Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Mon, 9 Nov 1992 15:02:00 EST
From:         "Michael H. Bloom" <MHB@MITVMA.BITNET>
Subject:      "Executive Producer" is an oxymoron

From:         crispen <crispen@EFFTOO.BOEING.COM>
Subject:      Zappa, etc. part 2

> It's later.  I disagree with you, Bloomster, about your evaluation of
> "Blooz Nite at the Mafia Club".  If you can trust your own ears and you
> have the equivalent of Beale Street to roam around in, you'll quickly
> come to the conclusion that some blues is better than other blues (or
> at least that you like some blues better than other blues).

But I *don't* have the equivalent of Beale Street available to me; I have
the Sunday afternoon blooz jam at Johnny D's. And I still claim that the
quality of that forum is lacking to the point where if you drag a newbie
in and say, "Listen up, this is the bedrock music of our culture," well,
you may well successfully convert said newbie to madrigals :-)

From:         crispen <crispen@EFFTOO.BOEING.COM>
Subject:      Re: zappa, etc.

> Russ Gelinas has been asking about which FZ to get.  How come nobody
> has mentioned "You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore" Volume anything?

We resent FZ's after-the-fact annotation and editing, maybe... Stravinsky
once said he'd be revising his old scores all the time, if it weren't that
he was so busy writing new ones. I think I'd rather hear more new music out
of FZ in the time he has left to him.

> Actually, Volume 1 is better than Volume 2(?) -- the one with the
> Stockholm(?) concert.  I've got a bunch of the live CD sets.  Oh, yeah.
> "Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar" is fabulous, too.

Actually I like the Helsinki concert, maybe because FZ presented it unedited.

> BTW, have you heard Todd Rundgren's "A Cappella"?

Splendid record. The first tune on it has an imitation of the "Ketjak"
monkey chant, which we saw live in Bali-- amazing shit, with a hundred
voices on it. Marsha, when you originally started the a capella thread,
did you include instances of group chanting from non-Western traditions?
Some of it is astonishing: Tuvan throat singing, Tibetan religious chants,
Les Mysteres des Voix Bulgares...  Also I can't recommend highly enough
the qawwali singing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, despite that he has a few
instruments in the group (two harmoniums and a set of tablas).

> Hey, Bloomster, I stole your format for this one.  Thanks.  More later.

Ya wanna thank me properly, call me "Bloomdido" instead of "Bloomster" :-)

From:         gmgettie@THAMA1.APGEA.ARMY.MIL
Subject:      Music Magazines (was Triumph)

> Anyone out there want to recommend a good music magazine? How 'bout a good
> heavy metal magazine? Preferably one that does not feature Axl Pus and Jon
> poseur Bon Jovi regularly. Many, many years ago, I subscribed to _Circus_.
> Back then, they were good. Now, they seem to be just like all the others.

I dunno, how are the metal specialist magazines like _Kerrang!_?

When did you like Circus? I sold them a few record reviews in the late '70s.
The review editor then was Paul Nelson, a quite interesting character. He got
hired away by Rolling Stone in 1978-79 somewhere.


From:         Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: ROCK AND ROLL

> I have a healthy respect for your *endurance*, if you were listening to 600
> year old troubador music--that would make you 100+ years old, by my reckoning!

Weren't there itinerant singer songwriters considerably before the Renaissance
in France (at least), and what were they called if not troubadours? The French
term "trouveres," or something like that, had some subtle distinction attached
to it, but music appreciation 101 was longer ago than I want to think about.

From:         "OUT,
              OUT - YOU'LL NOT FEEL THE FALL-OUT..." <OLIVOTTO@ITNCISCA.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: More Italian rhymes and a multi-ethnic beer session :)

> Marsha says:
>
> >MArco, did someone tell you to try? I'ts commonly known that there are no
> >rhymes to orange - at least not in English common usage...I hope you
> >haven't spent too much time pondering this!
>
>         Heh, nice point. No, nobody told me to try - I needed that in one
> of my lyrics. I guess I'll have to change fruit... :)

They told Sondheim to come up with a rhyme for "orange," and he said:

"An orange, or / A porringer."

Which doesn't solve your problem at all, does it?

From:         mjferzig@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU
Subject:      Re: ROCK AND ROLL

>      ... among the best albums of all time. That only means that they are
> MY favorites, and that when I DJ, I play them. We can only rate them as
> "good" according to certain flawed objective standards - concert
> attendance, airplay, albums sold....notice we're dealing with economics.

Pshaw. When I talk about "best albums of all time," I'm talking about music
that makes obvious (to me at least) stylistic strides. Some of them sold big
in their day, like Yes's _Fragile_. Some of them didn't: Henry Cow's 5 albums
sold maybe 25,000 copies apiece. My favorite stuff nowadays all tends to be on
the Cuneiform label out of Maryland, and their press runs are like 3000 copies.

I think the odds of a big seller being *musically* significant have lessened
considerably over the last 25 years. Madonna's licks were mostly copped from
little-known disco and techno artists. Nirvana couldn't penetrate the mass
market until Soundgarden, Mudhoney, the Melvins, and Mother Love Bone had all
reminded each other which Black Sabbath records were the most fun. Michael
Jackson's hits were 20 years in the making-- more, if you count the career
of producer Quincy Jones. I shall have more to say about this topic later.

> Charles Ives is an incredibly famous and, some think, talented composer,
> and he is part of most music history classes, but in real life the man was
> an insurance salesman, and attained little recognition for his music until
> he was dead.

What do you consider real life? I think he was really a musician at heart,
and insurance was his way of making sure his family didn't starve. He was a
kick ass insurance man too: amassed a fortune of millions of dollars, back
in the days of five cent cigars. Of course, he worked himself sick: a heart
attack at the age of 40 forced him to retire from his insurance career, and
he also discovered he lacked the energy to compose. He spent his last few
decades as a semi-invalid, trying to collate all his compositions and prepare
them for publication, funding and otherwise helping out various organizations
dedicated to new music (he did some non-organizational philanthropy too-- he
let composer Carl Ruggles stay with him during some lean years), and trying
to interest "proper" musicians in his work and in other idiosyncratic new
composers. He finally heard his second symphony, I think it was, some fifty
years after he wrote it, by telephone-- never heard the Fourth at all.

And I think he was a genius. Beefheart's a stripped down rock'n'roll parody
of what Ives was doing 70 years earlier.
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