Category: Music

K3-D

Let’s see what’s been doing lately in tiny Belgium, home to the owners of giant Budweiser, and where there hasn’t been a government in nearly a year. Hmm… it seems the political protests there are a bit different than they are in, say, Wisconsin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVagUPDeNgo

One thing’s the same, however, and that’s consumer frustration over getting the runaround when calling customer service. A group of Belgian pranksters on TV calling itself Basta dishes out some payback.

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/media.theworld.org/audio/030220114.mp3|titles=The World on PRI: Basta protests]

The Flemish half of Belgium is, of course, the land of K3, the Europop girl group. The ladies have a new musical coming up, and it’ll be a first for Josje, who joined Karen Damen and Kristel Verbeke after Kathleen Aerts left the group.

WHY, KATHLEEN? WHY??

I don’t know why Studio 100 doesn’t call the new K3 musical “Alices in Wonderland,” but with three Alices on stage it makes sense to have 3-D effects on stage.

LONDON – Josie makes her musical debut soon for K3 in Alice in Wonderland. “It is the first time I’m going to do a full musical with K3, indeed,” said Karen about the musical, which will contain 3-D elements. In Alice in Wonderland 3-D scenery is used, which is a first. “It’s really the first time this has happened,” said Karen to Show News. “Probably there will be many to follow after us, but we can always say later: we were first.” The musical will play next summer at the World Forum Theater in The Hague.

Here’s one of K3’s more ambitious stage productions, with the girls combining a gospel church theme with 50’s “Happy Days” nostalgia. With so many little kids in the audience it doesn’t get as big a reaction as I think it deserved. Check out the wild backdrop.

[media id=235 width=512 height=308]

Marion Harris and the birth of popular music

As usual, I have a bunch of posts I’ve been ticky-tacking away at for a while, but haven’t finished, then something grabs me so I write about that instead. Ya gotta love Louis Prima. Man, that cat could swing! Listen to this bit from his fantastic 1956 mash-up of “I’m Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” — later covered by none other than David Lee Roth.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Mar/LouisPrima.mp3|titles=Louis Prima: I Ain’t Got Nobody (excerpt)]

But get this. Marion Harris recorded “I Ain’t Got Nobody” before WWI!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24dfSxU1S64

Here’s a song that’s familiar to people of a certain age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjHJ_snG3RI

Marion Harris did that one first, too, the year it was written, 1923.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0bzYKdXwk

Here’s a favorite by Harris. Listen to her phrasing in “After You’ve Gone,” and you’ll hear Marion’s influence on generations of singers to come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA6ulKFXiTA

Suze (the muse) Rotolo

He had been working on the second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and he had a Columbia photographer [Don Hunstein] take a picture of him and Suze, walking arm and arm along West Fourth Street. [It was actually Jones Street.] “The cover’s the most important part of the album,” he told friends as he passed around advance printings of the album jacket. It shook up everyone. “She was the envy of every folk singer’s chick in the Village,” Terri Thai says. “It was a big ego trip being on a record jacket.” Some friends believe Dylan was deliberately trying to affect Suze’s ego, “to give her some of the taste of what he was getting, and to make his hold on her a little tighter,” one of them says.

Dylan, An Intimate Biography, by Anthony Scaduto, 1973, p. 157

One of the more important women in the history of music wasn’t a musician. Suze Rotolo is gone. I was fascinated by her when I read Anthony Scaduto’s Dylan biography in high school. She wasn’t a great beauty, but she was the right girl at the right time for Bob Dylan, and her influence was significant. But it’s curious how many of Dylan’s greatest non-protest songs from that period, and into his time with Joan Baez, seem to have an almost negative attitude towards women.

This is a great outtake shot from the photo session for the cover of Freewheelin’. I found it on old fashion is lovely fashion.

New York’s finest

Sir Tim Rice is getting closer to Massachusetts in his American Pie series on BBC Radio 2. This week he’s on New York, and after rattling off a long list of great American songwriters, who does he open with? The Ramones!

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Feb/TimRiceAmericanPieNY.mp3|titles=Tim Rice’s American Pie: New York]

Tech note: I recorded that audio clip using Wavosaur, set up to monitor the Realtek High Definition Audio Stereo Mix device. As with using Windows Live Movie Maker to capture video, there’s a lot of misinformation about the Realtek stereo mixer, which doesn’t appear by default in Windows 7. There was even some speculation that it’s gone because Realtek was concerned about Digital Rights Management. Without the mixer you can’t record audio while it’s playing on the sound card but, no, there’s no conspiracy. The mix device does appear in Windows 7, if you know the trick.