Mick Jagger or Robert Plant in their offstage habitats was almost as entertaining as seeing Keith Richards or Television’s Tom Verlaine play sublime guitar licks.

By the ‘70s, Robinson was writing a cheeky gossip/fashion column she called “Eleganza” for Creem magazine. This led to her being hired as the press liaison for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 Tour of the Americas…

Read the rest of this review here at the New York Times.

–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Money Changes Everything Dept.: Which Artists Have Earned at Least a Billion from Touring?

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Rolling Stones top the list. Photo via the Rolling Stones Facebook page.

A new report in Billboard lists artists who have earned at least a billion dollars from touring.

The list is of the 25 highest-grossing touring artists from 1990 through 2014. Here are the top five:

1. The Rolling Stones

Gross: $1,565,792,382

Attendance: 19,677,569

Shows: 538

2. U2

Gross: $1,514,979,793

Attendance: 20,536,168

Shows: 526

3. Bruce Springsteen

Gross: $1,196,116,507

Attendance: 15,010,773

Shows: 727

4. Madonna

Gross: $1,140,230,941

Attendance: 9,694,079

Shows: 382

5. Bon Jovi

Gross: $1,030,082,884

Attendance: 12,333,668

Shows: 578

Check out the whole list here.

Audio: The Incredible Search for Blues Singers ‘Geeshie’ Wiley and ‘Elvie’ Thomas

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Only known photo of L. V. Thomas.

Fantastic article in today’s Sunday New York Times on the search for 1930s blues singers ‘Geeshie Wiley’ and ‘Elvie’ Thomas.

Below the excerpt are the songs the two women recorded in 1930 for Paramount Records.

John Jeremiah Sullivan writes:

IN THE WORLD of early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent. In the spring of 1930, in a damp and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin village on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the duo recorded a batch of songs that for more than half a century have been numbered among the masterpieces of prewar American music, in particular two, Elvie’s “Motherless Child Blues” and Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” twin Alps of their tiny oeuvre, inspiring essays and novels and films and cover versions, a classical arrangement.

Yet despite more than 50 years of researchers’ efforts to learn who the two women were or where they came from, we have remained ignorant of even their legal names.

Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, “Last Kind Word Blues”:

Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, “Motherless Child Blues”: (1930)

Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, “Skinny Leg Blues”:

Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas,” Pick Poor Robin Clean”:

Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, “Come On Over To My House”:

Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, “Eagles On A Half”:

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Neil Young’s PonoMusic Kickstarter Campaign Brings In Over $5.8 Million With 4 Days To Go

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As of this afternoon Neil Young’s PonoMusic kickstarter campaign has grossed $5,805,033 from 17,010 donors.

PonoMusic is the third most funded Kickstarter campaign, according to a Warner Bros. press release.

“We are so excited about hitting this milestone, said PonoMusic CEO, John Hamm in the press release. “This campaign has exceeded our expectations from the start. By taking the nontraditional crowdfunding approach, we have been able to unveil PonoMusic our way – directly to our customers. The PonoMusic Kickstarter campaign now has over 16,000 active backers and we’ve received over 5,000 comments, questions, and suggestions on the site. This is incredibly valuable consumer feedback and we will be a much better company at launch because of the engagement from the PonoMusic community.”

“Pono is an ecosystem to play and store music,” Neil Young said in the press release. “This is not a format; the experience is not about recognizing a song, it’s about feeling it,” says Young, who came up with the idea over three years ago. He and his team have been chasing the dream of bringing the soul back into music ever since.”

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –

In The News: Devo, Johnny Cash, Julian Casablancas, Neil Young, John Coltrane

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Devo Redux: Devo will perform its experimental music from 1974-1977 on a North American tour this summer. The 10-date North American tour is dedicated to the memory of the late Robert “Bob 2″ Casale, whose family will get a portion of the proceeds. According to Bob 2’s brother Gerald, Gerald Casale, Bob 2 “had no will or insurance.” — Slicing Up Eyeballs

Dylan’s Bed Jumping: Bob Dylan jumped on Johnny Cash’s bed the first time they met, according to the account the singer gave to his son, John Carter Cash which he commented about in a Reddit Q&A. Johnny Cash met Dylan in a New York City hotel room in the early Sixties. Although they had exchanged letters, upon finally meeting one another, “Dylan rushed into his room, jumped on the bed and began bouncing up and down chanting, ‘I met Johnny Cash, I met Johnny Cash.'” Although they fell out of touch as time went by, they remained friends. — Rolling Stone

Break the Code?: Fans think they’ve discovered the release date for ç upcoming album in a teaser video released this week. The date? May 26, 2014. Time will tell. — NME

Check out the video for yourself:

Gimme Money!: Neil Young’s PonoMusic Kickstarter campaign has now passed the $5 million mark. As of Saturday, March 29, 2014 14,808 people had contributed $5,006,618.

A Love Supreme: Six rolls of undeveloped film shot by Chuck Stewart during sessions for John Coltrane’s transcendent album, A Love Supreme, were found by his son. Check out a few of the photos at the NPR website. — NPR

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –

News Update: Neil Young’s PonoMusic Kickstarter Campaign Rockets Past $2.8 Million

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Patti Smith talks up PonoMusic’s sound.

For Neil Young, times are good. Very good.

He’s on a creative roll with amazing live concerts In New York and Canada, a new album, A Letter Home, in the bag, a second memoir, “Special Deluxe,” due out later this year and the money pouring in to fund PonoMusic.

As of about 10 p.m. PT today 8649 people had put $2,812,059 into the company.

Also, Young’s second big archives set is in the works and a source known as “Archives Guy” who claims to be involved in the project told Thrasher’s Wheat:

At this time we are still planning on physical release for NYA V2 and yes it will be available on Pono, too in full 24/192 sound quality. I’m happy to report that we are in full on production of NYA V2 right now. Maybe I’m biased, but I think V2 might be the best one. A plethora of previously unreleased tracks.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –

Books: Alex Chilton Bio, ‘A Man Called Destruction,’ Coming Mar. 20, 2014

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Holly George-Warren’s heavily researched biography of Big Star frontman Alex Chilton, “A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Times of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man,” (she spoke to over 100 sources) will arrive on March 20, 2014.

Reviewing the book in the National Review, John Lingan writes:

In the summer of 1967, The Box Tops’ first single, “The Letter,” took over American radio so fast that the Memphis band’s tour schedule filled up before anyone outside Tennessee even knew what they looked like. In between gigs with The Beach Boys and The Doors, they were also occasionally booked at black venues, whose owners assumed the gravel-voiced singer would fit in fine. But when a wispy-haired white boy barely old enough to drive showed up to play, managers were mystified. One booking agent at the Philadelphia fairgrounds forced bandleader Alex Chilton to sing a capella just to prove who he was.

That summer would be Chilton’s last experience with superstardom, but the next four decades of his music career were marked by similarly bemused audiences and parried expectations. His second band, Big Star, was a soulful pop-rock group who barely sold any records in the 1970s; Chilton responded by pushing the band in an ever less-commercial direction then embarking on a willfully shambolic solo career. As time wore on, he retreated further and further from the mainstream music industry, playing the occasional club show but more often noodling the piano in his beloved house in New Orleans’ Treme neighborhood.

But by the time Chilton died of a heart attack in 2010, aged 59, he had become an icon of intensely pure artistic integrity and an acknowledged influence on innumerable later acts including R.E.M., the Replacements and Elliott Smith. Rather than the failed or self-destructive pop star he appeared to be by 1980, Chilton had come to embody a new archetype: the unpopular pop musician, a performer whose reputation rests on a willful rejection of commercial considerations altogether. Without him there could have been no Tom Waits, who exchanged his piano for percussion instruments literally borrowed from junkyards; no Jeff Mangum, who disappeared from public life right after his band Neutral Milk Hotel recorded one of the ’90s’ most revered albums; no Jeff Tweedy, whose critical viability was secured when a major label dropped his group Wilco for making an “uncommercial” record with abstract lyrics and tape loops.

Holly George-Warren’s new biography bears the subtitle “From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man,” promising to tell how, exactly, the growling teen idol gave way to the romantic songwriter, who in turn became a punk icon, jazz crooner, and alt-rock figurehead….

For the rest of the review, head to the National Review.

If, somehow, you aren’t familiar with Big Star, check this out:

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Watch: David Byrne & Friends Cover Biz Markie’s ‘Just a Friend’

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David Byrne, Mike Mills formerly of R.E.M, Cake’s John McCrea, Tift Merritt, and Marc Ribot performed at NYC’s Le Poisson Rouge Tuesday evening. The concert supported Content Creators Coalition-NYC, a group currently petitioning congress for pay-for-play radio royalties for artists, Consequence Of Sound reported.

As it stands now, when a recording is played on the radio, the composer is paid a royalty but not the recording artist (unless they happen to be the composer.)

Byrne covered “Just a Friend” by Biz Markie to make a point.

“Mr. Markie didn’t write that tune (although he did probably write the rap),” Byrne wrote in his e-newsletter. “The drum and keyboard loop was lifted from a Freddie Scott recording, but the song was written by Gamble and Huff, the great songwriting team that wrote for The O’Jays and The Spinners. So chances are Biz Markie didn’t see any royalties from all the radio play that song got.”

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

New Book About Bob Dylan Focuses on ‘The Dylanologists’

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In 2001, an intense Bob Dylan fan named Bill Pagel bought the Duluth, Minnesota house where Robert Zimmerman lived before he moved to Hibbing, Minnesota. Five years later, Pagel settled permanently in Hibbing and attempted to buy the other Zimmerman house, the one where Bob lived while growing up, attending high school, etc., before taking off for Minneapolis, New York and stardom.

Kind of puts ones own obsession in perspective — right?

Pagel is one of the serious Dylan fans that Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Kinney writes about in “The Dylanologists,” a book that will be published this May.

Kinney describes himself as a Dylan fan in the book’s introduction:

I first found Dylan in the dusty basement of my childhood home. In the summer before my junior year in high school I was flicking through a pile of vinyl left behind by my older brother. I found a heavy box with five records inside. The man glowering on the front cover looked like he didn’t take orders from anybody. I liked that. I pulled off the top of the box, slid one of the records from a sleeve, fitted the vinyl onto the turntable, and dropped the needle into the groove. The music started, and a switch flipped in my head.

Writer David Kinney.

The album was called Biograph, a retrospective of the first two decades of a recording career still very much in progress. Dylan’s folk ballads were jumbled together with wailing mid-1960s rock classics; his gospel songs shared space with tomfoolery. A maid is beaten to death. A good man is sent to jail. A husband abandons his wife to hunt for treasure with a shadowy figure, and all he finds is an empty casket. There were songs about girls, and war, and politics. I didn’t know who all the characters were: Johanna, Ma Rainey, Cecil B. DeMille, Gypsy Davy. I couldn’t honestly say I knew what Dylan was saying half the time. But the lines were riveting. I wore out those five records. I leaned every word and made them mine, and Dylan grew into an outsize figure in my universe.

I’ve just started reading advanced proofs of the book and it’s very good. There’s a great section in which Dylan shows up in Hibbing to attend a funeral, as seen from the perspective of Linda Hocking, co-owner of Zimmy’s Downtown Bar & Grill, who is hopeful that the great man will stop in for a meal at her restaurant — or at least a piece of cherry pie.

The interior of Zimmy’s in Hibbing, Minnesota.

After all, ten years earlier, shortly after the restaurant was renamed Zimmy’s and decorated with Dylan photos and other paraphernalia, Dylan’s mother Beatty stopped in for lunch, and when asked what she thought of the place, she replied: “Honey, it’s about time somebody did something nice for my son in Hibbing.”

Bob and his mother, Beatty.

Kinney seems to have combined a biography of Dylan with stories of obsessive fans and so far it’s working.

I’ll post a review in late April or early May, once I finish the book and it’s closer to the publication date.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Audio: Bob Dylan & the Strange Story of ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’

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Fifty years ago, on February 5, 1964, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” was copyrighted as a Bob Dylan composition, by Whitmark & Sons, Dylan’s song publisher at the time.

But as Tim Dunn details in his book, “The Bob Dylan Copyright Files: 1962 – 2007,” Bob Dylan didn’t write “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.”

What’s odd about it is that at the beginning of Dylan’s recording of the song for his 1962 Columbia Records debut, Dylan credits Eric Von Schmidt as teaching the song to him.

“I first heard this from Ric Von Schmidt,” Dylan says before starting to sing the song. “He lives in Cambridge. Ric’s a blues guitar player. I met him one day in the green pastures of Harvard University.”

So Whitmark & Sons certainly should have known by February of 1964, more than two years after Dylan recorded the song, that it was not a Dylan original.

Dunn writes that the song can be traced to a 1930 recording by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy: “Can I Do It For You.”

Eventually Blind Boy Fuller recorded a version of “Mama Let Me Lay It On You” in 1938 that, in turn, was adapted by Eric Von Schmidt. Reverend Gary Davis claimed that he taught the song to Fuller, and in 1978 the song was copyrighted as a composition by Davis. (Davis passed away in 1972.)

When Dylan was hanging around Greenwich Village in 1961, he also heard Dave Van Ronk perform a version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.”

In an article Von Schmidt wrote that was published posthumously in the Winter 2008 issue of Sing Out! magazine, he said that Dylan’s version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” was “…a hybrid… probably closer to Dave’s version.” (Von Schmidt passed away in 2007; Van Ronk passed away in 2002.)

When the remastered version of Bob Dylan was released in 2005, the revised credits read: “Rev. G. Davis; add. contributions E. von Schmidt, D. Van Ronk.”

Bob Dylan, “Baby, Let me Follow You Down” off Dylan’s debut album, Bob Dylan:

Baby, Let Me Follow You Down by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, 1930:

Blind Boy Fuller, “Mama Let Me Lay It On You,” April 1938:

Rev. Gary Davis, “Baby Let Me Lay It On You”:

Baby, Let Me Lay It on You by Rev. Gary Davis on Grooveshark

Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Baby, Let Me Follow you Down,” Manchester Free Trade Hall, May 17, 1966:

Baby, Let Me Follow You Down by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Check out this version by Carly Simon with members of the Hawks backing her in 1966 — it’s not complete. The songs starts in at about 50 seconds into the clip:

Plus more versions from the 1966 World Tour:

Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” April 13, 1966, Sydney, Australia:

Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” April 20, 1966, Melbourne, Australia:

Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” May 14, 1966, Liverpool:

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-