Lori McKenna is her name. A momma of five, married to a plumber, Lori McKenna is the stand-out best of the best, tipper-topper talent in Boston-based singing-songwriting. Carol and I will be seeing Lori perform this evening. I’ll try to sneak some photos and maybe even a snippet of video.
Here’s how Lori looked for a long time…
… and here she is now, all dolled up after going a bit more over to Country from Suburban Folkie. Personally, I prefer her rumpled “Mom-who-rushed-out-of-the-house” look.
In 2002, when Lori was first catching some national attention, a Boston TV station produced this profile of her.
I bought The Beatles CD’s when they were released over twenty years ago, but I’ve never much cared for the sound of them. I greatly prefer the British Parlophone LP pressings done by Garrod & Lofthouse, that I collected in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
The first taste of the potential improvement in audio quality was, ironically, the release by Capitol of the American versions of the Beatles records on CD. Later, Love came out, with a further promise of future sonic delight. Which is why I’m pleased that the Beatles catalog has been remastered, and is slated for release on 09/09/09 — the day before my birthday. Once again, as I like to do whenever I talk about the Beatles studio recordings, I recommend to you the brilliantly conceived and superbly realized book, RTB: Recording the Beatles, by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan.
Details about the coming CD releases are available on BeatlesNews.com. I am, however, slightly concerned by this comment.
Finally, as is common with today’s music, overall limiting — to increase the volume level of the CD — has been used, but on the stereo versions only.
As I’ve discussed a couple of times before, to cater to the portable music crowd, popular music today is highly compressed. I think CD audio should be kept as close to the original recording as possible, without additional compression. Leveling out the loudness levels for the iPod generation should be done when conversion to lossy compression is done, and not before.
As an example of just how different a recording can sound, depending on the source and equalization, I’ll provide a couple of versions of the Beatles’ first EMI single, ‘Love Me Do’.
This recording was ripped at 192 Kbps from the Beatles Compact Disc EP Collection.
Both of those recordings feature Andy White on drums, with Ringo relegated to tambourine. Ringo on drums can be heard in this somewhat muffled sounding recording.
Most of the Parlophone LP’s I have were bought at a long defunct shop in Amherst, MA called Backroom Records. I spent many happy hours in that store, scouring the import and used bins. Buying compact discs never held the same gleeful delight for me, which I guess means I’m showing my age.
The demise of the record store as an entity, and the lamenting of the loss of same by owners and customers alike, is the subject of a documentary called I Need That Record, by Brendan Toller, who is a mere 22 years old. I heard about it last week on WBUR in Boston.
One of the faces seen in that video clip is Mike Dreese, co-founder of Newbury Comics, the granddaddy of Boston record stores, which began as a comic book shop. I happen to have a couple of Newbury commercials, shown during Star Trek re-runs on UHF TV in the 80’s, at the dawn of the CD age.
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Another name associated with Newbury Comics is that of Boston rock/punk scene legend Kathei Logue (yes, “Kathei” is the spelling). I made this video a few years ago to show to Kat, who I had hung out with when I was in high school and she was living with a guy in my town. That was before the days of Punk. Before the days of Disco, even!
My not-so-secret shame, the Flemish girl group K3, will soon be gone, with the departure of Kathleen Aerts. The signs have been there for a while. Videos began to disappear from YouTube, including this one, which happens to be one of their very best.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/K3/Verliefd.mp3|titles=Verliefd (In Love) by K3]
‘Verliefd’ (“In Love”) is Karen Damen’s favorite K3 song, and it’s the second song by the girls that I heard back in June. The harmony that kicks in at :40 totally knocked me out and I was sold on K3. Here there be Pop music magic.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the humble, yet mighty, 7-inch 45 rpm single. It was developed by RCA, at the same time CBS had come up with the 12-inch 33.33 rpm LP.
Originally there was competition to see which format would dominate, but each found its best use — singles were for kids, and albums were for adults, although that changed after The Beatles made albums the thing to have for anybody over 13. Stereo came along in the late 50’s, but mono would still prevail for nearly another ten years after that, until the rise of alternative FM radio crushed AM for music, and transistors made stereo record players cheap.
The combination of magnetic recording and vinyl records was a huge advance in audio technology. It replaced 78 rpm shellac disks and dominated home music listening for the next forty years.
Bismo recently asked me to convert a couple of 45’s to MP3, and this is them. First, the flip side to the Blue Brothers 1978 single, “Soul Man”…
This was the K3 display at Madame Tussauds in Amsterdam before Kathleen Aerts announced this week that she is quitting the Belgian Pop music group.
After Kathleen’s announcement, the museum symbolically moved her figure three meters away from Kristel’s and Karen’s still lifes in wax (or whatever material is used nowadays), and the sign now says ‘K2’. “We find the picture of Kathleen still an important piece in our collection,” says Annemiek Dolfin of Madame Tussauds. “She has sung for ten years for K3 and remains a celebrity.”
When I first saw K3 in wax, I thought it was a surreal display for the museum to put together, but now it seems prophetic to have the ladies frozen in time this way, because K3 has stopped, and where they go from here is unknown.
On Monday, Studio 100 released a statement about Kathleen and the future of K3. I’ve taken a Google translation and edited it for easier reading.
