Recently in Music Category

My new favorite band this week is the John Butler Trio.  Check 'em out.  He's a heckeva guitar player, accompanied by an upright bassman and drummer.  He mostly plays fingerstyle acoustic, sometimes through a wah-wah pedal.  But he did name his daughter "Banjo".  You can download his live shows at Archive.org.  Pretty cool, eh?  If I had a band, that's what I'd do...

While searching for more on Beattallica (link from Kevin Bryant), I stumbled across a new music festival:
Mamapalooza! The self-proclaimed festival for mom's that rock.

Apparently there is a whole Mom Rock Band movement that I, just now, am hearing about. This is waaay cool! Such artist include:

• The MyDols
• Placenta (Afterbirth Cometh Rock)
• Black Flamingo
• Frump
• Housewives On Prozac
• The Mothers (from the UK)
• Sin & Tonic
• Betty
• Pilley & Ila's Dress

Today I've been working on horn arrangements for Devo's "That's Good". Hopefully I can talk my father into having his band play it. I think the song lends itself well to horns. Check it out here in Lo-Fi (60 Kb/s) or Hi-Fi (144 Kb/s) Windows Media formats. Feedback is welcome, complainers can bite my shiny metal ass.

Wow, the RIAA has become almost as bad as SCO. Check out this recent article that was posted to Slashdot here.

To paraphrase drastically: the RIAA says that sales are down 10% because of piracy and Soundscan (the Neilson ratings of music sales) says sales are up nearly 10%. They are both right, sort of. RIAA counts a "sale" as a unit shipped to a store, Soundscan counts a "sale" as a comsumer buying a unit from the store.

To borrow the author's great simple example: If I own a record store and Q4 2003 I ordered 1000 Brittany Spears CDs and I sold 700 of them. Then in Q1 2004, I sold 770 CDs but I only ordered 930 from the supplier. Q1 vs. Q4 shows an increase from 700 to 770 units that I sold to customers, but according to the way the RIAA measures things, my "sales" would be down to 930 from 1000.

Why is this? The author did ask this question, which was neatly evaded by the RIAA spokesperson. Basically, I think it's because the RIAA wants to say that sales are down because of piracy and filesharing, thus justifying it's protection-racket of sending people letters that basically say "send us money and we won't sue you". See, that Econ you took in college does come in handy!

Today's interesting factoid:

"In August 1983, a marathon celebrating the song "Louie, Louie" was held at KFJC Radio in Los Altos Hills, California. For 63 hours, the station played every known version of the song. At the time of the marathon, there were over 800 documented recordings of the tune. Since that point in time, the number of known recordings has at least doubled, with the last count somewhere around the 1,600 range."

More such useless info can be found at www.louielouie.net. In particular, I found Frank Zappa's love/hate relationship with the tune quite interesting. A good time-waster for a rainy Wednesday (at least here in Arkansas). If you still haven't slaked your thirst for useless music trivia, head on over to classicbands.com for some more. For example: Shock Rocker, Alice Cooper was once elected Homecoming Queen for the University Of Houston. Go figure!