The Blame Game

From the BBC News:

Aerosmith play for unhappy fans. Rock stars Aerosmith are to hold a free concert in Hawaii to placate angry fans who brought a legal case against them. The "Walk This Way" hitmakers cancelled a sold-out show in Maui two years ago, leaving hundreds of fans out of pocket. They filed a class action case, which claimed the band had pulled out in favor of a bigger gig in Chicago and a private show for car dealers in Oahu. Lawyers for the would-be concertgoers said Aerosmith had now agreed to put on a new show, and would pay all expenses. "Everyone who bought a ticket to the original concert will receive a free ticket, and all out-of-pocket expenses will be reimbursed regardless of the amount," said Brandee Faria.

This winning class-action suit is great news for disgruntled music fans everywhere. Might I suggest a few other examples wherein fans can go after what we deserve?

That's Five Years Of My Life I'll Never Get Back: Remember when you swore loyalty to a band? You got the lead singer's astrology chart done, drove thousands of miles to see their shows, dropped friends who just didn't get it, and ran a fan site out of your parents' basement? And then -- AND THEN! -- the band had the nerve to become awful. So awful that you now call this period of your life "the dark ages," and you wish you had a nickel for every time you had to point to your tattoo and say, "They used to be good, I swear." Now fans of, say, Weezer can sue for every record released after The Green Album and Metallica diehards can be compensated for what followed the group's 1991 self-titled release. Pinpoint the album when the love of your life became the blight on your otherwise robust music collection, find out what that wasted time and energy is worth in dollars, and ask for it! Why should fans suffer for bad art?

When I Took My Shirt Off It Merely Meant That I Wanted To Wrestle: You are a girl, you loved Judas Priest, and you wanted to jump Rob Halford's bones. Conversely, you are a boy, you loved Judas Priest, you wanted to jump the bones of all the girls who wanted to jump Rob Halford's bones, and you were certain that Halford wanted those girls just as much as you did. How wrong you were! Rob Halford turned out to be gay, as did George Michael, Lance Bass and Bob Mould. Now what? You had Wham! posters on your bedroom walls, in eighth grade you dressed up in head-to-toe leather for Halloween in order to look like Halford, and you tore off your shirt (along with hundreds of other sweaty boys) and moshed at a Husker Du concert. What does it all mean? Would you, in your younger days, have loved the band any less? Would you have worshipped it in a way that said, 'This is strictly platonic?" Would their music have been relegated to queer dance-club nights? Let's be honest: You're just not sure. And that's why it's important to get reimbursed for the subsequent confusion that you now feel.

You Died And I Never Got To See You In Concert: Born in 1990? Bummer. Form a group on Facebook that petitions for your generation to get a yearly stipend to make up for every good band you'll never see because some or all of the members are dead.

I Played Your Song At My Wedding And Now I'm Divorced: "Faithfully" by Journey turned out to be ironic, Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" was actually about your best friend, and the sentiment in R.E.M's "You Are The Everything" felt suffocating after about a year, when you realized you didn't have any friends. Mad as hell? I would be, too. Compile every passive-aggressive text message and email, add up the sexless nights, keep the receipts from couples therapy and divorce lawyers, and send the bill to the songwriter who started it all. After all, why should these musicians be living off royalties based on songs that cause people so much pain? Every time one of these tunes plays on the radio, someone thinks back on their wedding night and dies a little on the inside. Don't suffer alone. Or, rather, don't suffer for free.

Have some ideas for a class-action case? Feel free to share them here.

1:45 PM ET | 04-28-2009 | permalink

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We Came, We Saw, We Conquered

A few days ago, I was having lunch with a friend. He said something I thought was interesting, the gist of it being that San Diego music wouldn't have been what it was if it weren't for the influences of Washington, D.C.'s Nation of Ulysses and Olympia's Unwound. I agreed, but added that without those two bands, the San Diego sound would have still been unique; it just would have been culled from a smaller pool of local influence, specifically from the likes of Drive Like Jehu and Rocket From the Crypt. Nevertheless, there was a time in the early and mid-1990s when a bunch of young San Diego bands -- from Heroin to Antioch Arrow to Clikatat Ikatowi -- sounded like their DC and Oly counterparts, only sped up (in the screamo variety) or slowed down (in the Black Heart Procession variety). But either way, theirs was the sound of the melted and the sun-weary.

It's strange how influence infects a town, a scene and an art movement. While Unwound's impact was felt more in Southern California and the Midwest, the band's hometown of Olympia -- where I resided during much of my 20s -- was being swept up in a love affair with Britain's Huggy Bear. The band flew into town in the summer of 1993, sans its handsome and brilliant guitarist Jon Slade, and proceeded to infiltrate basement shows, beach trips, practice spaces, dance parties and, most importantly, song structure. Basically, everyone who was in a band at the time, or who was thinking of starting one, wanted to harness the kind of chemistry Huggy Bear possessed; the sort that left the listener addicted to unsteadiness, vertigo and spontaneous fits. Perhaps only Karp -- an all-male trio -- succeeded in doing so.

Every scene has its story: Some kid sees Joy Division, the Ramones, Bad Brains, MC5 or The New York Dolls, and all of a sudden 10 new bands crop up, each with its own variation on the sound. Often it's a band from out of town, whose influence at home might be nonexistent or taken for granted, but whose music somehow speaks to another city's weather, mindset or sensibility.

And occasionally, specifically with a band like Unwound, its influence and successors far outshine its own story. Which is a shame, because Unwound synthesized all that was exciting about Olympia and music in the Pacific Northwest. Its music dark and often experimental; it had pop riffs that grew out of murkiness only to disappear again; its songs gave you glimmers of light but never flooded you with sun; there was angst but not brutality; it possessed an uneven wilderness, which is all you'd ever want from music, something unexpected emerging from what we already know. One of my favorite Unwound shows took place in Portland in 1994. The band was playing at the X-Ray Cafe and singer-guitarist Justin Trosper got a bloody nose during the song "Valentine Card." There was a red mess everywhere, on his shirt and face and hands, which was the perfect way to witness a song about a strange, tortured kind of love.

Feel free to share shows you witnessed in your cities or towns, or stories you've heard about, wherein bands came in and reconfigured the musical landscape with their influence.

4:12 PM ET | 04-23-2009 | permalink

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Rip City Uprise! On A Music Blog?

Deep down, I feel like there's some fundamental and philosophical disagreement between sports and music. Is it that we're still caught up in the jocks vs. weirdos mentality from high school? Were the freaks and geeks the only ones with good taste in bands? Music was certainly a form of salvation, expression and identity for those of us on the fringes or excluded from the popular circles. And it felt like the jocks, cheerleaders and frat boys caught on late, co-opting the good tunes for asinine purposes like pumping themselves and the crowd up for games or for parties.

Yet at the same time, I was raised on sports and athleticism. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I played soccer along with just about every other girl I knew; I hiked, bicycled, camped and made the varsity tennis team year after year. My father had graduated from Duke, and I knew all about Coach K and the Blue Devils (and how the Tar Heels were the enemy), and we went to Mariners games and followed Husky and Seahawk football. Sports fandom wasn't divided along gender lines or friend groups; it fit in seamlessly with dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids and our love of Duran Duran.

Then, in high school, I quit the tennis team my junior year, feeling like I couldn't combine my newfound love of punk rock and arthouse films with white Izod shirts and Adidas tennis shoes. That makes sense for a 15-year-old: to eschew one identity in lieu of another, to immerse oneself in the furthermost, most radicalized and strident version of a movement -- in my case punk rock -- in order to feel like I was a part of something and could be easily identified as such. But eventually, we crawl out of those corners because they're too constricting, searching for a more balanced wholeness in the center, sometimes even reverting back to our former selves or trying out new spaces and identities altogether.

But there's something about organized and professional sports that seems to irk or feel like a contradiction to certain people. In my own experiences as a writer and musician, my appreciation of sports often invokes expressions of surprise or annoyance. I think I got a few eye rolls when I wrote about Tom Petty's performance at the Super Bowl a few years back. My favorite comment on the piece was, "Wow, you lost me here... Super Bowl & Tom Petty. Keepin' it 'real' with NPR..."

But there are a lot of musicians and music fans -- both male and female and across all genres -- who love sports teams or specific players. In fact, your favorite musician is probably checking his or her fantasy baseball or basketball stats right now.

So why is there a perceived disconnect between sport and art? Is it a high- and low-culture divide? Is it leftover bitterness? Are certain sports less egregious than others? Or are sports just terrible?

You know, I really just wanted to say: Go Blazers!

Check out this Blazers rap!

3:53 PM ET | 04-21-2009 | permalink

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Five For Friday

1:15 PM ET | 04-17-2009 | permalink

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I Rock! You Rock! We All Rock!

One byproduct of having played music for many years is that people assume you want to hear the following words: "You Rock." Sure, maybe right after you walk off stage, the phrase might come across as benign -- a generic yet earnest, not-really-sure-what-to-say compliment. But on birthday cards, at company meetings, and in email sign-offs, "You rock" makes no sense at all. I mean, do parents of doctors write out cards with the words, "Son, You Cure!" Do friends of lawyers, when doling out praise, come at them with, "John, You Sue!" No, they do not.

In fact, whether you've played an instrument or not -- and whether you're a person, place or thing -- anyone and everyone seems to rock these days. And, let's be honest, we've been rocking for years. That tag line you came up with for Coke at your ad agency rocks! Your leather jacket with the hood rocks! Your dog catching a Frisbee rocks! Your new Herman Miller Aeron desk chair? It totally rocks! When you're thanking your dad for the loan, he rocks! When you score tickets to a playoff game, that rocks, too!

Practically the only thing that doesn't rock these days is music itself. And, if music did in fact rock, to actually say that it did would have very little meaning. Because you'd have to ask, "This music rocks compared to what? Beer? Hawaii? Grandpa?"

Let's take a moment to outline some particularly egregious and inappropriate uses of "You Rock." Your guy or gal has just popped the question. Your answer: "You Rock!" Wrong! Unless you are literally referring to and talking to the ring. If you aren't, then either the ring should be revoked or maybe you just really deserve each other. Also unacceptable: replacing "Thank You" with "You Rock" in contexts involving customer-service people such as your postal worker, UPS driver, or grocery clerk. After all, a Gap employee fetching you a different size of jeans in the dressing room doesn't rock, now, does he?

In a similar vein, but no less obnoxious, is the fact that a lot of industries and events have become "rock 'n' roll." I left a business meeting once with the following words of encouragement: "This is rock 'n' roll, people!" As we all walked back to our desks, returning to a life of semi-funny email forwards, office shenanigans and coming up with strategies on how to better sell coffee as a lifestyle, I kept wondering, is this really rock 'n' roll? Because if it were, it wasn't exactly how I remembered it.

Perhaps equating the mundane with something as exotic and bold as rock 'n' roll helps each of our lives feel a bit more important, exciting, even worthwhile. And in the wish-fulfillment triumvirate of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, rock does seem the most transferable and translatable. After all, comparing your day job to heroin -- or substituting "You F---!" for "Hey, you're cool" -- might get you in trouble.

It would really rock if you could please share instances wherein you've heard or used the phrases "You Rock" or "It's Rock 'n' Roll." What is the most outlandish or strange person, place or thing that has "rocked"?

1:40 PM ET | 04-16-2009 | permalink

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I Can't Hear You

Most of us talk about the events and moments in our lives that are improved by music, from weddings to parties to road trips to getting dressed up to cooking or jogging. We spend less time thinking about those times that are not music-appropriate -- those instances wherein music might be intrusive or tactless, either for us personally or for those around us. In other words, "turn it up" and "turn it on" are phrases uttered and exclaimed more often than the far less exciting, eyeroll-garnering "turn it off." After all, who wants to be the buzzkill, or to sound like their parents?

Recently, I observed two incidents wherein I actually thought that killing the music might be the way to go. At a restaurant on Easter Sunday, I saw a teenaged daughter refuse to remove her headphones and turn off her iPod at the table. Was it the first time that I actually thought, "What Would Jesus Do?" Okay, maybe it was. Second, I drove past a guy riding a unicycle up a steep hill while text-messaging and listening to an iPod. (As a side note, unicycles are making a huge comeback in Portland, a city with so many bicyclists that riding a two-wheeler is no longer a signifier of uniqueness. When someone finds a way to attach roller blades to their hands and roll to work in a headstand formation, I'm moving.)

I don't think we can say that personal listening devices like the iPod are the only conduits of music-related fouls. After all, who hasn't passive-aggressively turned the volume up in the car or on the home stereo during a fight, especially when there's a message in the song that you want to use to help win your argument, underline your pain, drown out your opponent or make your point? Whether it's The Magnetic Fields' "I Don't Want to Get Over You," The Replacements' "Unsatisfied," Sinead O'Connor's cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U" or even Motley Crue's "Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)," these songs weren't written with the intention of being used as weapons, an arsenal of volume and lyrical daggers. Or were they?

Specific musical genres practically come with a tacit agreement that, in the case of an emergency, you have license to use it for ill. Heavy metal, gangsta rap and Windham Hill samplers immediately come to mind for effectively clearing a room or answering back to a middle finger raised in your direction.

So, whether you've turned it up for the sake of tuning out, switched the dance music from slow to fast to avoid watching an ex romance his or her new love at a party, or sabotaged a step-parent's playlist that they asked you to make for their office event by including as many references to sex as you could think of, please share your own instances of what I'll call music temper tantrums. We've all had them.

12:56 PM ET | 04-13-2009 | permalink

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Loggernaut

For those of you who live in the Portland area, I am doing a reading tomorrow night.

From Loggernaut.org:

Welcome to the Loggernaut Reading Series.

Loggernaut turns 4!

Please join us for an anniversary reading and concert on Wednesday, April 8, at Mississippi Studios (3939 N. Mississippi) in Portland. Doors open at 7 p.m., show starts at 8 p.m. Admission is $10 and all proceeds go to benefit the work of Write Around Portland.

We've got a terrific lineup: Carrie Brownstein, David J. Morris and B.T. Shaw, with music by Lovers. Learn more about them here.

The prompt for April is RISK.

Please join us!

4:54 PM ET | 04- 7-2009 | permalink

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Women + Chad VanGaalen

I tried to convince my friends to go to the show, but everyone backed out on account of sickness, tiredness or married-ness. The destination was Holocene, a club in Portland where Women and Chad VanGaalen were playing. I ended up venturing out alone, which I like immensely, mostly because I can be a shameless and unimpeded observer. I wore a winter coat the entire time. It's April, I know.

Holocene wasn't entirely full when Women took the stage, which is a shame. Women is a four-piece band from Calgary. They had VanGaalen join them on stage, hooded, sitting in a corner cradling a keyboard. I had seen Women at SXSW and enjoyed the set but not necessarily the mountainous audience, over which I could never quite see. But last night, my view was clear. Women might combine all that I love about a band. These are strange, angular beasts, both physically and sonically. The singer/guitarist rests his instrument slightly askew against his leg. His right hand is spindly and spidery on the strings, crawling more than strumming. The drummer's mouth is often agape, making him look like a Pac-Man about to snack on drums. He sits erect with his rack tom as flat as the rest of the kit. The bass player has a tame beard and a penchant for playing leads; he may well be the secret weapon. The second guitarist adds the prettiness, but never enough so that it wholly polishes out the roughness.

Despite the fact that the sound person couldn't get enough vocals in the house mix or in the monitors, the mere texture of the singing sufficed, and the specific details of the lyrics weren't missed. Overall, what I love about Women is that the band stops just shy of granting a facile sort of satisfaction. Instead, the glee comes in the nearness it gets to pop, and in the way the group flirts with rock and prog. The whole time I was watching, I felt like I was on a carousel, flying past familiar sights and sounds in a sped-up, dizzying kind of way, so that it's a blur of a familiar landscape until the blur itself becomes its own terrain.

You can listen to Women's song "Black Rice" here.

Next up was Chad VanGaalen, a tall, incredibly handsome man who plays an ugly guitar, a.k.a. the Steinberger. (You might recall Mike Rutherford of Mike + The Mechanics playing the bass version.) To up the hideousness factor of the instrument, VanGaalen has a hippie dreadlock hanging from where the headstock should be. Actually, if a "dreadlock headstock" is what he was going for, not only do I applaud the rhyme scheme, but I also pat myself on the back for solving this crude mystery.

VanGaalen's Soft Airplane was one of my favorite albums of last year. Two songs in particular, "Inside the Molecules" and "City of Electric Light," were listened to on repeat without either their impact or the resulting giddiness ever receding. When he played the latter, I felt my eyes well up -- another reason to attend shows by oneself: It's just you, the music and its unmediated impact. Actually, it wasn't just me. There was a roomful of effusive fans, shouting out yelps of encouragement and mock harassment, dancing in half circles with their arms around one another. At one point, I remember thinking -- secretly excited that this might be true, feeling like a younger sibling sneaking into a cooler older-sister/brother event -- "Am I at a stoner show?"

Chad VanGaalen often sings in the higher registers, like Neil Young or Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips. But his voice is both sweeter and eerier. Despite mellifluousness and melody, there's nothing precious about the lyrical journeys of his songs. If they serenade, they do so laced with a subtle, creeping poison. Other times, VanGaalen amplifies all of it, guitar and voice together, and I can only describe it as gleeful.

Like the illustrations and animation for which he's also known, VanGaalen sings songs that double as life forces that continually give way to others -- shape-shifting, fluid, each whole in its own right, but always with the potential of splitting apart and revealing something either delicate or beautifully misshapen.

1:02 PM ET | 04- 3-2009 | permalink

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ThunderAnt: Portland Pet Haven

For more info, visit ThunderAnt's Web site.

1:00 PM ET | 04- 3-2009 | permalink

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