The art of the bad review

Long Road Out Of Eden
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Age discrimination in music - it's official

My predictions of age discrimination in the field of music are confirmed in today's Guardian:

At the Underage Festival in east London, bouncers will be checking IDs not to root out teenagers but to catch the twenty-, thirty-, and even fortysomethings trying to sneak in to hear some of the hippest new bands and DJs.

The one-day event in Victoria Park, Hackney, billed as the world's first credible festival for the under-19s, will see up to 5,000 14- to 18-year-olds turn out to see indie darlings like Jack Peñate, Cajun Dance Party, the Pigeon Detectives and the Mystery Jets (above). With many of the bands barely past their GCSEs themselves, the event looks set to be a riotous celebration of teenage exuberance.

For the £20 entrance fee they will get eight hours of musical treats on four stages, plus attractions such as a "bedroom jam" space complete with amps, drums, guitars and keyboards. But no alcohol will be on sale and there will be frisking on the door to catch those trying to smuggle it in.

Any parents who insist on hanging around ready to drive their offspring home at 8pm will be kept out of sight in a "creche" behind the main stage, complete with bar. VIPs will be similarly catered for.

Now read about the brand new sexy audience, and sample the Underage Festival via eFestivals Radio - but only if you're under 19 (only joking).
Image credit Dimmak.com. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Vinyl dreams at Killatunes Record Shop

It's Saturday, the sun is shining and I'm off to the beach. Here's a photo of Killatunes Record Shop upstairs at Ali Bongo in St. John Maddermarket, Norwich. It specialises in underground dance music on vinyl. It could almost be the summer of love.
Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Moving the music business on

'The music industry has reacted angrily at a decision to give away the new album by US musician Prince (right) with a tabloid newspaper. Planet Earth will be given free with a future edition of the Mail on Sunday. The 10-track CD from Prince - whose hits include Purple Rain, Sign O' The Times and Cream - is not due to be released until 24 July. Paul Quirk, co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, said the decision "beggars belief".

The Mail on Sunday's recent CD giveaways include Peter Gabriel, Dolly Parton, Duran Duran, UB40 and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Stephen Miron, the newspaper's managing director, said: "No one has done this before. We have always given away CDs and DVDs, but this is just setting a new level." Mr Miron declined how much the newspaper had paid to secure the deal. He added that the newspaper was not out to put music retailers out of business. "They are living in the old days and haven't developed their businesses sufficiently. We can enhance their business. They are being incredibly insular and need to move their business on," he said' ~ reports BBC News

Eat your heart out Nicholas Kenyon
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Music that knows who the real enemy is

'Vote for Enoch Powell,' came the counsel from a stage in the West Midlands. 'Stop Britain from becoming a black colony ... Get the foreigners out ... I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man.' Not some ranting nutcase from the National Front, but an inebriated Eric Clapton (now CBE), formerly of Cream and latterly of Hello! magazine. Yes, Clapton - who played the blues, but whose outburst in August 1976 came hot on the heels of another from David Bowie, proclaiming Adolf Hitler to be 'the first rock star' and urging that what Britain needed was a 'right-wing dictatorship'.

People may feel grateful to Bowie and Clapton for their own reasons, but perhaps the most gratifying contribution this duo made to music was to detonate the revulsion at their sentiments and clear the stage for Rock Against Racism, the first edition of whose fanzine, Temporary Hoarding, appeared on May Day 30 years ago. 'We want rebel music,' it proclaimed. 'Crisis Music. Now Music. Music that knows who the real enemy is. Rock Against Racism.'

Essential reading from today's Observer. Which does prompt the question, is classical music really a multicultural community?

Header photo is the Clash performing at the 1978 Rock Against Racism event, when 100,000 people marched the six miles from Trafalgar Square through London's East End - the heart of National Front territory - to a Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park, Hackney. Photo credit the Combative Clash Page. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Mothers of Invention

It's amazing where An Overgrown Path leads. My Theremin and Variations article is linked on a Frank Zappa blog, which also yields these gems:
* A composer is a person who goes around forcing their will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
* A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it's not open.
* Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
Which can only lead to Dead '72
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Dead '72

The Grateful Dead played hard to get - and it worked. They had little interest in money and mainstream acceptance. The band’s repertoire was a marketer’s nightmare and even now the group confounds the uninitiated because of decisions made decades ago -- decisions to play obscure folk and country music, improvise for hours at a time, and play to its own gallery.

Millions didn’t know what to expect and went elsewhere. The core fan base, built largely on constant touring, grew exponentially. It only goes to show that one person’s endless noodling is someone else’s intriguing labyrinth of sound.

For a group that spanned a multidecade career, many think ’72 was its best. Someone once called Dead shows “the place where I got my best thinking done.” Here’s a good place to start - the official Dead free music streaming service.

Psychedelia was the foreground; country, blues, and jazz the background. Choose a popular group from ‘72 that played any of those styles, whether it’s Pink Floyd or the Beatles playing psychedelia, Merle Haggard or the Byrds playing country rock, the Rolling Stones riffing on the blues, or Weather Report or Miles Davis playing jazz fusion. These elements were present in the Dead, the combination a unique mixmaster of American music.

Most rock musicians don’t have the chops to attempt this, but it’s the Dead’s stock and trade. Imagine Pink Floyd at center stage running through a 30-minute Money that had different contours every night. Or the Stones settling into a 40-minute Tumbling Dice. Not likely.

Jimi Hendrix begs comparison. He liked playing live and didn’t mind stretching out, but it was a short career by any standard, nowhere near the Dead’s 30-year life. Miles Davis played to the same audiences, but the shows stayed generally at about an hour, well short of the typical 2-3 hour Dead show.

Studio recordings were secondary to playing live. Those performances, sometimes uneven and unfocused, but ultimately clocking in at more than 3,000 in its career, possessed an edgy creativity. These are the snowflakes of rock. The Deadhead’s Taping Compendium was written by obsessives and features reviews of every live show it could find; volume 1 helps make sense of the early ‘70s.

The Dead’s instrumentation wasn’t far removed from other rock groups of the time – guitars, bass, drums (more often than not, there were two drummers pounding away), keyboards, and vocals. The difference, easily distinguished at the bottom, was the classical education of bassist Phil Lesh, who studied with Luciano Berio, worshipped John Cage, and soaked up Ravi Shankar and early ‘60s John Coltrane. He rarely sounds like he’s playing the same song as the rest of the group, yet each lope and loop fits neatly and surprisingly in.

Guitarist Jerry Garcia started as a folkie, veered into bluegrass, strolled easily into country music, and the leap to Chuck Berry was forgone. Playing was what he did best and, at his best, his spider-web sound has the ring of freedom. He is the keystone to the group and should be celebrated every bit as much as Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young or Coltrane.

Calling the Dead a jazz band may seem a stretch, but switch the palette from horns to electric guitars and it’s barely a step. Improvisation was the band’s musical lifeblood, the key to its acceptance by its fans and to its live shows. In later years Ornette Coleman and Branford Marsalis would play onstage with the group and neither had to adjust their direction much to fit in. Few in the audience would have made their way to a show by either, yet all applauded their inclusion by the Dead.

America was its stomping ground, though it occasionally made the trek to Britain and the Continent, converting some, as it did in ‘72. It all would have been lost without its habit of taping itself nearly every night and by the obsessive and sanctioned taping of shows by fans. After Garcia's death, the vaults of fans and band opened and there's plentyof the era captured and available for a fee, although the tradition of free downloads seems to be at an end - see footnote story.

I ducked into a café in The Hague about two years ago. I got into a conversation with the barmaid about music. She had plenty of CDs on the shelf behind her, loved Larry Coryell. and had a decent knowledge of jazz and pop from the past 30 years. I mentioned the Grateful Dead and she went blank.

“That’s just too American of a thing,” she said. “I don’t know much about them.”

The Dead played Britain and Europe in ’72, and came back occasionally over the next two decades. But, beyond that, seeing the band regularly remained essentially an American experience, purely due to geography. To recapture what you may have missed, or perhaps heard live, that year visit here and here.

Happy thinking.

Pliable writes - When Lee Landenberger contacted me saying that my article The Year is '72 should have included The Grateful Dead I couldn't disagree. So I invited Lee to write a piece on the Dead, which is precisely what he did above. Thanks Lee, a really valuable contribution which helps fill out the musical history of a fantastic year. Lee can be contacted at - ddewitt4 at bellsouth dot net

There is a topical side-story linked to the hot topic of file downloading. As this article was in the final stages of preparation the story broke that the Dead (the business) had asked the operators of the most popular download site for their concert recordings to limit access to listening only. The full story is here on the New York Times web site and there is also a follow up which suggest maybe a change of mind, both stories are free but you will need to register. Here are the first few paragraphs with acknowledgement to the NYT:

Deadheads Outraged Over Web Crackdown
By Jeff Leeds November 30, 2005

The Grateful Dead, the business, is testing the loyalty of longtime fans ofthe Grateful Dead, the pioneering jam band, by cracking down on anindependently run Web site that made thousands of recordings of its live concerts available for free downloading.

The band recently asked the operators of the popular Live Music Archive (archive.org ) to make the concert recordings - a staple of Grateful Deadfandom - available only for listening online, the band's spokesman, DennisMcNally, said yesterday. In the meantime, the files that previously had beenfreely downloaded were taken down from the site last week.

Dissent has been building rapidly, however, as the band's fans - known asDeadheads - have discovered the recordings are, at least for the timebeing, not available. Already, fans have started an online petition, at www.petitiononline.com/gdm/petition.html , threatening to boycott the band'srecordings and merchandise if the decision is not reversed. In particular,fans have expressed outrage that the shift covers not only the semiofficial"soundboard" recordings made by technicians at the band's performances, butalso recordings made by audience members.

To the fans, the move signals a profound philosophical shift for a band thathad been famous for encouraging fans to record and trade live-concert tapes.The band even cordoned off a special area at its shows, usually near thesound board, for "tapers" - a practice now followed by many younger jambands. But more broadly, it suggests that a touchstone of baby-boomercounterculture - the recording made by and shared, sometimes via mail,among hard-core fans - may be subverted in a digital era when music filescan be instantly transmitted worldwide.

And in a subsequent development a Guardian article reports on 2nd December: "Shocked by the backlash, the band yesterday relented and allowed the downloads to be put back up." What goes around comes around...

Image credits -
Lead and final poster - Bob Masse
Jerry Garcia - Wikipaedia via Tocatchinfo
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Follow An Overgrown Story to the rest of the story of The year is '72, plus check out Chanticleer rocks with Sound in Spirit.