Category: Music

The Troubadour door

The image that’s borrowed the most from this site is of my dear friend, lovely Prue Bury sitting between John Lennon and Pattie Boyd. My second most popular pictures are of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, immediately after they’d been shown the door at the Troubadour nightclub, for abusively heckling the Smothers Brothers.

So in 1974, when Tom and Dick decided to revive their stage act, they booked their first shows at…the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Nilsson, being a good friend, decided to surprise Tom again, and this time bring along a friend who was in town having a very long “lost weekend”: John Lennon.

“It was horrendous,” Tom recalls, laughing at the memory. “They came in pretty ripped to see our show, and, as Harry later explained to me, he told John, ‘He needs some heckling to make this thing work.'”

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, David Bianculli, 2009, p.333

This is where I originally posted the pictures, and here is a higher-res scan of the page they came from. Click to enlarge.

They’re in a magazine called John Lennon: A Man Who Cared, published by Paradise Press shortly after Lennon was murdered in December, 1980. The credits are: Editorial Consultant Jeremy Pascall with material compiled by Robert Burt.

Selling the world

It’s already been 20 years since David Bowie’s catalog was on Rykodisc, a label that was started here in Massachusetts. Bowie’s album The Man Who Sold the World was 20 years old when the Rykodisc CD was released. How times flies…

Nirvana did a popular cover of The Man Who Sold the World…

… but that was long after Lulu (To Sir With Love) did her own version, way back in ’74, with Bowie producing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y1LTndlCi8

Amazon’s Cloudy future

The new Amazon Cloud Player works only with a web browser or on an Android device. Before making it available on other platforms, perhaps Amazon is waiting to see how the music industry reacts to its otherwise bold move. An article on Ars Technica has the headline, “Music industry will force licenses on Amazon Cloud Player—or else,” but I hope Ed Bott on ZDNet has it right, explaining “How Amazon has outsmarted the music industry (and Apple).” There are laws, and there are contracts, and I don’t know if Amazon’s lawyers advised Jeff Bezos that he would be in violation of one or the other by introducing the Cloud Player, but so far none of the big music labels or the RIAA have filed for a cease and desist order.

Back in the early 80’s, when cassettes were an essential audio component, many LP’s came with a warning on the sleeve that said, “HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC… and it’s illegal.” And that was before CD’s! Well, neither claim turned out to be true. I remember when Disney wouldn’t allow its pre-recorded video cassettes to be rented. They could only be purchased, and they even came with a message saying that, embossed into the cassette. Eventually, Disney had to relent to the reality of the times and, of course, video rentals became a huge revenue source for the studio and helped to fund its resurgent animation department.

Time and again, the music and movie industries have had to react to new technologies. Silent movies didn’t survive talkies, but movies survived the competition from radio and, 20 years later, television. The only way to succeed is to find a way to take advantage of the new technology. As I’ve pointed out before, Napster was predicted in 1972, so the music industry had plenty of warning of what was to come:

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with “essentially perfect fidelity.” So much for record stores (in present form).

Stewart Brand
Rolling Stone
December 7, 1972

The controversy over this latest music distribution method will be fun to watch, because Amazon isn’t a lone college kid sharing MP3’s with friends, who can be easily intimidated. If pushed, Amazon can push back very, very hard. Similarly, the movie studios want to squeeze Netflix, but the question is, without Amazon and Netflix who’s left to distribute audio and video — Wal*Mart, Best Buy, and Target? None of them are still committed to selling physical media.

Belles of Belgium

NPR has a feature about the Scala And Kolacny Brothers.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Mar/NPR_Scala.mp3|titles=NPR Morning Edition: Scala and Kolacny Brothers]

I first blogged about the Belgian brothers’ girls choir nearly three years ago and featured its interpretation of radiohead’s song Creep, which was used last year for the movie The Social Network.

I wonder how many of the girls who have been in the Scala and Kolacny choir wanted to sing because of K3?

Amazon Cloud Drive and Player

I’ve been an Amazon.com customer since July, 1996, and have never gotten around to signing up for iTunes. For the past few months I’ve been playing with Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. It works fine for streaming media for embedding audio and video on the site. Today, Amazon introduced a new, consumer-oriented, service called Cloud Drive. It includes an online MP3 Cloud Player.

Amazon says that MP3’s bought on the site don’t apply to the 5 GB free limit, so the first thing I did was buy an album (for only $5), and that automatically kicked up the first year’s free limit to 20 GB. And, indeed, the 75 megabytes used for the files didn’t register. It would have been nice if my previous purchases were included as free storage, but Jeff Bezos isn’t that generous.

I uploaded a bunch of MP3’s, and gave the player a try. Gizmodo said there are some “jitteries” in the sound, but so far playback has been perfectly smooth. The Cloud Player’s volume control works in Firefox, but not in Google Chrome. Haven’t tried IE 8 yet.

An upload application is needed if you want to grab an entire music collection and/or folders. Using the Cloud Drive web browser page, folders can be created and songs uploaded.

Downloading files from a Cloud Drive uses the same AMZ format seen in Amazon’s MP3 store, and it invokes the download app. I can’t say how much better/worse this is than iTunes, because I don’t use it.

My big complaint is that the only choices for the Cloud Player are a web browser or Android. To make this useful for me, Amazon needs to hook up with Logitech to put Cloud Drive on Squeezebox. Logitech doesn’t offer online storage, so this would be a perfect hook-up. The Roku player has Amazon Video on Demand, so I’d like to see the Cloud Player there.

Follow-up: restarting Chrome got the volume control working.