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.

The Library of Congress announced the latest additions to The National Recording Registry. These are the sound recordings deemed valuable enough to American history that Congress funds their preservation into perpetuity. 500 years from now — assuming humans are still around — these are the sounds that people will know from our time. So what [...]

This is a shorter entry, and I hope to follow it up with a much longer sequel over the weekend. I’ve only ever bought three records off the turntable at record stores, and none in the last 25 years. The three records were U2′s Boy (which was then available only on import), Brian Eno’s Ambient [...]

Universal Records had its share of odd moments. A few of my favorites include: * Gandalf, the crazy coupon man, saw Jonathan Richman walking by with his guitar and conned him into playing a few songs. * Marc declaring ELO Week, so we blasted Out Of The Blue for a week straight, which confused our [...]

I’m not really sure how it happened, but somehow I wormed my way from “hanging out” to “working” at Universal Records, which was the name that The Music Faucet took on when it moved up between Bancroft and Telegraph. This was prime real estate — close to campus, next to Rasputin’s Records and across from [...]

Running a college basketball pool definitely sets back your ability to write interesting posts, and tonight I’ve got setting up my fancy new iBook to preoccupy me! The So-Called Post-Punk Life will resume shortly. While writing the MSCPPL series last week, I had the good fortune to run across Marc Time, a former colleague from [...]

Tuxedomoon was a local art-punk band that I found by way of The Residents. Ralph had signed them and then of course I just had to have their whole back catalogue. Their first couple of EPs, Tuxedomoon and Scream With A View were particularly great because they seemed so enigmatic. Self-released, hardly any liner notes, [...]

I think the folks at The Music Faucet were trying to get rid of me, their personal 13-year old hanger-on groupie. Or maybe this was a “Punk Rock Record Store Guy” test of sorts. One day Gary Nervo issued a challenge to me. He reached into his own stash behind the counter — a rare [...]

The siren song of Telegraph Avenue led me to hanging out at The Music Faucet, a quintessentially divey record store at the unhip end of the street away from Sproul Plaza and all its attendant early-80s student madness. Luckily the guys who ran the place took a shine to me and started feeding me records [...]