Thursday, March 1, 2012

thanks for playing

Every once and I while, I get tempted to post a few screenshots and say a few words, but there are only so few hours in the day. 
 AND
Today is the day that google officially starts to attribute each and every interaction with its network to a set of individually identified users.  I don't know all the fine details, nor do I care.  It's very rare that I think, life would sure be more convenient if advertisers knew how to behaviorally target me better.

  As far as the future us concerned,  one gets the feeling that all of this filesharing hysteria will seem pretty damn quaint one day. 



********
 In parting,
I hope that for you, like me, your rock and roll fandom helped to take your mind off things that you can't stand.  Furthermore, I hope that really trying to appreciate it as deeply as possible makes you a more competent person.  You learn more about computers or geography or history or anything...anything.  People who aren't obsessive about something are unreal in a way.  You focus on something, you see the contradictions, the complex reality behind the simple image

Friday, May 13, 2011

Aretha Franklin Paris 06/21/71

Aretha Franklin
1971-06-21
Taverne de L'Olympia, Paris, France
(original POP2 broadcast date: 1971-09-18)

soul / jazz / blues / R&B / gospel / rock

Lineage:TV(Melody)<

Video: PAL 25 fps, I/L TFF, 4:3 (720 x 576), MPEG2 7451-7923 kbps
Audio codec: AC3 CBR, 48000Hz 256 kb/s tot , stereo (2/0) (GSpot)


program intro
Say a little prayer
Brand new me
Don't play that song (You lied)
Dr. Feelgood
Spirit in the dark
Reach out and touch

total run time: 00:21:16

Aretha Franklin - vocals, piano

King Pin Orchestra
King Curtis -saxophone, bandleader
Cornell Dupree - guitar
Jerry Jemmott - bass
Truman Thomas - organ
Bernard Purdie - drums
Sweethearts of Soul
Brenda Bryant, Margaret Branch & Pat Smith.

Note: Melody logo, probably some DVB capture of some kind, two digital errors, one small one at 05:02 min and one bigger one at 05:17 (4/5 seconds freeze


**********
Might be said that these versions breathe a little more life into these songs than the official recordings.  Quality is very good.  Don't know much about the program on which this was first broadcast.  Some trader has compiled a list of guests on the program which I've pasted below.  Side note, the "96 Tears" on Aretha Arrives is pretty solid groover.

POP 2 #1 04/03/1970 Soft Machine 1 DVD, 35 minutes, excellent
Pop 2 14/05/1970 MOODY BLUES
POP 2 #3 11/06/1970 East of Eden 1 DVD, 28 minutes, excellent
POP 2 #4 25/06/1970 Taj Mahal 1 DVD, 31 minutes, excellent
POP 2 #5 23/07/1970 Soft Machine 1 DVD, 30 minutes, excellent
Pop 2 30/07/1970 Moody Blues
POP 2 #7 13/08/1970 Michael Chapman 1 DVD, 31 minutes, excellent
POP 2 #8 20/08/1970 Joan Baez, Country Joe (Festival de Boit) Pacific Drift 1 DVD, 41 minutes, excellent
Pop 2 10/09/1970 John Mayall & Friends
POP 2 #10 24/09/1970 Four Tops 1 DVD, 44 minutes, excellent
POP 2 #13 08/24/1970 Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Pete Brown 1 DVD, 41 minutes, excellent
Pop 2 10/10/1970
Pop 2 17/10/1970 mit Jethro Tull
Pop 2 24/10/1970
POP 2 #14 31/10/1970 The Beatles (Cavern Club/ profile), Family 1 DVD, 39 minutes, excellent
POP 2 #15 07/11/1970 Spooky Tooth, Beatles Interview, Cat Stevens 1 DVD, 37 minutes, excellent
Pop 2 14/11/1970 Deep Purple Live In France
Pop 2 28/11/1970 The Who, Triangle, Magma
POP 2 #20 12/12/1970 Soft Machine, Zoo, Mathews Southern Comfort 40 mins Ex
POP 2 #21 19/12/1970 Kevin Ayers, Edgar Broughton, Rod Stewart, Mungo Jerry 40 mins Ex
Pop 2 #22 26/12/1970 Joe Cocker, America, Johnny Cash, Soft Machine 37 mins very good / excellent picture
Pop 2 09/01/1971 Frank Zappa & New Mothers, Gong, Total Issue
Pop 2 16/01/1971 Family w/Interview, Zappa & Mothers of Invention (Gaumont Palace)
POP 2 #25 30/01/1971 Canned Heat, Steven Stills, Rod Stewart, Pretty Things 40 mins very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #26 13/02/1971 Mick Jagger Interview, Rod Stewart & the Faces 1971 40 mins very good / excellent picture
POP 2 27/02/1971 Cat Stevens/Alan Bown/T.Rex complete show 39 min A quality w/
POP 2 #28 06/03/1971 Patto, Ralph McTell 1971 32 mins Ex.....
Pop 2 #29 20/03/1971 Voyage, Stone the Crows 40 mins very good / excellent picture
Pop 2 27/03/1971
POP 2 #31 17/04/1971 Richie Havens, Charlie Watts, Eric Burdon & War, Canned Heat..very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #32 08/05/1971 Komintern, Jean Luc Ponty, Frank Zappa 40 mins very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #33 15/05/1971 Rex Foster, Terry Reid, Woodstock 69, Zoo, Charlie Watts, Joel Dayde, Martin Circus 44 mins very good
POP 2 #34 22/05/1971 The Rolling Stones Marquee Club 35 mins Ex HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Pop 2 05/06/1971 Rory Gallagher
POP 2 #36 12/06/1971 The Band, Rex Foster , Variations 38 mins Ex very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #38 26/06/1971 John Mayall, Coer Magique, Emmanual Booz 39 mins Ex..very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #39 03/07/1971 Auvers S/Oise, Osmos, Eruption, Mormos, Woddy Guthrie, Juicy Lucy 38 mins very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #40 17/07/1971 Rory Gallagher Pt 2, Courbevoie, Valerie Lagrange very good / excellent picture
Pop 2 24/07/1971
POP 2 #42 07/08/1971 Grateful Dead, Altamont Documentry, Tony Williams & Lifetime, Ian Matthews Southern Comfort 40 mins very good
Pop 2 14/08/1971 James Gang, Jim Morrison Documentary, Who at Woodstock, Eric Burdon & War
POP 2 #44 28/08/1971 Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, Paul Slade, Mick Abrahams 37 mins very good / excellent picture
POP 2 04.09.1971 Curved Air/Santana/The Beatles(Paris 65 clip)/Buddy Miles complete show 40 min in color w/
POP 2 #46 18/09/1971 Titanic, Aretha Franklin 40 mins very good /excellent picture
Pop 2 09/10/1971 Zoo, Sea Train, Colosseum, Grateful Dead
Pop 2 16/10/1971 Steve Waring, Tribu, Colosseum
Pop 2 #49 23/10/1971 Blues Convention, Gene Vincent, Kinks, Brian Auger's Oblivion Express .......40-45 MINUTES
Pop 2 30/10/1971 Mott the Hoople, Animals, Procol Harum
Pop 2 06/11/1971 Alice Cooper, Mott The Hoople
Pop 2 13/11/1971 Bob Dylan, Emmanuel Booz, Total Issue, James Gang
POP 2 21/11/1970 Donovan and Blood Sweat & Tears complete show
Pop 2 27/11/1971
Pop 2 #54 04/12/1971 Leon Russell, Woody Guthrie, The Grease Band, Pete Brown ........40-45 MINUTES
POP 2 #55 11/12/1971 Frank Zappa, Amon Düül 2 49 mins very good /excellent picture
POP 2 #56 18/12/1971 Redbone, Jacques Higelin, Judy Collins 49 mins Ex very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #57 08/01/1972 If, Amon Düül II, John Lennon, Lindisfarne 49 mins Ex very good / excellent picture
Pop 2 22/01/1972 John Lennon
POP 2 #59 19/02/1972 Buffy Sainte Marie 30 minsvery good / excellent
POP 2 #60 04/03/1972 Robert Charlebois, Gato Barbieri, Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart & Faces 49 mins very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #61 03/04/1972 David Bowie, Catherine Ribeiro, Heads Hands & Feet 46 mins very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #62 29/04/1972 Gong, The Who, Mormos, Poco 50 mins very good / excellent picture
Pop 2 27/05/1972 Bob Dylan (Bangla Desh), Van Der Graaf Generator, Jerry Lee Lewis, Van Der Graaf Generator
POP 2 #64 10/06/1972 Matching Mole, Velvet Underground, John Cale 40 mins..very good / excellent picture
POP 2 #65 04/11/1972 Johnny Winter, Pink Floyd, Poco, Alice Cooper, MC5, Lou Reed, Eric Burdon & War 44 min..very good
POP 2 18/11/1972 The Who/James Taylor/Stone the Crows complete show in color 45 min A quality w/
POP 2 #67 02/12/1972 Pazop, American Folk and Blues Festival - Lightnin' Slim & Whispering Smith, Bukka White, Johnny Young

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Misfits Dearborn 01/07/1983 Boston 03/20/1983

I've got something to say...

This blog is absurd...There has to be some direct way to the hardcore rush of a thrill than all this rock video nonsense...In a few seconds, the species will be able to inhale computer particles directly into their brain, which will explode with the heat of a 1000 orgasms. In the meantime, how pathetic the universe is. I remember, (can anyone tell me what magazine?.) Kim Fowley in a New Orleans strip club telling us..."Fuck the Seeds, the Music Machine...et.al  all that nostalgia shit is for deadweights.  If you just got out of your mom's basement exactly right now, there's some band ripping it up just as good"  Which is exaggerated...but not much.  Down the road right now, there are a bunch of knuckleheads moshing the piss out of each other to the out of tune of loud guitars.  Doubtful, that band has quite the balance of the chops and the energy and the humor of the misfits, but it beats what you are doing exactly right now...




An audio/video recording of the horror punk band The Misfits. Recorded for the cable access TV program "Why Be Something You're Not". Filmed in a storage room at Group W Cable in Dearborn, Michigan on January 7, 1983.

This recording has not been officially released and only circulates as a bootleg.

Setlist:
01. Earth A.D.
02. Band Introductions
03. Interview With Glenn Danzig
04. I Turned Into A Martian
05. Skulls
06. Devilock
07. Queen Wasp
08. Mommy, Can I Go Out And Kill Tonight?
09. Hate Breeders
10. Braineaters
11. Halloween
12. Bullet
13. Horror Business
14. We Are 138

The Misfits:
Glenn Danzig (Lead Vocals)
Jerry Only (Bass Guitar, Vocals)
Doyle (Lead Guitar)
Robo (Drums)
 ----------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This blog is absurd.  In the future, which will be a sort of paradise. memories and desires, awareness, will be a movable feast software that can be downloaded onto genetically perfected human livestock...generation to generation.  In the meantime, there is a new sandwich from mCCdonalds, there is a buddy of mine telling me that seeing bad religion again, twenty years later, seemed like punching the timeclock deadend of inspiration...Meanwhile, there is the new html 5 video tag...which I feel like if I was more computer savvy and more imaginative, I would be more excited about.  please help me to be entertained.  Should I buy an Ipad?  Can the Devil see me right now?  Is there an internet in the afterlife?

 Halloween
20 Eyes
Wolfs Blood
All Hell Breaks Loose
Mommy, Can I Go Out And Kill Tonight?
Devils Whorehouse
Demonomania
London Dungeon
Die Die My Darling
Violent World
Astro Zombies
Green Hell
I Turned Into A Martian
Skulls
Devilock
We Are 138
Nike A Go Go
Hate Breeders
Braineaters
Attitude
Rise Above
Horror Business
Bullet


The Dearborn footage has a much better image than the Boston.  But I played this for pretty strong fans and the mediocre quality of it made them lose their attention.  The sound is not that great.  I imagine there are some audio boots from around this time that have a lot more fidelity and are worth hearing.  Anybody with knowledge about that, give me a comment.  I've got some Bad Brains cdrs from around this time which are really hardcore....

Friday, April 22, 2011

Do It Yourself: The Rough Trade Story


From BBC four website:  " When Spiral Scratch was released in 1977, the idea of putting out a single without the support of an established record company was incredible."

"incredible..."

if you are under the age of twenty five, you can remember a time when actually making a decent fidelity recording...having access to the technology that could do this...Making records was very nearly indistinguishable from magic...often black magic, a handshake and compromise with some morally corrupt corporate authority.

Do It Yourself, even today, can seem nearly the sole criteria of Aesthetic quality.  Whether or not you have an emotional response to symbols comes down to whether or not you believe that actual individual people were manipulating them...following no other compulsion than their own pleasure, curiosity, free will.  The story of Rough Trade is that the success of this has a ceiling.  The record label would give the bands a start, but eventually they defected to the majors.  Organizations that could make musicians into household names.

The odd thing is that even though the barriers to entry are lower, superstardom is still an elite margin with occult gatekeepers.  The 80-20 law :80 percent of awareness is owned by 20 percent of the population.  One of the thermodynamic axioms of psychohistory perhaps.

This documentary is so well made that I was interested in it without being too big of a fan of any of the Rough Trade musical acts.  I don't believe that it is available for viewing in a way that is commercially beneficial to its producers- another downside to the 80/20...if something is in the long tail of popularity, the revenue you generate from making it available for distribution does not exceed the cost.  But actually, I have to confess that the BBC is rather a unique network.  How it finances its content, and profits from that content, is far more complex than I can even pretend to understand. 

The Jayhawks Frankfurt 06/XX/95

never gave this band much attention but somehow wound up with a well put together disc with some of their television appearances. The frankfurt material is way over saturated but the sound is good:

clouds
settled down like rain
take me with you
two angels
reason to believe
sister citu
waiting for the sun
she picks the violets
wichita

videos:

waiting for the sun
take me with you
settled down like the rain

three chapters of extras:

hollywood town hall EPK (some songs performed and some very well produced and edited interview footage.  unlike the other stuff this is captured in close to broadcast quality)

ktcz tv 92

farm aid 92






The jayhawks currently doing the twenty year reunion thing where remastered albums are made available with bonus tracks playing concerts for old fans of an entire album in its entirety.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Sixties Beat Freaks

I'm a dabbler when it comes to vid collecting.  I got this disc from one of those gray area dvdr b-movie sites.  I really have respect for people who are consumed by ultra rare Shock Cinema style movie collections, and I'd buy more from them if I wasn't so damn broke. If you turn yourself a walking encyclopedia with the planet's only viewable copies of obscure giallo...eurosleaze...made for TV schlock titles, you deserve some cash to get by: you're doing more for civilization than most people.


This disc I'm reviewing is a VCR edit of mid sixties lip sync weekly rock shows. The generation loss of these clips is, for me, kind of a atmospheric positive thing.  In a better life, you'd always be able to wander over to someone's pad and there would be projections of this going on their living room wall.  Aside from the Kinks, the Pretty Things, The Seeds, The Monks, Question Mark and the Mysterians, there are many also ran groups like The Boots and Smoke which, I can't front, I don't know anything about.  I'm sure there are fifty page interviews with them in Ugly Things.  But I can tell you that they are more amusing to watch than to listen to.

No doubt this kind of disc is irritating to hardcore sixties collector/historians, who would want chapter indexes dividing the performances and information about who each group is and what program they are appearing on.  But me, like I said, I'm just about this for the do it yourself ambiance.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Metallica 03/12/1989 Philadelphia

4.02 GB Disc is multicam proshot screenfeed two or three generations down the line.  Picture is fair.  Lacks a lot of sharpness and contrast.  Sound is all mids and borders on crunchy distortion.  Quality of recording makes it probably of interest to only fans, but as far as 80's boots go, I've watched far worse.  The Youtube embed below has perhaps a different audio source, a little more definition but a little less range.  The video is definitely clearer, that boot either came from a different rip or someone stuck it into an editor and worked it over with some filters.







A cleanly laid out, nicely detailed Metallica boot site lists two recordings for the night.  One is a PAL audience.

It seems as if my tribute to tapetrader.com has turned into an epitaph. All of that information is now unavailable to access.  There are murmurings on various forums that the responsible parties were having financial problems with their host.   A long time ago, I was curious as to why, financially, the site existed in the first place. I found an interview with the developer where he explained that he was responsible for training Coldfusion developers professionally and he maintained the site for those purposes. As the years went on, state of the art search (say, for instance, appearances of a specific text string through all the disc descriptions) and web 2.0 features never appeared and made the site seem rickety. But, of course, the main reason the site became less popular is that it was overshadowed by torrent trackers, as downloading a video file is a hell of a lot more convenient than emailing dozens of strangers, burning discs, and going to the post office to send them through the mail. Just the same, I would often go to the site just to survey what has been filmed or taped...Soundboards of the Cleveland Agora, for example. Or all video files ever traded with images of Elvis...It will take a long time for all of this to reappear online. And in a centralized location, perhaps it never will. http://www.setlist.fm has already stepped in for people to wiki in what they know about shows...and there is songkick as well...These may disappear too one day, of course, but as their information is served to the public as webpages, it is a lot more amenable for independent users to crawl and archive. Just as people have archived public sites like dead bulletin boards or yahoo geocities.

01 - The Ecstasy Of Gold
02 - Blackened
03 - For Whom The Bell Tolls
04 - Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
05 - Leper Messiah
06 - Harvester Of Sorrow
07 - Eye Of The Beholder
08 - Bass Solo
09 - To Live Is To Die Jam
10 - Master Of Puppets
11 - One
12 - Seek & Destroy
13 - ...And Justice For All
14 - Creeping Death
15 - Fade To Black
16 - Guitar Solo
17 - Battery


Metallica versus Napster. This was the headline more than a few years ago. The blacks and whites of it all are perhaps now even harder to get to the bottom of.  Technology marches on.  Yesterday's power structure tries to delay its adoption for a percentage of a population for a short time, but eventually it must itself adapt. Browsing Cryptome the other day, I found an interesting link to a recent textbook which attempt to assess the current scope of international entertainment piracy. In historical retrospect, the real significance of the music industry will be seen as a mere catalyst for the mass production of consumer electronics. Where economies of scale will eventually permit the manufacturers to mass produce smaller and more powerful things...things which, inevitably, will create far more social transformation than the creation of audio recordings.



The future, or rather the present, is subscription. Instead of owning the physical medium in which the files themselves are kept (how inconvenient!), digital music files will be something that is subscribed to. This is a gray area of ignorance for me, personally, as I have yet to make the transition to having all of my interest in music satisfied by a recommendation engine powered by Pandora or Spotify and delivered to me on my cell phone...This is the future, of course. Where the content of every communication that appears in the span of your attention will be cataloged into an account specific to your unique identity. Will the Apple or Amazon or Netflix cloud deliver to us this ratty footage of a 20 year old concert by Metallica? Given the grayness of its independent origins, I would say it's unlikely. While Metallica is the kind of band that first world cell phone markets want emanating from their phones, the forces behind Metallica are still powerful enough that they must make these official channels pay recompense.

Yet, the data network corporations are growing to such stature that the concerns of the vestiges of the recording industry will eventually lose all consequence.   Glyn Moody (whose Rebel Code and Digital Code of Life books are very well researched and very perceptive) recently remarked that, with Google's capital, they might as well merely buy all of the record labels outright, rather than be troubled with their lawsuits and licensing demands.

One day, it will all be in the cloud.  And as long as you have this month's subscription fee, the cloud will have your fix.   But what if, one day, the cloud disappears?  Google itself is going to make the 2.8 million videos that people have uploaded to Google Video unavailable for viewing in a weeks time.  Although we can presume that a lot of them A) exist in another form somewhere else or B) has no conceivable bearing on any  cognitive inquiry that the species might imagine, the magnitude of it is pretty staggering.  How many MB were lost with the library of Alexandria?   Of course, headlines claim that Google is erasing this data, but Google says no such thing.  It says that it will only be unavailable for internet viewing.
And how reliable is communication across the cloud?  As of today, you and I can use YouTube to view Metallica playing Philadephia in 1989.  But it could very well disappear tomorrow, just as a video of Prince that I embedded in one of my posts went on to be dutifully removed at the request of the artist himself.   Whatever the rightness or wrongness of these uploads actually happens to be, it is Google, not the artist nor fans, that has much of the power when it comes to deciding if they will remain.  As far as official Hollywood content goes, apparently the network has devised extremely clever algorithms that can automatically, within an hour, identify a snippet of these when someone attempts to upload them into its database.  These methods will only improve.  How long before master of puppet facial recognition programs can return every video in which a person appears, regardless of the age that they appear in those stored images?



A second uploader has nonembeddably posted the concert to youtube HERE, I leave it to the obsessed to determine what the overall lineages are. I guess I'm generally kinda curious as to what the best bootleg is for this tour. If anyone reading this has any opinion, definitely leave a comment.