Music

My friend Andrew brought me a nice turntable recently saying he had an extra. He's the sharing kind, and the ultimate Christmas hero. This has been a substantial windfall since we have hundreds of record albums in the house which haven't heard in a couple of decades. Some of these, I could wait a couple of decades before hearing again but they make good dj practice for my 4-year-old.

I don't think I'll ever buy a cd again! The simple truth is... in my living room, where I most enjoy music, vinyl sounds much better than digital. Don't get me wrong... I love my iTunes but since I don't have a cheap plastic fetish, I don't want to deal with compact discs ever again. I'll either buy the vinyl or the iTunes.   read more »  

Why are "songs" set at $.99?
I keep thinking some songs are better than others.

Thanks to our pal Morst and the fine folks at Sonoma Wire Works, we had passes to the MacWorld PodWorld Expo in SF yesterday. We weren't there for micro-gadget-fetish, though... we just wanted to get on John Lennon's bus!

We hustled straight over to Lennon's bus and low and behold... the bus was off limits for the entire day because Bob Weir and his chums were inside the bus recording a new song. We could see them on closed circuit widescreen lcd right as we stood just outside the bus -- they were kinda hangin' out w/ their instruments, talking about what they were gonna play -- but we couldn't get on the bus. We couldn't hear the contents of the bus either, but they wound up playing their creation later that afternoon.   read more »  

A quandary we can live with: Los Lobos plays Friday and Saturday at the Fillmore doing "Kiko" in its entirety. Ever hear a live version of Wake Up Dolores? Didn't think so... Meanwhile, at the Great American Music Hall, it's those rolllicking Mother Hips those same two nights!

Superlegend Link Wray passed away. He was the best. Somebody else put it very succinctly: (nobody could say it any better than Alan below...)

Alan Scally - ayjay@justice.com - January 20, 2004
Well, Link Wray strutted last night across the stage at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon but it was really 1950 Oklahoma and he got out of his 1937 Ford coupe and walked boot heels crunch crunch across the gravel parking lot of the DariFreez, brushing past the football players staring at him and his black leather jacket, greased-back hair and at the Cherokee girl-child at his side--Hank Williams and John Lee Hooker, wind storm off the prairie, fire wrapped inside the wind he rides, hard chords of eternal defiance ringing out across endless wheat field and down lonesome highways, across cities and through silent farmhouses where a men sit and watch the darkness sink into the earth like a bitter flood; Link Wray struts like a black leather rooster, shakes his guitar like an angry lover as the notes fly away like buffalo stampeding across green spring grasses of empty Kansas forever land; Link Wray raged last night with all the defiance and laughter and love and power he carried within him - a legend surely as Crazy Horse, a force of nature like a tornado, a howling prophet man shouting blind in a dust bowl sun of tribulation and triumph to come.   read more »  

NPR is offering up a live webcast of the Calexico / Iron & Wine show this wednesday, November 30th from Washington, D.C. They will play the entire show -- full sets by each band and their collective set -- beginning approximately 10 pm eastern time.

Hopefully, somebody will record the webcast and post in in a torrent. Anybody know how to do this?

Details from NPR are here.

There is a man in San Francisco -- to whom capitalism has been very kind -- who can make his fantasy come to life. And sure enough it did (and does) and there isn't a person alive with better dreams than he. As a matter of fact, this year's fifth and free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival was so damned stupendous that is was too much so. We are terrified of what could happen next year, because how can it possibly improve? It was so good by Sunday at 4 pm that we had to leave. We just couldn't grin any more.

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