The Entroporium

Let’s start with what we mean by “Live.” I propose the following definition, as useful for a classical pianist as a drum circle as a guy with a laptop: A live musical performance is one in which the musician is 1) Performing music from a score or via improvisation; 2) Making conscious decisions about how the music is played as it is performed, and; 3) Injecting meaning through his/her actions, words demeanor and stagecraft.

With Kraftwerk, I don’t think anybody has any doubts about 1) or 3). It’s 2) that you might have a problem with.

I wanted to get this track up last week for Gay Pride, but this being The Entroporium, there’s always a little bit less energy over time. Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a peripheral figure in the No Wave scene that hit New York City at the end of the 70s. Enormously influential on many of today’s [...]

Apologies to Meco, but this is how it was meant to be done: Bill Murray – Star Wars.mp3 Courtesy of Bedroom Dancing

In the Summer Of ’77, Star Wars and disco mania took hold over America’s youth, and Meco provided the perfect combination. Each time we sat in the back seat, we hoped and prayed that Meco’s “Star Wars Disco” would come on the radio. The most highly anticipated part of the song, of course, was The Cantina Band segment, leading to a whole lot of gleeful car dancing and spastic behavior. For those of us lucky enough to own the 45 (to bring to classroom parties, natch), everyone knew exactly the place visually on the record where the needle needed to go to get to that “good part.”

Rodney Bingenheimer, long-time DJ at Los Angeles’s KROQ, is all confidence and smiles as an “expert witness” in The Ramones: End Of The Century. As the main character of George Hickenlooper’s excellent documentary, Mayor Of The Sunset Strip, an entirely different picture emerges of a lonely man living on the tail end of his time [...]

Daryl and Tom got me to go to see Hot Tuna Friday night. (I’m embarrassed just TYPING that band name. Ranks among the dumbest all time.) You know…I figured Jorma and Jack … two legends ……….. whatever. The first set was acoustic. I did all I could to remain upright holding out hope the second half would justify my attendance. It didn’t.

The Ramones: End Of The Century had a limited run in theatres last year and should be turning up on DVD any day now. It tells the band’s fascinating and sometimes harrowing journey from formation to its induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Wattstax catches Soul and the Black Power movements at a critical time of transition. The Sound of Black America was shifting away from indie labels like Stax and Motown, while majors like Warner and Columbia were quickly muscling their way in with money and “distribution deals.” Soul artists, meanwhile, were finding it harder to reach a white mainstream audience – and the Afrocentric styles and attitude of the day probably didn’t exactly help either. The money was shifting into the major media centers, radio was re-segregating and so was the rest of the culture industry. As urban Americans of all races were more & more forced by law and by economic circumstance to live closer to each other, their lives ever more intertwined, American culture was rapidly re-balkanizing after the halcyon days of ’60s soul – “The Sound of Young America.”

Two weeks ago, I attended a workshop on “Writing About Music” at 826 Valencia in San Francisco. The panel included music criticism luminaries and pioneers like Greil Marcus and Ben Fong-Torres, the room was filled with earnest, erstwhile music critics and the dialogue for the most part was at a high level. I took lots [...]