Jenny Lens' Punk Photos from 1976-1980

Check out these fantastic shots of The Cars, The Clash, The Go-Go's, DEV-O, The Rolling Stones, Cheap Trick, Joan Jett, Van Halen, Blondie, Screamers, The Police, and more!!

Lot to Learn

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Radiohearts' new 7", "Lot to Learn" released by No Front Teeth Records in England has been garnering some really great press...

Check out Sorry State Records' review (with bonus ordering info!!)

Here's Keep Track of Times' kind words...

And the website, Veglam, also said some nice things,

as did Heatwave.

The blog, Just Some Punk Songs, was equally effusive... choosing the eponymous song, "Lot to Learn" as #10 in their Top Ten singles of 2015!!

Whew.  Thanks to ALL of you for your continued support!

Look for Radiohearts' first full-length LP coming in 2016!!

"I'd Rather Be Dead (For Now)"

The Bottled Spirits perform "I'd Rather Be Dead (For Now)" live at Alex's Bar opening for Hollygolightly and the Brokeoffs on November 22, 2015.

I Want to go to There

"The best field trip I been on was to the Nacho History Museum."

LOL!

Obviously, my favorite line from my 5th graders' writing this year!!

The Thingz - Troubles Begin 12" EP Coming Soon!

The Empire Strikes Back

The title says it all.  Absolutely heartbreaking.

New Thingz Video Coming Soon!

Confirmation Bias

I agree with it because I already believe it.

Happens to the best of us...

I didn't share this map, but I saw it and agreed with its intentions.

But I must constantly remind myself:

"Be suspicious when something too closely matches your own world view"

Confirm or deny the rest here.

RIP Christopher Squire

:(

Hot Off The Press!

Thanks to multi-talented artist Julie Green for featuring The Thingz in her awesome blog, Patterns and Tones.

Julie asked us to perform a song acoustically inside a West Hollywood dry cleaning establishment a few Saturdays ago.  (I can only imagine how much hotter it would have been on a weekday, with the presses on...)

She also took these fun shots of us posed around the machines.

You can watch us perform a minimalist version of "Trouble" off our forthcoming LP, Troubles Begin, here.

30 Years of Purple Rain

Here's a cool Vibe article about Susan Rogers, the woman who helped record Purple Rain and was Prince's personal studio engineer from 1983 to 1988.

As the author of the article mentions, some of her stories could easily have been Chappelle's Show sketches!

Maybe for Season 4? ;)

The Newest Member of the Cordero Family

1972 American-made Fender Telecaster bass 
Thanks, Pops!!

"12 Ways to be a Completely Bitter and Miserable Musician"

I loved these so much, I had to share!

I'm sure I've been guilty of all of these at some point...

And really, this list could apply to any art form, (or human endeavor) not just music...

So stay grumpy and enjoy!

Rockit Man

There's really only one song that's responsible for my brief and unfortunate foray into break dancing...

I remember it was 1984, my last year of elementary school, and I couldn't escape breaking - all the kids with cable and MTV were doing it.

I thought it looked cool the way the dancers moved, like a cross between mannequin and machine.

I wanted in, so that summer I took a break dancing class through the La Palma Parks and Recreation Department that met in the gymnasium of my future junior high school and was taught by a dancer who said he was in the movie Breakin'.

He also said that Boogaloo Shrimp was his friend, but for the life of me I can't remember his name...

Suffice to say, no matter how hard I tried to "egg-roll" or "windmill," the closest I ever got to breaking or popping was an anemic arm wave...  

That summer, Future Shock, Heartbeat City, and 1984 were all in heavy rotation on my hi-speed, dual cassette tape deck, but there was only one song that made me wanna break out my cardboard and parachute pants to practice my "crazy legs," and that song was Herbie Hancock's "Rockit." 

I thought the scratching section was the best part.  I'd rewind the tape over and over again to listen to it... 

I'd even try to imitate it on the zipper of my hoodie!

Little did I know that it would be the first of many Herbie Hancock and hip-hop albums that I would buy...

Check out the fascinating history of how this innovative song and video were made here.

Da Do L. Ron Ron

Here's a fun, albeit long, Vice article about its author touring some of LA's Scientology buildings.

It definitely made me want to go to a few of the spots he mentions...

The Jurassic Park Movie Night seemed fun...

 And check out this awesome Battlefield Earth display!

Can you believe they keep an office for L. Ron in every building, just in case he needs a spot to work when he comes back?

There's more freaky stuff in the article, but I won't spoil it all.

I'm already planning my tour...  I'll use a pseudonym, like the author did...

And if they call me by my real first name, as they did to him, we'll all know it wasn't just his paranoia!

1998 was Great!

So many great movies released that year... and hardly an Age of Ultron among them... hmmm...

It's a (Small) Beautiful World!

Out with the Scold, In with the Skewer

Salon used to be one of my go-to sources for liberal/progressive news and information.  But then I started seeing more and more clickbait links with their over-heated, reactionary headlines, and I stopped looking at it as much.  The site seemed to be ramping up the outrage and becoming a shrill scold.

I guess Patton Oswalt had a similar experience:

It feels a little frustrating that a site like Salon that I used to always go to for great news, great commentary, did turn into a caricature of what a lot of really dumb conservatives used to say it was. That’s really disturbing to me because I don’t want it to be. And I’ve been saying this over and over again.

Apparently, unbeknownst to this non-Twitter subscriber, Oswalt and Salon had been going at it in tweet form for quite some time. The interview I linked to above, dubbed a "Peace Summit," is a pretty long sit-down with Oswalt and Salon's Editor-in-Chief, David Daley. They discuss a lot of different topics that require a bit of background knowledge of current events in comedy to follow, but I think Oswalt sums up the crux of his argument quite nicely here:

I hate to talk in terms of our side, this side, that side. But our side, the liberal progressives, the open-minded people –  I don’t want us to be the scolds and the shushers. That was always the role of neoconservatives and the religious fundamentalists, to restrict and remove words. I don’t want our side to be the one that’s parsing language.
It just really, really bothers me, if the liberal progressives have now become the scolds. We were the Grouchos! We’re not the Margaret Dumonts — and we’re turning into the Margaret Dumonts on a lot of levels. That lets the misogynists and homophobes and racists seem like the rebels: “Well, we’re saying what people can’t say anymore.” We should be having way more fun with language and jokes and going too far. If our side starts doing that, then I think we’re fucked in terms of moving forward as a society.

So what do you think?  Does Oswalt have a point?  Does Salon?

What can we learn from them both?

Vibe Merchants

Producing music fascinates me.  I love reading about all the crazy ways producers made classic recordings!  But whether I’m reading about it or trying my hand at it, I’m really just interested in learning to be better at it.  If producers are hired because someone likes their taste, I’d like to continue to refine mine by learning from the masters. 

Two articles in Tape Op magazine about a few of these masters recently caught my attention… 

My take-away from both articles was vibe. 

Good producers set a vibe for creativity to flourish and optimum conditions for musicians to do their best work. 

The first article interviewed the multi-instrumentalist/producer/engineer, Jon Brion as he was working on the soundtrack for P.T. Anderson's magnum opus, Magnolia.

Brion discussed playing a session where the producer, T-Bone Burnett, set a good vibe:

It was a song about Texas... we played a take and it wasn't great. It was completely proficient, everybody in the room was proficient. There was no question that everybody could play and there was no question that everybody wanted to do the right thing for the song. Nobody was hot-dogging anything, but it didn't feel right. People came in to listen and it was a take that maybe a lot of people would have even kept, because it was proficient. Everything was right, not in a clinical way. It was right, it just wasn't magical. T-Bone looked around the room and said, "You guys have all been to Texas, right?" We all nodded and he said, "Do you know how when you're standing in Texas and you look around and see miles in every direction?" He starts leaning over the board and making this big sweeping motion with his arms. We all nodded. He said, "That's how it has got to be." We proceeded to march in and in one take we played the shit out of the thing. That's not an accident, that's not a bullshitty little thing. That's the real thing. To me, one of the biggest jobs of production is "taking" the people who go into the room. I think it's the most important part of production.

Coincidentally, the other night I was watching a doco on Elvis Costello in which T-Bone Burnett seemed to reinforce Brion's opinion that good producing entailed “taking” a room of people and setting the right vibe, but this time the tone was set by a veteran jazz bassist.  Apparently, Burnett was producing one of Costello's songs with Ray Brown on bass, and not unlike his directions to Jon Brion about Texas, just before a take, Ray Brown turned to the musicians in the room and said something to the effect of, "Don't none of you play any ideas."  In other words, the implication was don't play tons of notes or licks -- don't play for yourself -- play for the song.  Or as Kendrick might put it, "Bitch, don't kill my vibe!"

Another interesting part of the Brion interview was when he talked about the (d)evolution of music production starting in the early '60's and the benefit of intimacy when playing quieter:

I used to listen to records and go, "Why are all these '50s jazz records perfect?" We figured out some way to record musicians in a room in an appealing fashion. It's not truly realistic, but give us a sense of what it was like to be there. It's like looking at a good photograph. I started thinking about why records started sounding like shit in '63 or '64, and they did. All the early British rock records sound like dog shit. They have no bandwidth. Eventually I realized that when musicians started playing louder, the old mics couldn't handle the level. So, they invented dynamic mics, which you could put right up on guitar amps and drums. Then, things sounded shitty again, they could take the level, but they didn't have the bandwidth. Then people figured out ways of doing the hyper-real sound, which became popular in the '70s. You've got dynamic mics right up everything's ass and then you've got EQ and different things to get the sound together and thus began the era of hitting a snare drum for a day.

Ouch!  No wonder recording budgets were so bloated in the '70's.  (Aside from the blow, of course… but I guess that’s just another way to induce good vibes, no?)

The second Tape Op article was a 1999 interview with Phill Brown, who produced my two favorite Talk Talk records, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock.  Brown described the vibe in the studio making those two records:

It was very, very psychedelic. We had candles and oil wheels, strobes going, sometimes just total darkness in the studio. You'd get totally disorientated, no daylight, no time frame.

Brown started out in the 1960's as a tape operator at Olympic Studios in London and worked his way up to producer, but he still considers himself an engineer, mostly:

I guess I see my trade as an engineer. Even though I produce things and co-produce things I see what I do as an engineer. I tend to work the same whether you give me credit as an engineer or a producer. It's hard to say. The kind of producers I worked with originally were people like Jimmy Miller or Steve Smith … who were producers who set up a situation and controlled things but they were vibe merchants. Jimmy Miller was this incredible kind of energy and drive and force. He made the session feel like you wanted to be there and make music. But he wasn't a hands on producer...

Jimmy Miller, the "vibe merchant" Brown mentioned, produced two of my favorite (and arguably best) Stones records, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, the latter (in)famous for the vibe created while recording it in the basement of a mansion on the French Riviera as depicted below.  (Miller's the one lying on the floor.  You can also go here for more pix.)

Brown got the job working with Talk Talk after a... ahem, talk with Mark Hollis, their lead singer, about studio vibes:

I dropped him off at the tube station. As he got out of the car he said, "What sums up Olympic in the '60's for you?" I said, "It's got to be one o'clock in the morning, November 1967." It was a Traffic session I did. I was 17 years old and it was a new job. That particular night we were doing "Mr. Fantasy" and there was just this fantastic atmosphere with low lights and people were a bit out, wasted. I mentioned this to Mark and he said, "Oh, cool." After a few weeks I got a phone call saying he'd like to get involved. And we met up and went into the studio Mark said, "Let's set this up as if it's one o'clock in the morning, November 1967!"

These guys knew it, as did Brian Wilson...

It's all about good, good, good, good vibrations!

We're All DLR!

I only knew about this photo shoot tangentially, from the We're All Devo video collection when Rod "The Man" Rooter suggests to his daughter, Donut, that he could hook her up with Numero Uno, the lead singer of his "mega metal band, The Evil Clowns," and points to the picture below... (watch here)

"El vomito," Donut responds.

At the time, I didn't realize the poster was a Helmut Newton shot of David Lee Roth with someone else's face pasted over it.  I also didn't realize that it was included in the first million copies of Van Halen's third record, Women and Children First, since I'd bought mine used, years after its release.  And I certainly didn't know that this photo shoot almost broke up the band back in 1979.

You can read all about it in the first link provided above...

My favorite picture of the Newton shoot, on the grounds of David Lee Roth's palatial, Pasadena home. (Click on it for a larger image)

All The BS

Check out The Bottled Spirits' new website and get all the BS!!

LA Record

Lots of Long Beach artists in this issue of LA Record, plus a nice review of The Thingz latest LP, Red Future on page 76!! 

Thanks Dennis!

Jake & Elwood

Great Blues Brothers picture collection here.

"BLT Blues"

 

Enjoy!

For Doom the Bell Tolled

The story of the birth (or renaissance) of my favorite MC, MF DOOM...

How to be a Good Band Girlfriend

Lol, those pix tho!

Yeah, man!

Whip(lash) It!

While I haven't seen the movie Whiplash, two articles about it recently caught my attention.

The first is by New Yorker film critic (and apparent jazz aficionado), Richard Brody who writes, "The movie’s very idea of jazz is a grotesque and ludicrous caricature."

The second is an interview with esteemed jazz and studio drummer, Peter Erskine who summarizes it thusly:  "I'm disappointed that any viewer of the film will not see the joy of music-making that's almost always a part of large-ensemble rehearsals and performances. Musicians make music because they LOVE music. None of that is really apparent in the film, in my opinion."

Having played in many ensembles over the years, both large and small, I can definitely attest to this idea:  music-making SHOULD be fun!  And I certainly haven't been doing it for the money - I've been doing it because I LOVE it!

In their respective reviews, both Brody and Erskine call BS on the JK Simmons' teacher/band director character, Terence Fletcher.

According to Erskine:

A conductor or bandleader will only get good results if he or she shows as much love or enthusiasm as the discipline or toughness they dole out. Being a jerk is, ultimately, self-defeating in music education: for one thing, the band will not respond well; secondly, such bandleaders are anathema to the other educators who ultimately wind up acting as judges in competitive music festivals -- such bands will never win (the judges will see to that).

As someone who dropped out of band his sophomore year of high school partly due to having a "jerk" band director, I completely relate.  Zig Kanstul, our band director, would always find new and exciting ways of telling us we were shit musicians.  While his opinion was probably right, it didn't make it right to say those things, and it certainly didn't inspire me to be a better trumpet player.  Maybe he never heard the expression I tell my students now, "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar!" 

According to Brody, not only is Fletcher a tyrant that "hazes [Andrew, his student] with petty rules that are meant to teach military-style obedience rather than musical intelligence," he justifies his techniques by embellishing the oft-told story of Charlie Parker getting a cymbal thrown at him to suggest that Joe Jones (the drummer) was trying to decapitate Parker.  As Erskine notes:

The misrepresentation of the Jo Jones throwing the cymbal at Charlie Parker's feet anecdote may well lead people to thinking that Jo Jones did indeed, as JK Simmons' character avers, try to decapitate Charlie Parker at that epochal jam session in Kansas City where a very real Charlie Parker attempted to play some of his double-time / new harmony improvisation and more or less flubbed it. Papa Jo eventually tossed a cymbal towards Charlie Parker's young feet in a "gonging" motion to get him off the bandstand. Jazz masters could be tough, but the movie gets that story all wrong.

While this was a pivotal moment for Charlie Parker as a musician, Brody says the movie completely misses the lessons he learned:

Brody (10/13/14):  Here’s what Parker didn’t do in the intervening year: sit alone in his room and work on making his fingers go faster. He played music, thought music, lived music. In “Whiplash,” the young musicians don’t play much music. Andrew isn’t in a band or a combo, doesn’t get together with his fellow-students and jam—not in a park, not in a subway station, not in a café, not even in a basement. He doesn’t study music theory, not alone and not (as Parker did) with his peers. There’s no obsessive comparing of recordings and styles, no sense of a wide-ranging appreciation of jazz history—no Elvin Jones, no Tony Williams, no Max Roach, no Ed Blackwell. In short, the musician’s life is about pure competitive ambition—the concert band and the exposure it provides—and nothing else.

Interestingly, Erskine notes that Andrew's "winning" drum solo performance at the end of the movie is very old-fashioned:

If the film takes place "now," any drummer playing like that at a competitive jazz festival --especially one in New York City -- would get a cymbal thrown at their feet by the ghost of Papa Jo Jones, or I'd do it for him.

Brody also addresses the one line I knew from watching the trailer (and, incidentally has, so far, put me off of seeing the movie):  the idea that "the worst thing you can tell a young artist is 'Good job,' because self-satisfaction and complacency are the enemies of artistic progress."

Brody (10/13/14):  There’s nothing wrong with “Good job,” because a real artist won’t be gulled or lulled into self-satisfaction by it: real artists are hard on themselves, curious to learn what they don’t know and to push themselves ahead.

Indeed, as a practicing musician, I know all too well the self-loathing that accompanies a performance I deem personally sub-par.  But I also understand that playing music is a journey and that there's always more to learn and improve upon, regardless of how good or bad a performance may be to me or others.

As a teacher, I've often looked to Peter Johnston's book, Choice Words, as a guide for inspiring students through my language to not only take ownership of their learning, but to feel empowered to imagine new possibilities for him or herself as a life-long learner.  One of Johnston's mantras is Praise the work, not the student.  In other words, teachers should say, "Good job" or "Nice work" because it praises the process and honors their effort, rather than praising the student with, "Good boy/girl," since its opposite implies that the student is somehow a "bad" person.

Ultimately, as Erskine says, a music teacher's job is...

To inspire his or her students to get the MOST out of music, by GIVING the most to music. To, yes, inspire and instill a sense of discipline and responsibility, but to show students the rewards of concentration and playing well and working as a team.

At the end of his piece, Brody makes his strongest criticism:  the movie is not even about music - it's about authority:

Certainly, the movie isn’t “about” jazz; it’s “about” abuse of power. Fletcher could as easily be demanding sex or extorting money as hurling epithets and administering smacks...

Ouch!  Indeed, Erskine notes:

I can't imagine [USC Dean of Music] Rob Cutietta putting up with an ounce of the behavior portrayed in the film. But, like I said: it's fantasy, it's Hollywood.

Sadly, it sounds like these are far from the only shortcomings of the film.  From "a drummer crawling out of a major car wreck and then somehow managing to get himself on-stage to play, bleeding and injured," to Flecher testing his student's ability to play a tempo (Erskine:  "Give me 4 beats, not just two -- YOU don't even know the tempo with that kind of a count-off, Mr. Band Director."), both Brody and Erskine agree that the movie is desperately lacking.

Brody (10/13/14):  There’s nothing in the film to indicate that Andrew has any originality in his music. What he has, and what he ultimately expresses, is chutzpah. That may be very helpful in readying Andrew for a job on television. “Whiplash” honors neither jazz nor cinema; it’s a work of petty didacticism that shows off petty mastery, and it feeds the sort of minor celebrity that Andrew aspires to.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go practice!!

No Saint Stands Alone

Does Selma "snub" Mrs. King?

You decide.

The Beastie Boys' "9th Symphony"

I'll never forget my buddy reviewing Paul's Boutique for our high school newspaper and giving it a B- after we listened to it ONCE on my turntable and agreed that, while WAY better than Licenced to Ill, it still wasn't THAT great...

Of course this record would later change my life completely... expanding my taste in music exponentially...

And ever since that "missed connection" that was the first time I heard Paul's Boutique (Seriously, how could I MISS those "Funky Snakefoot" snare rolls that set off the second track, "Shake Your Rump" like a pack of firecrackers??), I've often thought, If only my buddy had kept that original, quad-gatefold pressing of the LP...

Oh well, recently, having thought that I'd seen everything related to my favorite Beastie Boys record, I discovered this:  a visual companion to Paul's Boutique!!

Ijeoma Wins the Internets!

This is how to deal with internet trolls...

After all, What Would King Do?

The Bottled Spirits Video Shoot

The Bottled Spirits performing "Blue Line Transit Blues" on the Wardlow Station platform the night of our video shoot.

Video by Roger Klinkers

The Mustangs' Last Ride

New Year's Eve, 2014, at the Coronna's Going Away Party