The Guardian asked its readers to submit alternative covers for Morrissey’s much anticipated (at least in England) autobiography, which is called “Autobiography.”
Here are a couple of the submissions:
To see the others, head to The Guardian.
And while you’re at it, check out this essay about Morrissey and The Smiths by Jon Savage.
And if you’re in the mood, “How Soon Is Now” by The Smiths.
This year the nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame includes Nirvana, the Replacements, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Link Wray. Also nominated are Kiss, Hall and Oates, Chic, Deep Purple, Peter Gabriel, LL Cool J, N.W.A., Link Wray, the Meters, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens, Yes and the Zombies.
Over 600 music industry players including band managers, record company executives and journalists vote for a handful of the nominees and the winners are inducted in April at an event in New York City.
For more go to Rolling Stone.
Here’s Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”:
The final day of the Austin City Limits music festival has been cancelled due to extreme weather.
Posted on the festival website:
AUSTIN – October 13, 2013 – Due to current weather conditions with flash flood warnings, The Austin City Limits Music Festival organizers have canceled the festival for Sunday, October 13.
“Our first priority is always the safety of our fans, staff and artists,” said Shelby Meade, communications director for C3 Presents, the promoter behind Austin City Limits Music Festival. “We regret having to cancel the show today, but safety always comes first.”
Refunds will be issued automatically by check from Front Gate Tickets within three weeks. One-third of ticket price will be refunded to all ticket buyers based on original ticket price paid, and will be mailed to the billing address on the original order. For questions, please visit http://support.frontgatetickets.com.
More than 40 acts were scheduled for the final day including Thom Yorke’s Atoms For Peace, Neko Case, Divine Fits, The National and Franz Ferdinand.
David Byrne is not happy about streaming music services such as Spotify.
In a long essay in The Guardian, he thoughtfully discusses the impact these services are having on musicians.
“In future, if artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they’ll be out of work within a year,” Byrne writes.
Later in the piece he says: “I also don’t understand the claim of discovery that Spotify makes; the actual moment of discovery in most cases happens at the moment when someone else tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you’re on the streaming service listening to what you have read about (though Spotify does indeed have a “discovery” page that, like Pandora’s algorithm, suggests artists you might like). There is also, I’m told, a way to see what your “friends” have on their playlists, though I’d be curious to know whether a significant number of people find new music in this way. I’d be even more curious if the folks who “discover” music on these services then go on to purchase it. Why would you click and go elsewhere and pay when the free version is sitting right in front of you? Am I crazy?”
Disclaimer: I once worked at Mog, which is now a streaming music service owned by Beats.
Read Byrne’s essay at The Guardian.
Peter Buck did a rare interview with Salon that was published today. The former R.E.M. guitarist and songwriter seems quite happy with his life. He’s working with musicians he digs, taking walks, writing songs and pretty much having a ball.
It wasn’t always that way. Buck says when R.E.M. disbanded, he was in a bad way.
“It seemed like everything occurred at once,” he told Salon’s David Daley. “I remember I felt really sorry for myself for a day or two, and then I thought, well, this is bullshit. I have got a million friends; if I was broke I could just call them and stay on their couches for 10 years. I still have whatever ability I had, which isn’t a lot. I’ve got great family, great friends. You know, I don’t have to work for a reason; there’s no need.
“I was just down. Disheartened when things end. When lots of things end — I was really sad when my kids went off to college. They weren’t.
“I’ve just got to remember who am I and consider what I’m going to put my time to doing. You know, I’m like a lot of people my age — music is not something I need to do 24 hours a day, but I want to continue to create. And I want to do things that are interesting and entertaining and fun.”
Buck still thinks back fondly on the days when he could introduce journalists to great unknown bands of the punk and post-punk era.
“We had bands open for us that we really respected.,” Buck told Salon. “At a time when no one knew who the Minutemen were, I would play tapes of them for writers in England, and they’d say, ‘This is amazing. This is a revolution happening right now in America and nobody’s paying attention to it.’ We’d talk about it, whether it’s Howard Finster or Flannery O’Connor. You know, we weren’t getting a lot of information either. I grew up in Atlanta in 1978, and every once in a while somebody would have a Melody Maker that was six weeks old.
“The B-52s went to New York and they would tell you things. I didn’t know them very well, but you’d hear, ‘Wow, there’s this great band called Gang of Four.’ My whole thing was whenever I would do interviews, I’d say, you know, it feels like there’s only 20 people in this town, but there’s 20 people in every town in America interested in these things. I’m still really good friends with a lot of them — Steve Wynn, Bob Mould. People who helped shape scenes where they lived.”
Buck recorded a solo album for Portland-based Mississippi Records and only released it on vinyl.
“Well, when R.E.M. went the way of all flesh — it was all amicable and we decided and we agreed 100 percent, but it left me thinking, well, I’ve been dissatisfied for a few years with what has gone on. So what don’t I like? And I sat down and made a list of things I like and a list of things I don’t like. The things I don’t like had nothing to do with music — it was all the other stuff. The business part of it, and you know, the interviews. I’ve only done five in the last five years. I don’t promote my own stuff with interviews because I don’t need to. But for years I’ve been saying I hate the way CDs sound, and on top of that I don’t like records that are made on Pro-Tools, even though that makes it easier. So I went all the way to the other side. I’ve been lucky enough where I don’t have to make a living making records. So I can do it exactly the way I want to — and if that’s seen as exclusionary, that’s OK, but you know, you can order the records.”
For more, head to Salon.
The Bob Dylan Bootleg app for iPhone and iPad has been released. If you’ve got Dylan’s Another Self Portrait on your ios device, the app provides video interviews about the songs, biographical info about artists who Dylan influenced or who influenced Dylan, lyric and track info and more.
More info about it here.
For now it only works with Another Self Portrait but according to the app, soon info will be available for all of the Bootleg series albums.
Download for free here.
Mick Jones, once the guitarist, songwriter and occasional singer in The Clash, said in an interview that he wrote a batch of songs with his Clash partner, Joe Strummer, that have never been released.
“We did write some more songs together and he was going to do them with The Mescaleros [Strummer’s final group],” Jones said during an interview with BBC 6Music.
“We wrote a batch – we didn’t used to write one, we used to write a batch at a time – like gumbo,” Jones said. “The idea was he was going to go into the studio with The Mescaleros during the day and then send them all home. I’d come in all night and we’d all work all night.”
The NME, which reported the story, says it’s possible the songs did get recorded as an unreleased Clash album.
“That didn’t come to nothing because that wasn’t going to work, we knew that but it was a nice idea,” Jones said in the interview. “Later on, a few months later we were at some opening or something and I said, ‘What happened to those songs?!’ If you didn’t do them straight away and get them back straight away, it was like, ‘What’s wrong with them?!’ So, I went, ‘What happened to the songs?!’ He went, ‘Oh man, they’re the next Clash album’.”
Thom Yorke hasn’t kept quiet about his hatred of Spotify. Now he’s spoken to Mexico’s Sopitas.com and this is some of what he has to say:
“I feel like the way people are listening to music is going through this big transition. I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what’s happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen. But it’s all about how we change the way we listen to music, it’s all about what happens next in terms of technology, in terms of how people talk to each other about music, and a lot of it could be really fucking bad. I don’t subscribe to the whole thing that a lot of people do within the music industry that’s ‘well this is all we’ve got left. we’ll just have to do this.’ I just don’t agree.
When we did the ‘In Rainbows’ thing what was most exciting was the idea you could have a direct connection between you as a musician and your audience. You cut all of it out, it’s just that and that. And then all these fuckers get in a way, like Spotify suddenly trying to become the gatekeepers to the whole process. We don’t need you to do it. No artists needs you to do it. We can build the shit ourselves, so fuck off. But because they’re using old music, because they’re using the majors… the majors are all over it because they see a way of re-selling all their old stuff for free, make a fortune, and not die. That’s why to me, Spotify the whole thing, is such a massive battle, because it’s about the future of all music. It’s about whether we believe there’s a future in music, same with the film industry, same with books.
To me this isn’t the mainstream, this is is like the last fart, the last desperate fart of a dying corpse. What happens next is the important part.”
Yorke then recounted a conversation with Massive Attack collaborator Adam Curtis, in which Curtis allegedly said to Yorke, “We are entering an age when potentially all creativity stops, the past informs the future, there is no other future.”
York then continued:
“And, it’s like, ‘fucking right, man.’ You know, people like us and him and Massive Attack we need to be standing together. Bullshit, it ain’t over. It’s like this mind trick going on, people are like ‘with technology, it’s all going to become one in the cloud and all creativity is going to become one thing and no one is going to get paid and it’s this big super intelligent thing.” Bullshit. It’s hard not to think about it all the time, because to me it’s the most important thing happening in music since when… it’s like when the printing press came out.”
Listen to the entire interview:
Thanks to Consequence of Sound and Sopitas.com.
A 78 RPM recording by the ’30s blues musician Tommy Johnson sold on eBay for $37,100, according to Broadway World. That’s reportedly the highest price ever paid for a 78 blues RPM record.
Tommy Johnson, no relation to Robert Johnson, was an influential delta blues musician who died in 1956. He recorded in the 1920s.
The record that sold on eBay features “Alcohol And Jake Blues” and “Ridin’ Horse.”
Listen to “Alcohol And Jake Blues” right now.
Read more about this story at Broadway World.
Onetime Motown recording artist/songwriter Barrett Strong, 72, is at odds with Motown over the song “Money,” according to a recent story in the New York Times. Strong says he wrote the song, and he was originally listed as a writer, according to the United States Copyright Office in Washington. Motown says it was a mistake that Strong’s name was on the song, which rose to #2 on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart in 1960, and reached #23 on the pop charts that year. The Beatles and the Stones recorded versions of the song, and it’s generated millions in publishing royalties over the years. Strong’s name was removed from the song, three years after it was written, according to the Times.
This is a story worth reading if you care about the people who make the music.
Check it out here.