For Fans of Peter Laughner

I received an email from Don Harvey this morning with some links that you may very much enjoy. Per Dr. Harvey's instructions, download and disseminate widely and be sure to throw shame on anyone trying to charge for these.

Peter Laughner’s high school band, Mr. Charlie, was a real fun bunch of guys, and ahead of their time in many ways. Here’s a link to some high quality stereo recordings of five songs Mr. Charlie performed at Bayway, in Bay Village, Ohio, in August, 1969. Includes “Waiting for the Man” and “Ferryboat Bill”, and more. Feel free to download these files and enjoy. But please, don’t resell these in any form. More on Mr. Charlie can be found by googling “Those were different times” by Charlotte Pressler.
Part 1: http://www25.zippyshare.com/v/JbGuhwm9/file.html 
Part 2: http://www25.zippyshare.com/v/IgifGPVA/file.html

The complete Ann Arbor Tapes are available for free download through the following link: http://www25.zippyshare.com/v/BI1A9TVM/file.html. It includes previously unreleased recording of "Fire Engine" and "Candy Say", in addition to Story of My Life, Blank Generation, Dead Letter Zone, Amphetamine, and Venus de Milo. Peter Laughner: guitar and vocals, Don Harvey: reed organ, bass and backup vocals on Candy Says. Enjoy, and spread the word to anyone you think would like them, just please don't sell them.

At The AV Club: Chuck Vs. The A-Team

Today at the AV Club I fill in for Steve Heisler on Chuck.

At the AV Club today: Celebrity Apprentice and The Amazing Race

In which I fill in for my estimable friend Scott Von Doviak on The Amazing Race.

And then I get down with the crazy on Celebrity Apprentice.

Celebrity Apprentice at the AV Club

I have a new gig with the AV Club!  This week I review Celebrity Apprentice, which is crazier than a busload of Gary Buseys this season.  Actually, that's a little hyperbolic.  It is exactly as crazy as a busload of Gary Buseys.

Go check it out!  Share it with your friends!  I'm hoping that this will get to be a regular feature.

http://goo.gl/PAtJZ

Petardcast No. 9, No. 9, No. 9

Another item of self-promotion to mention: I was the guest on Leonard Pierce's Petardcast about a month back.  Leonard's a good guy and a great friend, and we chatted it up on a rather dreary day here in NC.

Here's the link to his blog and the relevant post.

Oxford American 2010 Music Issue

Among the many items I have been remiss in posting is a plug for the 2010 Oxford American music issue.  I have an article in this issue on Vern Gosdin and the Gosdin Brothers that's halfway to decent.  But my contributions are lifted by the stellar quality of the writing throughout.  Buy it!

In the meantime, here's a link to an interview with OA editor (and all-around helluva guy) Marc Smirnoff.

A Brief Note On Houses And Homes

Astute readers of this blog might notice that I have been mostly absent of late.  Here’s the skinny: my wife has a new job in North Carolina and we’ve been preparing to leave Austin.  Or, rather, I have.  The rest of my family has already moved.

But that leaves our house in Austin to consider. and I hope that Austinites do consider it.  Make me an offer, people.

We lived in Austin for almost 10 years.  Our children were born there, and the bulk of our friends live there.  Moving away is not easy.  There is a lot about Austin that I love: besides the amazing people that it collects, there’s the Alamo Drafthouse, the Carousel Lounge, the Continental Club, Chango’s, The Tacocorrido, Stubb’s, The Dog And Duck (aka the Mallard And Mutt, the Quack and Woof, and so on, a place that I feel such affection for that I’ve nicknamed it over and over), Nomad, Waterloo, End of an Ear, and many other places of business that are undeniably awesome.

There’s some things that I dislike, too.  I feel that the arts scene is incredibly insular, for one.  And the way that the environment tricks my body into thinking that fresh air is poison with only a few allergens--well, I just hate that.

But I’m sad to be leaving, even as I’m happy to be returning to North Carolina. I’m proud that I could be an Austinite for a decade, ambivalent though I felt about it at times.  Someday soon I’ll no longer have a house there, but I’ll always think of it as a place that I could call home.

Why Should I Care? Driving's A Gas And It Ain't Gonna Last

Like much of the blogosphere, I'm in a state of shock over Alex Chilton's premature death last night.  I've been vocal about how I think he's squandered his considerable talent over the last three decades or so, but the fundamental truth is that squandering his talent was his prerogative.  When he was great - and I don't think it's humanly possible to overstate his greatness and importance to rock music - he was wholly unappreciated by the public. When public tastes finally caught up to him, he took one look at the mantle of "elder statesman of rock" and chose to Bartleby.  God bless him for his irascibility.  There was no one else like him. 

Here's some of what I've written about Chilton and Big Star at this blog:

Bach's Bottom and 19 Years: A Collection.

1970. (Here I should state that I have a bunch of Chilton's solo albums on vinyl and cassette, but I never listen to those media anymore, so I really need to replace them with digital versions.  Also: man, I was terse in those early days of my music listening project.)

Big Star.  (I beat up on In Space, which isn't as bad as I say, and John Fry - the engineer from Ardent Studios! - steps in to tell me that I'm wrong.  Sweet!)

Big Stars In The Radio City.  (In which I try to explain how sophisticated Chilton's approach to rock music was.)

I didn't know the guy.  In fact, based on his attitudes when I've seen him live (and man alive, did the guy put on some killer live shows), I assume he would have held me in nothing short of complete contempt for my starstruck fandom and my focus on the music of his youth over his more recent efforts.  But a world without Alex Chilton is a far crappier place.  He, more than anyone, should have been able to stare down his own death and simply state, "I prefer not to."

Incidentally, if I had to pick one, this would be my favorite Big Star song:



That's "Dream Lover," for anyone who reads this on Facebook without the attached video.  There's no reason in the world for this song to work.  The whole thing seems always on the verge of falling apart.  I especially love the long pause before the guitar solo and the way that none of the elements of the song seem even remotely close to the beat, and yet there's this aggregate effect that wraps the whole song together with dream-logic. It's an uncoverable song. Who could do it justice?

Salon on Waterboarding

Reading about how the CIA has fine-tuned the art of waterboarding makes me sick to my stomach.  Can we, at long last, agree that this is an offense against human dignity?  Mark my words: the US will end up paying reparations to aggrieved parties for allowing this to happen.  I doubt Bush, Cheney, Yoo, or any of the others responsible will ever face an international trial for their crimes, but this is pretty clearly a conscious violation of international law.  They should be punished, but this is a stain on every U.S. citizen's conscience.

Here's Salon's report.  Read it if you dare.

At Dog Canyon: Loud & Rich at the UT Ballroom

This is my first post for Dog Canyon, in which I review the Loudon Wainwright III/Richard Thompson show from last Saturday. Check it out!

On Being Part Of The Jandek Experience

This article by Adam Gold, who served as Jandek's drummer in Nashville last week, is utterly delightful. Lucky guy!

Oh, The Outrage!

Fox News is outraged - outraged! - that the White House dares to say openly that Fox News is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. How dare they make such a point, despite the fact that anyone with a functioning brain could come to the same conclusion, despite the fact that those obnoxious Tea Parties and Town Hell bozos are funded and supported by Fox News, despite the way that Fox is behind these absurd death panel arguments and other baseless lies that keep popping up in the mouths of people who should really know better.

Fox President Michael Clemente says:

An increasing number of viewers are relying on FOX News for both news and opinion. And the average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents. So, with all due respect to anyone who might still be confused about the difference between news reporting and vibrant opinion, my suggestion would be to talk about the stories and the facts, rather than attack the messenger... which over time, has never worked.

Stephen Colbert always says that he lets the free market decide the truth. And Fox's defense of itself is to present the exact same argument without the irony. Nice! Score one for the reality-based community.

Congratulations to Maud Newton!

I'm just catching up on the news from last week that my pal Maud "Supafly Lit Chick" Newton won the 2009 Narrative Prize for her novel excerpt, "When The Flock Changed." It's a killer story, from what I am sure is a killer novel-in-progress, so go read it.

Just Hinting At Desperation Is So Brick-And-Mortar: Further Adventures with eMusic

Yesterday eMusic gave an unknown number of members an unexpected bonus of 50 free downloads, the equivalent of a whole month under my newly disimproved plan. I know at least one of my friends who also stuck it out with eMusic received this bonus, as well, so I'm assuming it was wide-flung. Without any specific information about why eMusic would do such a thing, the reason seems obvious: they have alienated and lost many of their long-time customers without bringing in enough new customers to offset their losses. I could be wrong about this, but this certainly appears to be a desperate plea to stop the bleeding. The problem with this is that the naked desperation could alienate investors and sour their Sony deal.

Should someone in the planning division of eMusic read this, I'm offering you this business advice for free. I'm not a marketing sage, but I do work in public policy and can recognize a poorly-planned and poorly-functioning program when I see it. What you've done wrong is acted as if the record companies are your clients but the subscribers are not. You have worked out a deal that is better for the former, but you treated the latter as if their continued subscription was a given. And now you're losing money and desperately trying to re-establish the loyalty of your customer base. Here's a couple of things you can do to reduce your flop-sweat.

1. Give people advance notice so you look like you know what you're doing. Instead of the current message, which is: "Surprise! We really really really love you, after all, so please GOD don't cancel your subscription today," you need to send an advance message that says, "This is a rough transition, but we appreciate you sticking with us, so next week we have decided to reward long-time customers with an extra month of downloads." Then send another message thereafter. Email is free, people. Don't spring things on the base.

2. Try to attract customers back with the economics of album purchases, not single purchases. Amazon charges customers $8 - $10 for albums, and iTunes charges $10 - $12. You charge customers roughly $5 per album. It's STILL the best deal on the Internet (even after you alienated everyone by doubling your cost-per-download with insufficient notice), but you make no mention of this on your site. When you list your values, you focus on single songs. That's great, but bring it on home, homies. Your base, whether you like it or not, are mostly rock geeks who are interested in albums, not singles. In fact, you discourage purchases of singles by requiring album downloads to get ahold of certain songs, seemingly those that are quite popular or over 10 minutes in length.

3. Adjust your number of downloads per month or your number of credits per album. This is key, guys. I have 50 downloads, and albums cost 12 downloads apiece. That's four albums and change. It appears that you don't know how to divide. If you want to standardize the number of downloads per album - and I realize that this isn't the case on every album, but it is on most - make it so that your plans include a whole number of albums. As a customer who likes value, I would appreciate it if you would standardize album downloads at 10 credits, or five albums per month for guys like me. You would then be charging $4/album, which is roughly half of Amazon's best deal, an easily-understood value that people can relate to and that you can market with. I realize you want a sliding scale for EPs, but, just speaking for myself, EPs are a tiny portion of my downloads. Go 1 credit/1 download for albums with fewer than 10 songs. This would be good business because unlike Amazon or iTunes, your customers are locked into a certain number of downloads per month. You should strive to give them the biggest bang for their buck, and speaking as a customer, it's easier to justify the expense ($240/year!) when I look at the albums per month, which has fallen precipitously since you changed your subscription service.

Anyway, please work on this, guys. As annoyed as I have been with your past mistakes, I'm sticking it out with the hope that you will get your damn act together. Should you decide that my common sense and economic skills are the answer to your current mess, my contact email is easy to find at the bottom of the page.

Spanky Twangler, Rest In Peace

Brian Rogers was a good guy and he fought a good fight against the damned cancer that took his life yesterday. He was far too young. Heck, his wife is far too young, and his kids are far too young, and even his parents are far too young. My heart bleeds for his family and many friends today.

Here's a video of Brian with his excellent surf-rock band The Penetrators, led by Brian and his older brother Scott, who passed away in a car wreck some 6 years ago.

Vote Darling New Neighbors!

My pals in the great Austin band Darling New Neighbors have entered the theme song contest for Carrie Brownstein's NPR video blog, and made it all the way to the finals.

Check out the song, check out the competition, and vote DNN!

Feelies Reissues!

It's about time! Pitchfork has the news.

The eMusic eRevolution Will Be eHalf-Assed

Yesterday eMusic began offering the Sony catalog to subscribers, and incidentally screwed over many of the same long-term subscribers. Here's what happened.

At the end of May, the eMusic CEO Danny Stein announced that eMusic had inked a deal to offer some of the Sony catalog to subscribers. This led to two changes:

1. New plans with less value for our dollar. Long-term subscribers were forced into new plans with fewer downloads for the same price per month. Some of these subscribers had plans that eMusic had grandfathered some years earlier. My former plan, for instance, was one I first bought in October 2005 for 90 downloads for $20/month. At at least one point afterwards, eMusic had modified their $20/month plan to include fewer downloads, but had allowed me to keep my plan. My new plan, however, is 50 "downloads" (I'll get into why I put scare quotes up in a minute) for $20/month. So my downloads have gone from 22.2 cents each up to 40 cents each. Still a better deal than Amazon or iTunes, but the effective cost to me has gone up by nearly 100 percent.
2. Album pricing. Some - but not all - albums with more than 12 tracks will now have a fixed price of 12 "downloads," a term that eMusic has changed to "credits" on some pages. Some albums with fewer than 12 tracks, especially those where at least one of those tracks is longer than 10 minutes, will now cost subscribers 12 "credits" to download. This really hurts in metal and jazz, where the bang for the buck has always been so valuable. For example, I had 4 Albert Ayler albums in my Save For Later list, each of which had 2 tracks per album. Now eMusic wants 12 credits for each. It's still a better deal than Amazon or iTunes, but a far worse deal than I was offered just the day before yesterday.

So I spent the evening going through the new Sony offerings. I should point out that this wasn't easy, because eMusic's website remains as clunky and unfriendly as ever. The only way to find out what eMusic had added from Sony was to scroll through the new pages, which list everything recently added in groups of 10. All the Sony additions were made on 6/30/09, and to go through them all, I scrolled through nearly 900 pages. Some of the additions are damn great (Skip Spence, the Clash, Dylan) and some aren't (wow, the whole Celine Dion catalog plus Kenny G plus the New Kids On The Block, oh my!). The thing is that like many of eMusic's long-time subscribers, I'm already a hardcore music collector and I already have most of the new additions that I would be inclined to buy. I ended up adding a few Dylan albums that I don't have to my list, plus some Ellington and Mingus albums. I expect that it will take me maybe 2-3 months to burn through all of the new additions that interest me. At least, at the rate of my newly enhanced plan.

Judging from the 1600+ comments on Danny Stein's original announcement on eMusic's blog, I'd say that I'm not alone in being less than impressed with what subscribers are getting in return for the new catalog and reduced-value plans. I understand that eMusic needs to do what it can to remain a viable business, and Stein said that eMusic had been under pressure from the indie labels for some time to increase its per-download charge. I don't like the suddenness of the change, nor the lack of a response to complaints from eMusic. It is as if they've decided that they don't care about keeping their often-enthusiastic long-time subscribers - or, at least, don't know how to show that they care - and that doesn't make much business sense to me.

eMusic also needs to figure out what the per-album pricing means to them and to customers. If many of the albums I was previously planning to download now will cost me either 12 or 24 credits (double-albums are twice the credits), why are all the monthly download plans and booster packs being offered in multiples of 5? Don't get me wrong: I prefer the base-10 idea, but why not make the per-album credit a flat 10 downloads, then? Not that eMusic would listen to me; I'm merely a long-time subscriber.

New Layout

You like?

Some live to blog and some blog to live

I've joined the crack team that writes about film at the Screengrab, which is Nerve.com's movie blog. I meant to get my first post up today, but it will have to wait until this evening now. Can't you feel the excitement?