Rock Star Journalist

Much as I dissed Katy Perry, she did something great. Two great things, in fact. First, she donated a cast of her breasts to the Keep A Breast Foundation for breast cancer research funding. Secondly, she let someone tape it, and it’s online:

For whatever reason, I like her now. This balances out her annoying songs and the fact that she’s dating one of the guys (McCoy, I think) from Gym Class Heroes.

This was originally going to be a post about how awesome The ‘59 Sound, the new Gaslight Anthem album, is. However, I’m all distracted now, and it’s going to have to wait.

Damn. I wish I’d listened to Chris Clavin earlier.

The guys of Vinyl Collective’s podcast played a track of his album The Roads Lead Everywhere, and it pretty much kicked my ass. The tune is entitled “Pittsburgh” is very much a Weakerthans / Mountain Goats kind of affair. Pretty, folky, but a little snotty. Not, y’know… “folk punk,” mainly because to me that appellation pretty much means smelly kids singing Against Me songs to busk for change. Let’s call it “folk that is done by people other than hippies or Joan Baez.”

I have no idea why I felt the need to pick on Ms. Baez. My mom’s a big fan, really. Sorry.

But yes… Chris Clavin is a talented fellow, and you should buy his record. And Vinyl Collective’s podcast (to which you can subscribe by dropping into iTunes) is a fantastic way to find out new music. I am now debating whether or not to drop some cash on Clavin’s record, as well as Kay Kay & His Weathered Underground, which is this big orchestral pop group that sounds like the Polyphonic Spree and kind of blows my mind. Really, really good stuff put out by really really nice people in Colorado. I support Suburban Home - as should you.

Kay Kay & His Weather Underground - “Hey Momma” (from Kay Kay & His Weather Underground)

My record shop has the final say on the Jay Reatard single series. Their eBay auction for the current single pretty much says it all.

The story:
Love Garden Sounds (the record store hawking these) has been ordering 15 copies of each of these series of singles. We got 15 of the first and second single, 8 of the third single, and 7 copies of the 4th single. We still might get a few more copies of the 4th single. We only got 5 copies of this single, #5 in a series of 6. ALL Jay Reatard performed songs on the singles will appear on a matador released CD/LP in the near future. Oh, there will be another song on the LP & CD that will NOT be on any the singles.

At this point, the variations have passed reason, but I figure that is one of the points of this exercise. We’ve got several regular customers who are interested in this series and Jay Reatard’s music, and I don’t know how to do right by them at this point. I can think of 8 people off the top of my head, but I know there are several more. I’m going to sell these singles and probably a couple copies of single #6 on ebay and use the money I make from these auctions to buy copies of the Jay Reatard “Matador Singles 08″ CD and/or LP and GIVE copies to Love Garden’s regular customers who have been lured into this collector’s nightmare.

So, someone will ask me “what about the other 2 copies Love Garden got?” Nick Sp##ek and Katie Ash###e (our store record buyer queen bee) will get to buy em at a reasonable price. Sorry to Grant, but you stopped coming around the shop as much and I feel scorned and I miss you so f**k you. I’ll buy you a LP singles comp and we’ll go out for Ice Cream and go make up at your place.

XOXO

As of this writing, after being open for 16 hours, there have been four bids. It started at $10, and is now up to $51. There are (so Kelly tells me) 41 watchers.

Fucking. Batshit. Crazy.

By the way, yes, that is me mentioned in the listing. I’m Internet famous!

In one of the numerous small towns surrounding Lawrence, there is a thrift store. I go there once or twice a year, wander into the basement, and ransack their record section. It’s a small section - just about ten or twelve feet of shelving - but it yields high-quality, well-maintained, insanely cheap records. I’m talking the best selection of old-school country I’ve ever found, along with a surprising number of funk and soul albums. Sure, there’s the usual Tom Jones, Mantovani Strings, and Mormon Tabernacle Choir records… but the finds!!!

Merle Haggard & the Strangers’ Same Train, A Different Time, the soundtrack to Mondo Cane, Isaac Hayes‘ Black Moses and …To Be Continued, Ernest Tubb’s My Hillbilly Baby & Other Hits… seriously, these are all in such good condition, they might as well be new. The jackets have some wear, but they’re all together and pretty good. The LPs look like they just got pulled out of the shrink wrap. And that list is only partial - I still got some Left Frizzell, Roy Clark, Robert Goulet, and even more. Twelve LPs. Two bucks, plus tax.

The ladies who work there don’t ask any questions. They just let me wander, sit on the concrete floor (kneeling will mess up your back and knees quite quickly), and dig. Then they ring me up, and I wander out, barely containing the giggles. If I were a better person, I’d share this with my friends. But really… I don’t want to share. Everyone should have it this good.

See? You only get places like this in the Midwest. They don’t exist in big cities.

Isaac Hayes - “The Look of Love” (from …To Be Continued)

Rock Star Journalist faves the Architects are going on tour with Authority Zero, and they’ve got a good reason to. Their new album Vice is doing obscenely well. If you pop on over to their MySpace blog, you can read all the good press they’ve gotten (including the 3 1/2 star review in Spin.

They’ve also recently released a video for “Pills.” You can watch it below, along with a making of, which I’d embed for the lazy, but that’s been disabled. Anyhow, if the band is coming to your town, fucking go see them. It’s a rock show.

Record companies: please, please, please stop it with the variants. There’s not a day that I visit the Pop Punk Bored that someone isn’t dealing with some form of color variant regarding some record. Color variants, different colors, limited pressings… just fucking stop it, all right?

The extreme end of this phenomenon is courtesy of those fine gents in Less Than Jake. There is currently an auction on eBay for the Ultimate Less Than Jake vinyl collection. You just have to click and take a look at it for yourself. The number of color / cover variants is staggering.

And this is sort of a prime example as to why I have such a problem with limited edition vinyl: I don’t own some of these records. Simple as that. The idea of pressing 500 copies of a record? I understand that. You don’t want to press 1,000 and have 600 sitting in your warehouse for five years. That makes sense. But if you press 500, and make 100 on blue, 100 on red, 100 on clear, 100 on black, and 100 on gold, you’re going to end up with 100 vinyl geeks who want all five, as opposed to 500 people who just want to own the fucking record.

You press 500 on red and it sells out? Fucking repress it. You want to do another color to differentiate? That makes sense. I can get behind the logic there (see here for a good example). What I don’t understand is pressing limited amounts, never repressing, and never putting out a singles collection. That seems to me to be a slap in the face to your fans. In this day and age of Internet and eBay and collector scum, there are going to be people who buy records simply to flip them, like folks did with baseball cards and comic books in the ’90s. I’d prefer this not to end up like the ’90s, with shops and companies going under from this sense of “gotta catch ‘em all.” If Matador wasn’t doing a singles collection after shit like this, I’d probably be forced to make threatening phone calls once a day until the police showed up.

What it all boils down to is this: you make a record, make sure people can get it. Limited quanities build a buzz, and get people excited, but those of us who don’t have two hours a day to commit to crate digging, online searching, and trading on various forums would like to be able to walk into a store, buy a record, and bring it home to give it a spin. Compromise: do your limited press of 500 on clear red splatter, and then just keep that fucker in print from now until the end of time on good ol’ black - best of both worlds.

* Please notice I didn’t name names, for the most part - this is because I love the record companies that do this crazy shit, even though they do this crazy shit.

Jay Reatard - “See/Saw” (from Single #1)

According to Sunday’s New York Times, Rolling Stone is switching sizes. Instead of it’s current, classic, tabloid format, it will be changing to a more standard magazine size, as well as becoming perfect-bound, with the release of it’s October 30 issue on October 17.

The Times makes a big to-do about this, but I really just couldn’t care. I understand that Rolling Stone is pretty iconic in its current format. However, it’d be more impressive if the magazine was, say, I dunno… maybe covering artists with cultural relevance? Artists outside the mainstream? Not giving every Neil Young album four stars?

The format change is nice, or would be if I felt like spending money to read articles that really don’t mean anything to me. I always used to hate the fact that Rolling Stone would fall apart because it was so big and stapled together. Anymore, tho’ - I just don’t care. The magazine has the occasional good interview (the one with Robert Downey, Jr. in the current issue is pretty in-depth), but the reviews and features always cover artists who really don’t need the coverage, or only matter to people like Jan Wenner.

Nice try, folks. Maybe next time you’ll take a look at something like the late Punk Planet and see about getting reviews of bands that matter and articles that aren’t fluff pieces for people who are already ridiculously famous.

Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show - “Cover of the Rolling Stone” (from At His Best)

I am totally aware this cd came out a while back (like well over two years ago). However, No Idea sent it to the station recently, and I reviewed it for our library, and it’s totally great, and you should go listen to it right now.

Defiance, Ohio – “The Great Depression”
(No Idea Records)

Defiance, Ohio sing politically charged songs that features a bunch of kids on penny whistle, banjo, and other such folksy instrumentation. It’s folk-punk, for whatever that’s worth. Like fellow genre-benders O Pioneers!, Fake Problems, This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb and Andrew Jackson Jihad, this sextet sings lyrics that sound like they were written by Billy Bragg, and strum and thump as if they were the opening act for the Pogues.

There’s a lot of energy here, and the songs barely make it past three minutes (if they make it past two). Short song lengths are pretty handy here, actually – when mocking Bush (“New World Order”) and the government (“Lambs to the Slaughter”), the rhetoric is easier to take when it’s fast and catchy. “Oh, Susquehanna!” is my absolute favorite, and I want to make every kid who ever tramped by a creek or climbed a tree or rode their bike off a cliff listen to it so they can remember when kids had fun outside and got dirty and didn’t act like they were made of fragile crystal.

You can download The Great Depression fo’ free over at archive dot org.

This morning, they had a couple of women on the BBC World Service to talk about Katy Perry and her current hit, “I Kissed A Girl.” There’s some discussion going on at the moment (of which I was unaware until the teaser for the story came on) as to whether Ms. Perry’s song is homophobic. The ladies made some good points, and I wish I could remember the organizations they represented - the sad state of trying to work at 4:00am and keep story ideas running in my head. The first woman commented something along the lines of (and I am paraphrasing here) that “it wouldn’t be all that offensive, but it’s just such an awful song.”

BBC Radio 1’s Chart Blog has a really nice debate on their site at the moment. The Guardian also has a good article, as well. Well-reasoned stuff, especially the bits considering as to whether or not “I Kissed A Boy” would have been so well received. The complaints I’ve heard pretty much all revolve around the fact that it seems like:

A) She’s trying too hard to ditch her Christian music past.
B) She wants to be an “edgier” Avril Lavigne.
C) Pink does this better.

They’re all pretty much true. I missed her set at Warped Tour (pretty much on purpose), so I can’t say as to how it all comes out live, but I can’t imagine it’s all that special. The promo material that came with the advance single for “Ur So Gay” was so offensively hip and cool that I chucked it across the room. You can read that sucker right here and see what I mean. If ever there were a work, this is it.

Katy Perry - “I Kissed A Girl” (from One Of the Boys)

Well, I learned a valuable lesson the other day. I went to Warped Tour a while back, as you may recall. Had a great time, shot some good photos, met some folks, hung out with friends, and managed to find a couple of good deals on records. Well, those “good deals” on records have come back to haunt me. One deal, specifically.

You ever look back on something and realize with crystaline clarity what a bad choice you made? Yeah, this was one of those times. I’d been wandering around, and it was nearing the end of the day. While waiting for the Architects to play their set, I happened upon the Bridge 9 booth.

I’m a fan of the label. They put out the new H2O record Nothing to Prove, they released the original American Nightmare stuff… good label for hardcore kids. Well, they also recently put out the International Superheroes of Hardcore record. The band is pretty much New Found Glory with Chad on vocals and Jordan on guitar, playing Good Clean Fun-style funny as hell hardcore, posi-core, whatever.

Anyhow, I walk up to the booth and ask the guy about the ISHC record and the H2O release, ’cause I’d like to buy them on vinyl. Well, he tells me that they’re out in the van, and he’ll have one of his guys grab them. He says for me to come back in half an hour. Now, it’s 90 degrees out. We’re in a parking lot the size of several football fields, and it’s July in Kansas. Park a van on that blacktop and stick some vinyl discs in it, and think they’re going to survive?

I did not think about that. I saw the Architects play their set, wandered back to the booth, got the ISHC record (they were out of H2O), put it in my backpack, and headed to the car. Got home, cleaned out my bag, and forgot about the record. I’ve got the ISHC on CD, so I’ve been busting that out in the car. Well, I wanted the wife to listen to the record while we were hanging out the other night, so I pull it off the shelf and drop it on the turntable.

Yeah… it’s so warped that when the autoplay function kicks on, the warp in the record bounces the tone arm right back to its rest. Fucked up. I e-mailed Bridge 9, and it’s been two whole days, and not a goddamn peep. I wouldn’t care so much if it’d been mailorder, or something like that, but I bought it straight from them. At least I didn’t buy the H2O album… although I still don’t even have that on CD, because the copy they sent the station for review was fucked up at the pressing plant.

the International Superheroes of Hardcore live set at B-Sides ‘R Us.