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Friday, Aug 18 2017, 2PM
"The thing is, being punk rock is not having to prove you are. And it's obvious to anyone who is authentic in that mind-set. You don't have to call yourself a punk rocker." ~ Thurston Moore
On June 14, 1961, Patsy Cline and her brother Sam were involved in a head-on collision on Old Hickory Boulevard in Nashville. The impact threw Cline into the windshield, nearly killing her. Upon arriving at the scene, Dottie West picked glass from Cline's hair, and went with her in the ambulance. When help arrived, Cline insisted that the other car's driver be treated first. She later said she saw the female driver of the other car die before her eyes. West witnessed this too, and the impression left upon her may have contributed to an unfortunate decision she made some three decades later. In 1991, when West was seriously injured in a car accident, she insisted that her driver be treated first. West died from her injuries, possibly because she had declined to be treated immediately. Cline spent a month in the hospital, suffering from a jagged cut across her forehead that required stitches, a broken wrist, and a dislocated hip. Her friend Billy Walker, who died in a vehicle accident in 2006, said Cline rededicated her life to Christ while in the hospital, where she received thousands of cards and flowers from fans. When she was released, her forehead was visibly scarred. (For the rest of her career, she wore wigs and makeup to hide the scars, along with headbands to relieve the pressure that caused headaches.) Six weeks later, she returned to the road on crutches with a new appreciation for life. Unable to capitalize upon the success of "I Fall to Pieces" due to her hospital stay, Cline sought another recording to re-establish herself. When introduced to "Crazy", a song written by Willie Nelson, Cline expressed dislike because of the narrative on Nelson's demo recording. On Thursday, August 17, 1961, with Cline on crutches, the session was the rare time that Cline couldn't complete a recording in one take. Working in a Quonset hut (where the original Bradley's Barn Studio was located before moving to Opryland), she tried to follow Nelson's idiosyncratic narrative style. Cline claimed this was too difficult. Her ribs, injured in the crash, were making it hard for her to reach the high notes. In an era when it was standard to record four songs in a three-hour run, those in the "Crazy" session spent four hours on a single song. It was eventually decided that Cline would return the following Monday and simply sing the lyrics, overdubbing her vocals on the best instrumental track. After resting she was able to reach the high notes, and recorded her part in a single take. goo.gl
Released in 1996, the band initially planned for Tchad Blake, producer of their first album Ruby Vroom, to produce this album, but the death of a family member in a car accident caused Blake to take a hiatus. Over the objections of his bandmates and his record label, Slash Records/Warner Bros., frontman Mike Doughty (then billed as "M. Doughty") hired producer David Kahne (Fishbone, The Bangles, Sublime, Tony Bennett, Sugar Ray, The Strokes); he was intent on following up the wild sonics of Ruby Vroom with a tightly wound, trembly, New Wave–inspired record.
The tracking, at Manhattan's Power Station recording studio, was complete in eleven days, and Doughty was jubilant at the results. "Super Bon Bon" was used in the soundtrack to racing video game Gran Turismo 2. goo.gl
"Left of the Dial" is, in fact, a love song. Not only to college radio (the low-wattage, non-commercial stations found at the lower end of the FM spectrum), but to a specific person. Paul Westerberg revealed in interviews that the song was directed towards Angie Carlson, guitarist in Let's Active, whom Westerberg met and became smitten with on tour. The two groups' touring schedules didn't coincide, however, and the next time Westerberg heard Carlson was when she was being interviewed on a college radio station. None of this is explicit in the lyrics, but there's a typically gruff sense of heart-on-the-recently-puked-on-sleeve romanticism on display here that makes it easy to fill in the blanks. The overall mood is wistful but unsentimental, with a fine Bob Stinson solo, making this one of the group's best mid-period ballads. Unsurprisingly, it became an all-time college radio classic, one of those songs that is forever tied to its time and place. goo.gl
The song became popular after being featured on the MTV show Beavis and Butt-head, nearly a year after the album's release. It is still their highest charting single to date (and the only to chart on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100), even entering the top 10 of the Modern Rock Tracks chart, at number 9. Even though the band often ignores playing their pre-Soft Bulletin material, "She Don't Use Jelly" has usually been the most notable exception and has still been played live at most of their concerts to this day. It usually is preceded by a video of Jon Stewart introducing the song on The Jon Stewart Show. After the song, lead singer Wayne Coyne usually inflates an enormous balloon, filled with confetti or smaller balloons, until it bursts onto the crowd. The success of the song garnered the band a guest spot on the TV show Beverly Hills, 90210, in which they played live at the show's hangout, The Peach Pit, where supporting character Steve Sanders (portrayed by actor Ian Ziering) remarked, "You know, I've never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house!" goo.gl
G. Love on special brew: "My first introduction [ to craft beer] was in high school. It must have been 1988 or something and home brewing was just starting to take off. And this store called Home Brew opened in Philadelphia and me and my buddy for a chemistry project actually brewed beer. We brewed an IPA. We called it B and G’s Bare Beer. We brewed it and served Dixie cups of it to our tenth grade chemistry class. My first intro to craft beer was making my own. I actually home brewed some cream soda after that. That was my last thing until I got to work with New Belgium a few years ago... I met the people from New Belgium years ago when they were sponsoring a gig I was doing. I just talked to them about that idea and then it kind of percolated for a couple of years and finally they were doing their Lips of Faith series and they invited me to do that with them. So for that beer, the gist of it was let’s make a beer that represents the music that I make taking elements of the blues and a back porch thing. I grew up in Philadelphia and spent summers at the Jersey Shore. That’s where I would write a lot of my music—on my mom’s front porch on the Jersey Shore. Jersey is really known for its peaches and tomatoes so we decided to do a peach beer. It was actually a really complex beer. It was interesting to make because I was working with master brewers out there. We used grits, biscuit malts and molasses. It was a lot of southern 'bluesy' ingredients to represent that and the peach to represent the front porch.
Honestly, that was just a limited edition, but it’s been a dream of mine to partner up with someone and have a beer that’s going to be part of their brand. I want to do a summer shandy. G Love’s summer shandy because my whole thing is lemonade." goo.gl
Muddy Waters originally recorded this song in 1955, then re-recorded it in 1977 for his Hard Again album in a version produced by Johnny Winter.
The repetitive guitar line is easy to play, but very memorable. Waters used the same basic riff on his song "Hoochie Coochie Man." This riff appears on many other Blues songs in both the 5 note and a shortened 4 note version. George Thorogood used it for his song "Bad To The Bone."
The Rolling Stones often played this in their early days and released it on their 1977 Love You Live album. Muddy Waters was a huge influence on The Stones, and their name comes from his song "Rollin' Stone Blues." goo.gl
"For me, when a song is being born, it’s like you see a window into someplace that’s a journey away but you can see It from here. You’ve got a sense of where you have to go. But if you have to step away from the window and go all kinds of other places, you come back and the weather conditions are different, and the landscape has changed, and you’re like, 'Shit! I can’t see that place anymore, so I can’t get to [it].' It’s kind of challenging. As so many women writers, especially, have written about along the way – A Room of One’s Own… I think a lot of women writers have been aware that it’s a luxury that few women can afford, once children come along, and caretaking, to be able to write and think and have 'a room of one’s own' to create in. I think that’s why poetry and the women’s movement are so inextricably connected. Complete sentences are a luxury for people without children. I’ve learned how to come back to ideas. Sometimes you need to go with the new version of whatever that old lingering idea was." goo.gl
"I... felt the need to get out of St. Louis at that time. I had never really lived anywhere else, and New Orleans seemed like a good choice. I visited there as a kid, and I just felt like it was — and still is — an amazing place with so much culture and this amazing overall aura. I just finished a book called Empire Of Sin, written by a guy named Gary Krist, which goes through the evolution of jazz in New Orleans, so I learned more about the history of the city. But I moved there because I had always wanted to learn about New Orleans. I was doing a lot of driving. I think it was 24 hours to Minneapolis, and I essentially followed the route of the Mississippi River. Along the way I went through areas that had a lot of musical history. Whenever I was traveling, I would swing through the Mississippi Delta or drive Highway 61, which goes through St. Louis. I got to see sections of the country that I had never seen before, whether it was up in Iowa or Wisconsin or Minnesota. I was doing that drive from New Orleans north, and a lot of times I would check in with AM radio, where you could find a lot more varied musical palette. Sometimes I would tune in to Mexican radio stations, but more often than not, I would search for this one radio station that came out of New Orleans called the Road Gang. They would play a lot of classic country, so when I was driving, I would listen in and hear Buck Owens and George Jones and Merle Haggard. That’s the aesthetic I was going for with Trace, trying to incorporate some of that instrumentation — acoustic guitar and fiddle." goo.gl
On Come on Feel the Lemonheads, Dando revealed, "It’s almost a Smudge record. Every time we stopped touring, I’d go to Australia. I got rid of my apartment – I didn’t have a home for about three years. I’d either be on tour or in Australia. We made that album while we were on tour. I should have taken a break. We’d gone from being a bar band to a proper band in half a year. It was that classic thing of people wanting to get as much out of you as possible. I mean, they knew what I was doing, and they thought I might pop off – we had people coming down to the studio saying, get this done, because this guy might die. I never thought that was going to happen. I know nobody ever thinks it’s going to happen, but I was always careful with drugs. Real abuse is when you overdo it, because that’s not respecting the drug. It’s not a very serious record. There are a lot of experiments that are maybe a bit frivolous. Too happy, not quite dark enough in some ways. The title is about Slade, yeah. I had that Sladest greatest hits in high school, and I just thought they were one of the coolest bands!" goo.gl
"My animals are what made me make the sounds that I did. The slides, the things that I used to show Hendrix. I had over 40 to 50 species of jungle animals from all over the world; lions, tigers, leopards, elephants, gorillas, hawks, eagles, falcons, I had them all because I was preserving their breed before they'd go into extinction from the hunters. I didn't keep them in small cages, they roamed in cages over 100 feet long, I had thirty acres of land at that time. Where I am now I have 81 acres. It's like a private airport, but I had them being able to run the way they wanted to run. I used to sleep with them. I had them inside my house and everything like that. I used to bring them on stage and feed them during the intermission part of the show. I would buy 500 pounds of chicken necks and hand-feed them. I also had sea lions, I used to crawl up their stomachs and take all the worms out of them, and the hawks and falcons, I used to take all the little bugs out of their throats, the mites.
My life was music, surfing, and all my animals. And so when I heard my elephant scream at the top of his lungs when he wanted me to feed it, I'd go in and I'd feed it. Or my mountain lion would scream really high and my African lion would rumble to me at 5:30 every evening to eat. My cats were very well-mannered in the way that I had raised them. You can't let people think that they can get these animals and raise them, because the animals will kill them. A lion has 1,700 pounds per square inch in their jaw, and when they close they go right through the middle hands, but I used to stick my arms in their mouths [laughs]. See, there's a way that you work with these animals, you cannot control/command them without resentment, and that's why people get injured. You have to use a different kind of psychology." goo.gl
"I loved country music, and I always wanted to be a cowboy singer. So I followed people like Hank Williams and things like that. And in fact I even tutored Chet Williams' daughter on how to be on stage. I’ve gotten to perform in the same building at the same time as people like Johnny Cash, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, and Lefty Frizzell. I just did a memorandum song for Joe Maphis, who's the father of the double-neck guitar. And at the same time it was Larry Collins and his sister Laurie, and I was sweet on Laurie at the time. And Larry, he was just a little kid, but could he play the double-neck guitar, because he was tutored by Joe Maphis. Larry was the one who taught me my first guitar lick. I came to California in 1954. Drums were my first instrument. I used to listen to the big band albums that my Dad would bring home, and that's what got me to play the trumpet, like Harry James, Louis Armstrong, and stuff like that. And I've always been self taught. I used to bang on my mother's flour pans as a drum listening to Gene Krupa, cans of sugar and stuff like that in the Depression days. My father would say, "Stop scratching your mother's cans." That's where I got all my rhythm, and being left-handed. So when I first got my first instrument, I was reading in a Superman comic magazine. It said sell X number of jars of our Noxzema Skin Cream and we'll send you this ukulele. Well I'd be out there in the snow banging on doors at night, "Buy my Noxzema Skin Cream." I finally got the ukulele and it was made out of pressed cardboard or something, I was so disillusioned I smashed it in a trash can. Then I went in and took the Pepsi-Cola bottles and the Coke bottles in my little red wagon, went down and got six dollars. And I went to the music store and I bought my first six-dollar ukulele. It was plastic and it had screws going into the tuning pegs so they would stay in it. But the book didn't tell me - 'turn it the other way stupid, you're left handed.' I was holding it to strum with my left hand 'cause all the rhythm was there." goo.gl
"We like the 4-track for two reasons: for one--we like the way it enables to be more spontaneous. If we have a song, we can just go into Toby’s basement and record it that day. You can't really do that with a big studio. Second, some things just sound better on four track. We've spent a lot of time in the studio trying to get the vocals to sound as good as they do on the four track, that natural compression that you get. There are other things that we like about the four-track: the way it simplifies the arrangement, the way it allows you to get away with maybe not being technically perfect, which you're not going to be anyway because you just learned the song. Like the rhythm section is usually buried on four-track, all the low end gets kind of squashed out of existence, and the high end is really emphasized, so mainly what you hear is guitar and vocals, and this kind of clatter. But that's kind of the way that you used to hear songs on transistor radios back in the 60s, which is cool." ~ Jim Greer goo.gl
For guitars and effects used on this album, Bob Mould reveals, "It was my blue Strat, the same one that I use to this day. It's a 1987 American Standard Strat Plus with Lace Sensor pickups. That blue guitar was pretty much the guitar for the entire record. For my acoustic, I used a Yamaha APX with a stereo pickup in it. That got a really nice sound. [As for effects,] I remember my signal path because I still have it! [laughs] I plugged into a Roland SDE-1000 delay, and then I had an Eventide H3000 SE - I ran stuff from it in stereo and then I compressed it with a DBX 160S two-channel compressor. At that point, I had a left and a right signal, so I had a pair of stacks on each side, with each made up of a Roland JC120 solid-state head, a four by 12 Marshall cabinet and a four by 12 Sonic cab - both of those had Celestion speakers. Also, on each side of the stacks, I had a Fender Concert, a great tube amp with one 12-inch speaker. The Roland JC120s were for the faster, tighter low end, and the Fenders gave me that dirty wash on top. They were usually split by 15 milliseconds because of the stereo delay. So it was delay into harmonizer into compressor to the stereo stack. Pedal-wise, it was an MXR Distortion Plus, which I still use today. That's the core of the sound: the Strat Plus, the stereo stack and the Distortion Plus." goo.gl
Recorded on Kevin Cole's birthday. "After writing together for a long time, we started writing separately. We started competing rather than working together. That starts happening the first time a record is reviewed and one song is liked more than another. The other person has their feelings hurt. In the case of Warner Bros. and Hüsker Dü, the worst thing that ever happened was when they picked two songs of mine in a row to become singles. Bob [Mould] was used to regarding himself as the main songwriter simply because he was the guitar player." goo.gl
Instead of Pinkerton, the original plan for Weezer's second album was to be a rock opera called "Songs From The Black Hole": "I think I was planning to make the second Weezer album a sort of space-travel-themed rock opera with lots of synthesizers and new wave flavor over the Weezer rock sound. And then our bass player, Matt, put out his first solo record and I felt like it had a lot of the same musical and lyrical themes that I was planning to explore on the second record. So that would be one contributing factor, my change of heart. Also, I had this really painful surgical procedure on my leg, which lasted 13 months in all and it took me to a place, emotionally, where the whole idea of this whole rock opera started to feel too whimsical for where I was emotionally, going through the pain of the procedure. And so I scrapped the whole idea and went to a more serious and dark place." goo.gl
Fretblanket have had more success in the United States than in their native Britain, which the band put down to the attitude of the British music press. The band has been described as "one of the first British groups to reflect the worldwide influence of Nirvana's Nevermind", although Ride, The Wedding Present, and Swervedriver have also been identified as influences. The band signed to Polygram in 1993 and released their first album, Junkfuel, a year later. Fretblanket had a fairly successful hit in 1997 with the song "Into the Ocean". The video for that song had a short life in regular rotation on MTV the same year, and at the time was the highest-rated video ever on MTV's 12 Angry Viewers. The same year saw the release of a second album, Home Truths From Abroad. goo.gl
"We had a show out in Tijuana. That was pretty insane out there... well, all of Mexico, but we spent a lot of time in Tijuana. We actually bought a small house down there and just hung out and partied down there. Celso has relatives there so we were like hanging out down there, going to donkey shows... oh by the way, Brian Ritchie got arrested down there but we can't talk about that. Okay, we will. It was about 110 degrees outside, we had been drinking tequilas for three days straight, worms, the whole thing. We had met tons of lady friends down there anyhow, and they had convinced us that we should do a straight ahead clothes swap, fair enough right? So you know we were willing to dabble, so we traded clothes with them and the next day we were still in these clothes running the hot streets of Tijuana. Well, we ended up sitting in this small little comfortable bar that we liked to spend a lot of time in. It was about three in the afternoon and a couple of sailors walked in. [And] well, somebody got caught with their hands in the cookie jar... We spent a week in jail and had to cancel some shows but it was all in the name of fun." goo.gl
"If we get people's attention--and it doesn't necessarily have to be in a positive way--then I feel that our point is gotten across in one way or another. I mean, if people are just talking and disinterested about it, I would be frustrated, maybe, but we've been blessed with being able to play a show and everybody pays attention. Whether they understand it, what I'm trying to say--because I don't even know necessarily what I'm trying to say a lot of times. Maybe they understand it better than I do... I think the instruments that we use, the reason that we probably use them is because they help get across what we're trying to say. The actual sound of each instrument coincides with an emotion or something that I feel or want to get across, or I think that has a lot to do with it. When we're playing in Germany... they get the presence of it, they get the feeling of it just from the sound of the instrument, and the look of it as well." goo.gl
The jazz/hip-hop fusion collective Us3 scored a major hit in 1994 with "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)," a song that displayed the group's fondness for sampling classic recordings on the Blue Note label (in this case, Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island"). The group was founded in London in 1991 when concert promoter and jazz writer Geoff Wilkinson met Mel Simpson, who was writing music for television shows and ad jingles and had once played keyboards with John Mayall. The two produced an independent single, "Where Will We Be in the 21st Century?," which sold less than 250 copies. In 1992, their song "The Band That Played the Boogie" attracted the attention of Blue Note owner Capitol Records, which gave Simpson and Wilkinson free rein to sample anything from the catalog. The two immediately went to work, hiring several musicians and rappers Kobie Powell and Rahsaan Kelly, with Tukka Yoot joining later. The sessions resulted in the hit "Cantaloop" and the album Hand on the Torch. goo.gl
"I question people who say they have the finished product in their head and all they have to do is put it down and record it. It’s believable if it’s Stravinsky or Mahler, because they had the proof on a piece of paper. But a lot of popular music is not about that. I threw ideas around the studio. It’s not a precise record. But a lot of people are too easily satisfied. Or they aren’t allowed to say ‘is this good enough? Is this where I want to stop this?’ You can always try to make something better. (smiles ruefully) You can also ruin it that way too. If there was an idea behind [this album], it’s that it wasn’t just a collection of songs, that it read like a symphony, with a coda, epilogue, recurring themes." goo.gl
Beth Gibbons on fame: "People think it must feel great when everybody loves you all of a sudden, and it does, but there are other sides to it. I don’t feel like this now, but at one stage I was thinking you write songs and you hope you’re gonna communicate with people – half the reason you write them is that you’re feeling misunderstood and frustrated with life in general. Then it’s sort of successful and you think you’ve communicated with people, but then you realise you haven’t communicated with them at all – you’ve turned the whole thing into a product, so then you’re even more lonely than when you started.” goo.gl
First aired on Shawn Stewart's "Moonlight Meditations." Blackman is involved in the North American goth, spoken word and transgressive literature scenes, and self-published three now out-of-print chapbooks: Pretty, Sweet, and Nice, and were collected in Akashic Books' Blood Sugar.
Her work as a performance artist include 'Bloodwork' performed at The Kitchen/NYC in 2000,[2] where she debuted her blood performance (and shook hands with the audience, bloodying them too), slipped secret messages into the audience's coat pockets, projected text on the street and created audio visual installations.[ Since then she has performed 'Courtesan Tales' at PS122 art space in New York City, at The Andy Warhol Museum/Pittsburgh, and for three years at the Fierce Festival in Birmingham England. The 'Courtesan Tales' are performances in which a blindfolded audience of one has a five-minute story whispered into their ear. She debuted 'Harm's Way' (a multi-media performance of her email diary of working at Ground Zero) as a work in progress in New York." goo.gl
"Chicago, Illinois, USA-based art-rock group Yum-Yum is essentially the work of one man, Chris Holmes. Holmes is responsible for writing all of the group’s songs, and also for co-production, singing, guitar and keyboards, working alongside a constantly revolving team of sympathetic musicians and collaborators. What immediately captured critical interest about Yum-Yum’s debut album, 1996’s Dan Loves Patti, was the unusual instrumentation. Arranged by Holmes himself, the record incorporated string, horn and cello sections to animate Holmes’ dense, emotive songs. An early interview in Rolling Stone magazine drew comparisons with both the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Another comparison was drawn with the Moody Blues - Holmes admitting to using a Chamberlin 60s keyboard to play tapes of genuine orchestral instruments in the same manner that the Moody Blues had done two decades earlier. He also employs a mellotron, formerly used by the BBC for sound effects on the science fiction television programme Doctor Who. Indeed, his interest in science fiction extends to lectures on UFOs for college radio stations, and a dissertation on alien visitations at the University of Chicago. His first band, the Hawkwind -influenced Sabalon Glitz, were named after a Doctor Who character." goo.gl
Settling in Denver, Colorado, and using his Capitol Hill apartment as a studio, Boston, Massachussett's Alan Sutherland recorded several loop and sample driven cassette-only releases for Slabco, which at this point was operating out of Seattle, Washington. After Alan relocated to Brooklyn, New York, where he began a master's degree program in art education at the Pratt Institute, employees at Seattle's Up Records heard his second Land of the Loops cassette release, "Percival," leading to a recording deal with them. Being produced by Tucker Martine, many of the songs on "Percival" were reworked and for the first Up Records CD release, "Bundle of Joy" in 1996. Among the guest musicians on the album, two songs have vocals by Beat Happening's Heather Lewis. The CD had some success on college radio with the standout track and advance single, "Multi-family Garage Sale," being licensed by Miller Genuine Draft for a beer commercial. goo.gl
Following the Sex Pistols' break-up in 1978, photographer Dennis Morris suggested that Johnny Lydon travel to Jamaica with him and Virgin Records head Richard Branson, where Branson would be scouting for emerging reggae musicians. Branson also flew American band Devo to Jamaica, aiming to install Lydon as lead singer in the band. Devo declined the offer. Upon returning to England, Lydon approached Jah Wobble (né John Wardle) about forming a band together. The pair had been friends since the early 1970s when they attended the same school in Hackney (both belonged to a circle of friends Lydon informally dubbed "The Gang of Johns" – John Lydon, John Wardle, John Gray, and John Simon Ritchie, a.k.a. Sid Vicious). Lydon and Wobble had previously played music together during the final days of the Sex Pistols. Both had similarly broad musical tastes, and were avid fans of reggae and world music. Lydon assumed, much as he had with Sid Vicious, that Wobble would learn to play bass guitar as he went. Wobble would prove to be a natural talent. Lydon also approached guitarist Keith Levene, with whom he had toured in mid-1976, while Levene was a member of the Clash. Lydon and Levene had both considered themselves outsiders even within their own bands. Jim Walker, a Canadian student newly arrived in the UK, was recruited on drums, after answering an ad placed in Melody Maker. goo.gl
"[As Sex Pistols,] we were despised as being talentless.... Just personality-wise, we just couldn't see eye to eye. But that was actually the striving energy that drove us forward, those complicated relationships. And then you had a manager [Malcolm McLaren] in there playing us all off against each other.... Basically, for me, the ideology is to remove greed from music. If it’s all fair shares; doesn’t matter if there is one particular person in charge of everything, but you are all equal... Malcolm was disruptive. He couldn't help it because that was his left-wing politics. He just felt the need to talk bollocks at all the wrong moments. And we were very, very young. And there it goes, the beginnings of punk.... Malcolm was great at certain things but absolutely awful at others. Particularly in connection with money, he was much more interested in promoting his aspirations. He made himself be very much like an Andy Warhol. Who to us in England was Andy Asshole. Kids understood what it was we were saying. And oh my God, it was just pure luck, what opened the door to become the Sex Pistols singer: a bloody T-shirt with 'I Hate Pink Floyd' on it. That’s all I had to do. You have to bear in mind that at that time, Pink Floyd was so adored... They were sacrosanct. It was blasphemy to write 'I hate' over the top of it.... The hilarity of it is I've [now] got friends in Pink Floyd." goo.gl
"Humans actively listening to music are sort of transparent and glowy no matter where they are. That sounds so lame...I guess what I mean is, since I don't wear my contact lenses on stage, I feel like a good audience is a good audience is a good audience everywhere we go. Listening is hard work; I respect people who can do it well. Letting someone else's soundtrack resonate is...well just amazing, in my opinion." ~ Kristin Hersh goo.gl
John Doe on X's longevity: "Oh, I guess we like each other [laughs]. We haven't made a million dollars apiece, so we have to keep working. And I think we hold X in high esteem. We think that we're good and it's a good sound, and Exene's a great role model. Billy still plays his ass off. It's all those things. And maybe we just are blessed with short memories and have more forgiveness now than we did." goo.gl
One of the biggest and most well-respected names in alternative music, known equally for his militant political activism and passionate vocal delivery. In the '90s he rose to fame as frontman for Rage Against the Machine, and used that pedestal as a catalyst to further his left-wing political beliefs. To understand the motives for de la Rocha's vocal stylings, one must first trace back his philosophical roots. His story begins in Irvine, CA, during the '70s and '90s, with de la Rocha growing up as a Hispanic youth in one of the most ethnically white areas of California. His mother was an anthropology Ph.D. and his father, Belo de la Rocha, was a well-known muralist, famous for his paintings of Zapatista farmers. His parents separated at an early age and Zack split his time between his two parents. When Zack was 13 years old, his father had a nervous breakdown and subjected his son to extreme religious asceticism. Soon, he could no longer cope with his father's fanaticism and chose to move in with his mother full-time.
Within a few years, de la Rocha began to express his feelings of anger and isolation by listening to hardcore punk music, including Minor Threat, Black Flag, and Bad Religion. Before long, he had joined his first high-school band, Hardstance, where he contributed both guitars and vocals. This band later evolved into Inside Out, which would eventually release one album on Revelation Records in 1991. As he grew older, he strayed away from his rock influences and became increasingly affected by a stream of hip-hop artists, such as KRS-One and Run-D.M.C. This is about the time when he bumped into Tom Morello, a Harvard-educated political science major and kindred soul in socialist thought. The two clicked musically and intellectually and started a band together, which de la Rocha dubbed Rage Against the Machine. With a backdrop of heavy metal riffs and Morello's clever distortion techniques, de la Rocha's hip-hop-tinged vocals singed with unparalleled intensity. It wasn't long before the two were on the main stage at Lollapalooza II and became one of the most politically volatile bands ever to receive extensive radio and MTV airtime. goo.gl
Tom Morello on Zach de la Rocha's departure: "Zack called me the morning that the press release [for the release of Renegades] was issued. One thing that might not be clearly understood is that we were in a period where he was planning to take 18 months to two years off. He wasn’t planning on writing another Rage song or playing another Rage show until 2003. So, as far as it did come as a surprise, in our daily schedule it didn’t have a huge impact on the rest of us. I was disappointed that, come 2003, we wouldn’t be booking a world tour, but Tim, Brad and I were planning to continue to work together and make new music. Those plans will continue.” goo.gl
"Renewable energy is obviously the future. Whether or not you believe in global warming, I think it's been countless evidence that where Mother Nature is going with the planet is [majorly] different in the last twenty years. I mean, look at the typhoon that just happened in the Phillippines. Look at what just happened in the Midwest, in our country–tornadoes. So the way we've been treating this planet we've been abusing this planet. People gotta understand the planet is no different than our bodies, right? The whole mass body, two thirds of it, is composed of water. Just like the planet. Two third of the planet is composed of water. And everything else is land. One third of it is land. So if you mistreat it and abuse it these are the things that happened. The planet gets sick, just like if you mistreat your body, you get sick. That's why you may have noticed a lot of people are now eating gluten-free foods. A lot of people are eating green, organic foods. Free-range chicken because all the side products and the things that are added to it are harmful to your body. That's no different from the planet. So renewable energy is like feeding the planet organic food. Instead of wasting energy, we do renewable energy where its safe for the planet, safe for our health, and it can ease the tension. We're not going to change what we've done, but we can ease it and make it better. That's my philosophy on it, that's how I look at renewable energy." ~ Pras goo.gl
"Being in a group is not easy, I'm going to be the first one to tell you. But at the same time its kinda fun, too, because its almost like playing on a basketball or football team— you got each other to lean on. When its going good, it's great. When it's not going good, it sucks. I don't really think about it unless somebody brings it up to be perfectly honest with you. But when I do think about it, I just think about the fond memories, man. I'm one of those people, I believe you always have to be grateful for what you have. And you always have to be grateful because the thing is you never know if there other people who have situations worst than you do. So no matter how crazy my situation or how I may feel things aint going the way I want it to go, I'm grateful to be able to even have a conversation with you and express how I feel, to have a platform for that. I'm grateful to get up whenever I want to get up, doing what I love and to be able to travel all the world is because of those two individuals. So I always look at it, like when I do reminisce back on that, I think about the fond memories, man. I could've been not in that situation and have a whole different lifestyle, you know. So I always thank God everyday for this. Especially knowing it all started from that situation." goo.gl
Mary Lucia has earned a large fan base with her work as a broadcast personality, writer, actor and voice-over talent. Lucia began her media career doing evenings at REV 105, co-hosted mornings on Zone 105, and hosted a talk show, Somethin' Stupid, on 1500 KSTP.
From 1998 to 2001, she hosted the local music show Popular Creeps, a two-time Minnesota Music Award winner for "Best Locally Produced Show." For her work at Minnesota Public Radio's The Current, Lucia has been voted best FM radio personality by City Pages seven times. In addition to her radio career, she has also appeared in commercials and in live theater productions.
Lucia likes cats and dogs more than people, wearing dead people's clothes and taking long walks off of short piers. www.mpr.org/about/people/mlucia@mpr.org
"I guess as far as my songwriting, I’m sort of a quirky songwriter. I don’t want to use the phrase 'I’m a hit or miss songwriter,' because it’s just all about creating a recorded document that is not boring. So, what is not boring to you in terms of your record collection? I’m sure it’s quite varied. Same with me. And same with all the records that I’ve been associated with. It’s not like I’m trying to do a certain kind of song. Anything is fine. You know, I gotta say that not every song that I’ve ever written, years later ends up being, 'Oh yeah, what a magical song that I wrote.' You know, it’s like, 'No, it wasn’t that magical.' At the time it felt magical. At the time it felt important. Certain songs just sound like the quirky ditties that they are. And there’s nothing wrong with that. In terms of the audience, when I talk to people and they say, 'Oh, I love your stuff; I really love such-and-such song.' And it’ll be that weird little ditty. So that kind of blows everything out of the water. If that’s his favorite song, who’s to say that he’s wrong? It gives you license to just do a bunch of stuff; and some of it will sound really catchy, and some of it will sound weird, some of it will sound kind of mainstream, and some of it will sound like I have no business touching that genre. But I’m going to do it anyway. And part of being an artist is being willing to fail." goo.gl
"You just try to make each song as good as you can. Maybe we thought we had songs that were singles, but we were wrong about that. I remember meeting Steve Lillywhite years later; he said, 'You know that song that the label wants you to write? It’s not possible. That’s the producer’s job to craft that song with you.' I like to think he was right. But you hear of other people doing that, studying what’s on the radio. Which is fine, maybe some people are more chameleon-like and they’re good at it. But no, we did not try that approach. I remember a comment from John Lydon about Public Image making one of their albums—that if you are in the studio trying to please other people, you become everything that you hate." ~ Dean Wareham goo.gl
"[What I want to communicate] doesn’t have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts — understanding. But I don’t really have a major message that I want to bring to the world through my music. The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It’s not my information, it’s not mine. I didn’t make it. I just discovered it." goo.gl
"It’s just that, when you get to the real meat of life, is that life has its own rhythm and you cannot impose your own structure upon it — you have to listen to what it tells you, and you have to listen to what your path tells you. It’s not earth that you move with a tractor — life is not like that. Life is more like earth that you learn about and plant seeds in… It’s something you have to have a relationship with in order to experience — you can’t mold it — you can’t control it…" goo.gl
"I wasn’t that familiar with the band U2, so after the first week of touring, Bono came up to me and said, 'Hey Michael, you know my guitar player? His name is 'The Edge,' not 'Ed.'" ~ Michael Franti goo.gl
"I think that what’s more important, as a songwriter and as someone who produces and records music, is to take your song and to really accurately detect the DNA of that one song – and try to go with that, as opposed to fulfill some kind of overarching narrative that you’ve created with your intellect. You know what I’m saying? It’s like it’s not about imposing your will on an individual song. In fact, I feel when I’ve been guilty of that, it’s always been a musical compromise. So yeah, I can’t give some sort of overarching narrative. I can say that I’m still influenced by a lot of the same music that I have always been, which is some of the classic writers of the 20th Century – not so much exclusively rock songwriters but jazz and country and other genres, as well. And our band continues to be probably in some ways more influenced by non-rock influences than we are on rock and indie-rock and whatever other sort of micro-part specifications of the general rock genre. That make sense?” ~ John McCrea goo.gl
Noel Gallagher on the band's aim to become the biggest band ever: 'You've gotta. If somebody says: 'Do you want to be put into how-many-ever fucking million homes on a Thursday night?' it's like, 'Yeah.' You've got a duty to the people that buy your records. The people that buy your records are going to be sat at home on a Thursday night, and saying to their mams and dads, 'See, this is the band I'm into. This is what I like.' We don't want to be an indie band from England who've had a couple of hits. We want to go on and be an important band and there's certain things you've got to do. You want to sell 5,000 limited-edition red vinyl seven-inches, that's fine. Make music for a closet full of people in Bradford somewhere ... but it doesn't mean anything to anyone. Phil Collins has got to be chased out of the charts, and Wet Wet Wet. It's the only way to do it, man, to fucking get in there among them and stamp the fuckers out." goo.gl
"I’m not the kind of guy that keeps a diary and I really tend to have very, very poor, like I said, autobiographical memory. If we’re on the road and we play a club, I’ll think, 'Wow, this is a really neat place. I don’t remember ever being here,' and somebody in the band will say, 'We played here like six times.' It happens all the time. I guess I’m just in the moment at best and maybe just a little bit at its worst." goo.gl