I had a nice chat recently with Mark Berry, publicist for classical music’s Naxos label. Naxos, for those unfamiliar, is a label with one hell of a back story.
If you measure success as confusing people, provoking discussions, evoking strong feelings, keeping listeners off balance, creating opposing camps, having the same record hated and loved by equal minorities, then Circuital by My Morning Jacket is already a big hit.
The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia? Now in its second revised and updated printing? Does any one person, even a momentous artist who now seems determined to die on the stage (to steal a quote from the great Midnight Cowboy) really need or deserve their own encyclopedia?
The Grammy Awards are that one Sunday night every January, when for a few brief hours, I try to imagine what people on other continents (in not other planets) think of America when they watch this silly, frivolous, super glam display of Las Vegasness come to the Staples Center. How incredibly ridiculous we must look to the rest of the world. During the telecast, I’m liable to claim I’m from Canada. By the end, I want to take a shower and scrub off the sleaze. The whole thing is so bad, so not about music, that I have to change channels throughout the telecast if only to cleanse my palette. Last night at one point, I flipped over to the hi def Palladia network and there was a Britney video of her tune, “Womanizer,” which was nominated for a Grammy but lost to Lady Gaga. Owing to the fact that much of the video takes place in a sauna, with Brit writhing around nude (creatively covering her nasty bits), the contrast between Spears skin and the absolute nonsense that was goin’ on in L.A. made Little Miss Crazy look like the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
Going to see Les Paul during his final years, playing every Monday night at the Iridium club just north of Times Square in NYC was always a good time, not only for the musicand to be truthful, by then Les’ arthritis had robbed him of his best chopsbut also for his playful, wellmeaning, semilecherous sense of humor.
I often joke that when I expire and migrate to the lower rings of hell, I'll find nothing else in my eternity than white blues bands playing "Mustang Sally" over and over and over again. But now I may have found another possibility for the soundtrack to my infernal reward.
You either buy it or you don’t. That’s the way I felt coming out of the Bell House last week in Brooklyn after watching Norah Jones, guitarist Jim Campilongo, bassist Lee Alexander, drummer Dan Reiser and guitarist/singer Richard Julieni.e. The Little Willies do their thing.