“So, have you ever seen Sting live?”

Yeah, we’ve seen Gordon. Twice, really. Once, years ago, at what we still think of as the best venue for large scale live music in the southeast (RedOak Mountain Ampitheater in Birmingham, Alabama). Earlier than that — spring 1991 — at UNO Lakefront in New Orleans, though, was the definitive sighting.

Back then, before Sting became the punch line for Jaguar commercials, he was still interesting. He was touring in support of his last good record (The Soul Cages), and had fer-crying-out-loud Concrete Blonde opening for him. In that pre-Internet-as-we-know-it era, nobody in Tuscaloosa knew it was happening until I went back to Hattiesburg for spring break — and discovered, via a local record shop, what was happening the following evening in the Big Easy. My little brother and I quickly signed on, and then we called certain other Heathen at their ancestral home, and consequently he and a couple others (J.B. and M.E.) were screaming down I-10 from Florida to Louisiana.

They missed the true opener — a damned shame, since in all honestly we were bigger Concrete Blonde fans than Sting fans — but they got there in time to see something extraordinary. After the CB set and the requisite period of silence, the lights went down, followed by a simple follow-spot and two guys walking out on stage: a tall pale blonde dude, and a black guy with short dreads and a big-ass drum.

Sting started talking. He told us about how he’d wandered into a bar in Santa Monica or someplace months before, caught by the rain, and heard this guy. He went backstage. He, being Sting, got him a slot on his tour. He informed us that in half an hour or so, he’d be out to play his set; in the meantime, we were to listen to the dreadlock guy.

Dreadlock guy was Vinx. Nobody, mostly, knows who the hell he is even now, but at that moment in 1991, it was easy to believe he was about to be a big-ass star. He held the arena in his hand with an ease I’ve not yet seen again. The material he did was incredible and solid and true. I immediately bought his record, and then the follow up, and then. . .

. . . he vanished. Of course, he was still there. He just didn’t have major label support, or the exposure the comes with it. He’s still out there, but the records I know are now, criminally, out of print. This guy’s the real deal. See him if you have the chance. Buy what recordings you can. He’s real. I sit here, nearly 15 years after the first time I heard his voice at UNO Lakefront, and I still can’t believe how few people know how awesome he is.

So that’s what we’re telling you about this evening, shifting POV and all. Go. Buy. Listen.

“RIP Chet.”

Of course, it’s about Chet Helms, but there you go.

No problem; just download the Quicktime files from here.

So, twenty years ago, we wanted to watch the original Live Aid on TV, but for whatever reason our mother insisted on going camping instead as a “family activity.” We were not, she said, staying home for some concert on TV. This met with precisely the sort of reaction from 15-year-old Heathen that you’d expect.

The new Live 8 is nice to see, twenty years later, but cannot be the cultural event the original was. We hope it’s more successful, though, since Geldof presumably has a bit more savvy and pull behind him now than he did then.

The most irritating thing about it, though, is the hopeless nature of the broadcast. Fundamentally, they’re not doing concert coverage; they’re doing some sort of awful meta-coverage. The direction is awful; for example, they managed to never have a camera on Pete Townshend when he pulled his signature windmill, for example. The on-air talent is pulled from that most vapid of all possible pools, MTV’s “veejays.” They keep referring to one-hit, current-hot bands as “amazing” and “incredible” as if they’d just seen Jesus on lead guitar. A more systemic problem lurks, though: the coverage is clearly tailored for an 8-year-old with ADD. Virtually no entire songs are shown, and we’re pretty sure the first time we’ve seen two songs in a row from the same act is now, with the much-ballyhooed Pink Floyd reunion (“Breathe” followed by “Money”) — and even then they interrupted “Comfortably Numb” to let some stupid twat babble over it.

A Smiths musical.

Country Dick Montana’s Rules of the Road, which includes the admonition to always carry with you “a condom, some Super Glue and an extra large, all-purpose rock-solid alibi.” Good advice, from a man who knows. Or knew, anyway; Montana died on stage ten years ago come this November.

We here at Heathen would like to apologize for whatever part we had in enabling the creation of this.

The band Self has covered What A Fool Believes using only toy instruments. FanTAStic.

Twenty-five years ago today, Ian Curtis committed suicide.

This video from DJ Format and friends has an amusing conceit. It’s not as fantastic as his prior work, but it’s still fun.

And mostly, he’s right.

From the otherwise mostly straightlaced Drummer World site comes this fine video of Buddy Rich’s appearance on the Muppet Show many moons ago. You might consider checking out some of the non-Muppet videos, too, especially this one of the recently departed Elvin Jones.

This is the best goddamn cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” EVAR. Of course, they have an unfair advantage in the area of, um, instrumentation. (~8 MB Windows Media)

Ol’ Jeff has an interesting game up on his blog. See if you can do better than my answers; out of 30 possible points (band, song, guitarist for each of 10), I scored 13.

[Axl] accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio, from wood planks and chicken wire.

This from The Most Expensive Album Never Made the NYT’s long piece on the long-awaited “Chinese Democracy” from Axl Rose.

(As with all NYT stories, hit it quick or it goes away. Use nogators/nogators.)

Apparently, they can’t even read their own study on DRM, and are therefore planning to hobble virtually all their releases this year — with some foolhardy DRM scheme that will be cracked in about 10 seconds. The Reuters coverage suggests the scheme will be the same old bullshit from SunnCom, which requires you to allow the new CD to install software in order to work. Um, why exactly would we do that?

We here at Heathen will refrain from buying anything DRM’d. If we can’t put a CD we bought on our iPod on our own terms, we don’t want it.

Guns & Roses’ seminal “Appetite for Destruction” is now, um, old enough to vote.

The Accordian Guy eulogizes the late, great Jimmy Smith (at left).

Go. Listen.

So we finally picked up Brian Wilson’s long-delayed magnum opus, and of it, I have only this to say:

It’s gonna be a long damn time before I can hear “Good Vibrations” without a voice in my head singing along with “Sunkist orange soda taste sen-sa-shuns” as part of the chorus. Goddamn advertising.

If you missed U2 on SNL, you are very, very, very sad. It was one of those incredible TV moments people talk about for years. Trust us.

NYT had a great piece on U2 (pointed out by Mike) on the 14th; we’ve been busy, or we’d have put it up sooner. Use nogators/nogators to get in. Interestingly, it turns out they weren’t paid for the iPod spot; it functioned as an ad for their record as much as the iPod. Neat.

A fine quote from Bono:

“I don’t talk about my faith very much, because the people you might want to talk with, you don’t want to hang out with. “To have faith in a time of religious fervor is a worry. And, you know, I do have faith, and I’m worried about even the subject because of the sort of fanaticism that is the next-door neighbor of faith. The trick in the next few years will be not to decry the religious instinct, but to accept that this is a hugely important part of people’s lives. And at the same time to be very wary of people who believe that theirs is the only way. Unilateralism before God is dangerous.” “Religion is ceremony and symbolism,” he added. “Writers live off symbolism, and performers live off ceremony. We’re made for religion! And yet you see this country, Ireland, ripped over religion, and you see the Middle East. Right now, unless tolerance comes with fervor, you’ll see it in the United States.”

And, on the iPod thing:

Apple is manufacturing a black-and-red U2 iPod with the album stored on it, and later this month its iTunes Music Store is releasing “The Complete U2,” a digital album of 400 songs, including 25 previously unreleased. To inaugurate the band’s partnership with Apple, U2 and its song “Vertigo” appear in an iPod commercial for which, Bono said, the band was not paid. “My idea of selling out is when you do naff things for money,” he said, going on to define “naff” as very embarrassing. “That’s subjective, but I think it’s quite clear: don’t embarrass your fans, they’ve given you a good life. Our audience are thrilled about the Apple thing. They can’t believe their band has its own iPod. “I have a very strong sense of survival,” he added, “and I know that ‘Vertigo’ is not the biggest pop song in the world. I know that riff has to be hammered home to become a pop song. With the commercial, we had a rock video coming on during the baseball playoffs in a way a record company could not afford.'”

Clever boys, U2. Now, when’s the tour?

Cream are considering a 2005 reunion stand at the Royal Albert Hall. We knew there was a reason we still had 100K+ Amex points.

(This is not to say that two-headed turtles aren’t good news, of course. Apples and oranges, really.)

We don’t know if they made this or not, but it’s funny as hell.

Not content to be totally out of the running when it comes to portable music technology, Sony has now bullied the RetroPod right off the net.

Go, Sony! Make sure we all know how irrelevant you’ve become!

It seems our friend Slacktivist is both an Evangelical and a VU fan.

(The post in question is actually a follow-up to this one.)

If you liked Spinal Tap, then you may enjoy listening to some actual idiot-musician-in-studio ranting from The Troggs. This is all over the net this morning, but it’s stilll pretty funny.

Johnny Ramone, dead at 55.

Ernie Ball, dead at 74. Damn.

A New Times paper somewhere posts The Ten Most Hated Men In Rock (Besides Sting). We think they’re mostly right.

We here at Heathen Central enjoy the gadgets, the toys, the geegaws, the technological marvels. We have several computers, half a dozen dead PDAs, two iPods, a Tivo, three kinds of wireless phones, and a device devoted to the deep-frying of WHOLE LIVE GOATS. You know the drill; certain Other Household Members have even opined — blasphemy! — that we should get rid of some of this crap, but so far we’ve kept it all safe.

This is all a long way of saying that it took us COMPLETELY BY SURPRISE that this Other Household Member insisted this morning that we procure, with all speed, another gadget: an XM satellite radio. Why, you ask? Well, because NPR-exile Bob Edwards is getting a show set to run against Morning Edition (delicious!), and we miss him.

‘Nuff said; off we went to the local non-asshole retailer where we bought one of these (~ $140 walking out the door). This particular device is a fine choice for flexibility as well; right out of the box, it’s ready to use in the car (via an FM transmitter), but a home kit is available (free for now) that includes the bits you need to hook it directly to your home stereo (really just another antenna, a 6V power adapter, and a mini-to-RCA cable; it’s got normal jacks for power and line-out). Service is a reasonable $9 a month.

We’ve only have it an hour or so, but already we’ve heard more cool shit than you’ll get in six months from any dozen Clear Channel stations. The X-Country channel is particularly fine, free as it is of Nashville taint — think Gourds, Billy Joe Shaver, Bob Dylan, and Joe Ely, all of which have been played in the last 15 minutes. It probably doesn’t hurt that this channel is hosted by the Last of the Full Grown Men, the Idol of Idle Youth, Webb Wilder, either. And this is just ONE channel of 68 or so available, virtually none of which play the pablum that now dominates the FM dial (unless you live in range of KGSR). We’re actually looking forward to our next long car trip; anybody who spends any time in the car needs one of these things. Seriously.

(We were just kidding about the goats.)

In CNN story teasingly titled “Will Sony’s new Walkman run over Apple’s iPod?“, they behave as if a smaller, cheaper player were something new on the market that the iPod hasn’t had to confront before, and that price and capacity are the reasons people buy the iPod. We’re pretty sure neither is true.

The real kicker of the story is buried toward the end:

As with Sony’s other players, the NW-HD1 plays songs in the company’s proprietary ATRAC format only, meaning it is not compatible with other online stores and cannot play tunes in the popular MP3 format.

Yup; it doesn’t play MP3. Nor does it play AAC, which iTMS uses, nor, we expect, does it play Microsoft’s WMA or WMA+DRM formats. Yeah, we’re sure Jobs & co. are quaking in their boots over this one.

Former Van Halen frontman and (let’s face it) frequent butt of jokes David Lee Roth has been training as a New York City Emergency Medical Technician, even temporarily relocating from his Pasadena estate to a New York apartment for the duration.

We covered Cory Doctorow’s DRM talk here last week. It’s clear, well-reasoned, and covers a lot of ground. It’s also structured in such a way that both experts and neophytes can follow his analysis.

That industry people with stakes in DRM disagree with Cory is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the amazingly half-assed way in which Jupiter Research’s Michael Gartenberg did so. Without saying how Cory is wrong about DRM’s fundamental conceptual problems, he insists that nevertheless Cory IS wrong, and that he’ll be happy to explain why to paying customers (he also positions his pseudo-argument in a “what customers will put up with” way, which says an awful lot).

Er, right, Michael. Of course, given that way the music industry seems content to buy snake oil, maybe this is all the sales pitch they need.

Professor Felton has a few bits to say on the subject over at Freedom to Tinker.

Also, I’ll note that there is actually a way to get the tracks onto an iPod: buy the album in compressed, digital format from the iTunes Music Store. However, this gives you what is obviously an inferior copy, and the issues associated with Apple’s DRM are the same fundamental problems any such system faces.

In other news, it appears that the Beastie Boys have fallen into the same trap, making their new record another one I’d buy but for the DRM, particularly given reports that the disc installs software without asking upon being loaded in the owner’s computer (and this time, it’s true of both Windows and Macs).

BMG has released the eagerly anticipated — at least by me — Velvet Revolver CD with some goofball DRM on it which purports to prevent ripping to MP3. Instead, the CD has a CD-ROM area on it with some Windows Media format files on it, for use on computers and some portable devices.

Leaving behind for a moment how wholly wrongheaded DRM schemes are — see the other post, on Cory Doctorow’s speach, for more on this — the Windows files are useless to me and to anyone else who uses the most popular digital audio player, Apple’s iPod, which doesn’t play Microsoft’s format (big surprise).

The other point is even weirder: the DRM scheme in question (Sunncomm’s) is hopelessly broken. Much was made of it a few months back, especially when it surfaced that you could circumvent their “copy protection” by holding down the shift key at the right moment. Of course, doing so for any reason is technically illegal under the DMCA, even if your goal — say, putting the Velvet Revolver tracks on your iPod — is completely within the realm of fair use. (That’s what DRM is really about: limiting your choices as a consumer. No DRM yet exists, or can exist, that will stop truly motivated pirates — by this, I mean folks who seek to make money from the counterfeited goods; remember, if the content owners had had their way in the early days of the VCR, it would have been dead on arrival.)

So here’s the issue: I’m steadfastly opposed to any such DRM. I agree with Cory; I think it’s wrong and stupid, and it treats your customers like thieves. Do I stand on principle and refuse to buy the CD for this reason, or do I buy it and rip it anyway, since I know the DRM in place is a paper tiger?

SF author and EFF evangelist Cory Doctorow gave this talk at Microsoft discussing why DRM is a bad idea. His main points:

1. That DRM systems don’t work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

Read the piece. Really. Pay particular attention to the first point: there’s a very simple reason why DRM cannot work as advertised, and he makes this point very, very clear.

Punk pioneer Johnny Ramone may not be long for this earth; CNN reports his battle with prostate cancer is going very poorly.

Damn.

“Johnny Ramone is not dying, his doctor says“

The Naked Maja has a fantastic appreciation of Ray Charles. Read it.

How about some lo-fi hip-hop done with a Commodore 64?

INXS is seeking to fill their 7-year-old lead singer opening with a reality show.

Ray Charles died today at his Beverly Hills home. He was 73.

Heathen provides this memento to commemorate his passing. (1mb WAV)

Few saw Houston power-satire duo Lady and the Mant during their brief reign of the Bayou City’s coffee-house-and-pool-hall circuit, but those who did saw something extraordinary, or did until they ran away screaming. At least one is a broken shell of a man, reduced to posting snarky commentary on web sites.

Right.

Anyway, it’s come to our attention that the album is available, should you feel the need.

I mean, we figured former Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan was pretty much always too pickled to bother with a bar fight, but maybe not.

Shane MacGowan, former singer with the Irish folk rockers The Pogues, suffered facial injuries in a beating in a central London pub, a British newspaper reported. The Evening Standard said MacGowan, 46, was attacked by two men in the Joiners Arms pub. A spokesman for St. Thomas Hospital said MacGowan was admitted but left before receiving any treatment. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said two men were questioned, released on bail and ordered to return to a police station later this month. IHT

Having seen the aforelinked documentary “If I Should Fall From Grace” — which, if you’re a Pogues fan, you should see, and which you’ll almost regret seeing — we categorically dismiss the possibility that MacGowan said something to set the other blokes off. Why? Years of drink have left him entirely unintelligable when sober, and somewhere close to Brad-Pitt-in-Snatch-land once in his cup.

In any case: Rodeohead.

No, it’s not about politics. Or global warming. Or economic doom. Or the war in Iraq.

No, it’s about the fact that from this list, which we can assume is reasonably cannonical, we learn that Creed have sold more records than The Police, Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys, or the Who.

Sigh.

Seriously, though, this chart would be more interesting if there were also columns for sales per year of activity and sales per album released, and then adjust both those for marketing dollars spent.

With Xingtone, it’s now possible to make custom ringtones from any digital sound file.

Monty Python’s written a little song for the FCC. God love ’em.

Salon has top-story coverage of The Portrait of Billy Joe, a documentary on Texas singer-songwriter Billy Joe Shaver — described by Willie Nelson as “maybe the best songwriter alive today.” Shaver has labored primarily in obscurity; his records don’t sell particularly well, but his influence is felt across the board, from contemporaries like Nelson and Waylon Jennings (whose 1973 album “Honky Tonk Heroes” is comprised almost entirely of Shaver’s work) to new acts like Kid Rock (who had Shaver open for him in his recent Houston show). Find a way to see this film, and in the meantime do yourself a favor and pick up some of Billy Joe’s work; if you haven’t yet, “you’re just crazy as hell.”

It is, however, a fine piece about David Byrne, courtesy of The Minor Fall, The Major Lift (bonus points if you can identify the source of the title of that site).

A quote:

[T]here as those who insist that public Byrne is the same as private Byrne. “He’s a genuine eccentric,” says Eno. “He’s always been exactly like that, and I’ve seen him remain like that in quite extreme situations. For instance, we were mugged together once in New York. It was quite frightening; we were mugged by 14 people. My enduring memory is of David being dragged off into the bushes, saying ‘Uh-oh!’ That’s absolutely true; it was like a cartoon scene.”