Month: September 2008

Los Lobos, above, not being ripped off.
Did Paul Simon completely rip off Los Lobos for the last song on Graceland? Steve Berlin says yes and said so back in April 2006 in this interview for Jambase. The song in question is “All Around the World.” According to Berlin, they were called in by a WB exec to jam with Simon and they shared a song that was going to turn up on “By the Light of the Moon.”

I remember he played me the one he did by John Hart, and I know John Hart, the last song on the record. He goes, “Yeah, I did this in Louisiana with this zy decko guy.” And he kept saying it over and over. And I remember having to tell him, “Paul, it’s pronounced zydeco. It’s not zy decko, it’s zydeco.” I mean that’s how incredibly dilettante he was about this stuff. The guy was clueless.
It was ridiculous. I think David starts playing “The Myth of the Fingerprints,” or whatever he ended up calling it. That was one of our songs. That year, that was a song we started working on By Light of The Moon. So that was like an existing Lobos sketch of an idea that we had already started doing. I don’t think there were any recordings of it, but we had messed around with it. We knew we were gonna do it. It was gonna turn into a song. Paul goes, “Hey, what’s that?” We start playing what we have of it, and it is exactly what you hear on the record. So we’re like, “Oh, ok. We’ll share this song.”

They thought Simon was going to cover one of their songs…nope. Anyway, it’s a fascinating read and, damn, I hate when I read something shitty about an artist I like!
By way of WMFU’s Beware of the Blog.

It was the hottest ticket in town, no joke, and I couldn’t go. And now people like the NPR’s Bob Bollen are calling the two-hour concert one of the best concerts they’ve ever seen.

Radiohead’s show at the Santa Barbara Bowl came as close for musicianship and creativity as any show I’ve seen in 37 years. I’ve seen a lot of shows.
These guys write great songs, and sometimes you can even sing along to them, but what they do better than any band is create a sonic adventure — a soundscape which, at its best, stretches time and allows the mind to wander and rejuvenate. I think of it as resetting the synapses. Creativity breeds creativity. When the music was over, I felt unboxed and changed and pretty darn happy. Drugs are overrated; music is underrated.

And, bless their cotton socks, NPR has posted the ENTIRE SHOW AS A DOWNLOAD! Awesome. The show runs at 133kpbs, which is pretty good.

A lost white-funky new-wave classic from 1982. Split Enz were not very big in the States, but Neil Finn’s next project–Crowded House–was.
This bassline has been in my head all day.

From the music blog Different Waters:

In the 70’s, Rainer Wehinger created a visual listening score to accompany Gyorgy Ligeti’s Artikulation. I (not me, someone) scanned the pages and synchronized them with the music.

Typically, scores like this are created by the composer as instructions to the players to improv. This is more a graphic after-the-fact deal. Still it’s cool and makes explicit the various sections of the electronic tape score. If you don’t know already, I groove on this kind of music from the 1950s and 1960s.
Why not buy some Ligeti?