CD sales in the US are down about twenty percent. If you’re thinking “Oh, that’s bad,” Bill Wyman says no, that’s good:

Why is this good news? Because the record industry is built on three pillars of corruption, on which it built an edifice (the manufacture and promotion of physical CDs) that is no longer needed. One of the unappreciated side effects of the digital revolution in the media space is its contribution to a drop in white-collar crime.

In the radio world, the record industry used payola for decades to get radio airplay; with radio’s influence waning and industry earnings dropping, those days seem to be over. In retail, price-fixing was the norm; now the prices are being fixed (lower than what they might otherwise be) for a format (the single) the industry stopped selling to force people to buy full-length CDs, all by a guy (Steve Jobs) who doesn’t even work in the biz!

But it’s not all unicorns and teabiscuits just yet:

The third pillar is relations with artists, whom the labels have screwed on royalty payments, virtually with impunity, since the dawn of the modern industry. I assume this activity continues.

There really isn’t a whole lot of reason to think it doesn’t.

Some months back I parted with my Teac GF-350, a respectable middle-fi shelf system with a turntable and a real live CD recorder. It did a decent, if not show quality, job, and when I mentioned I wasn’t getting a whole lot of use out of it, a friend offered to take it off my hands.

Of course, I still had my trusty Onkyo turntable, and if I had to rip vinyl, I could always connect it through a preamp to the PC’s sound card. Or so I thought:

[I]f I could find the line input of this box’s integrated audio, I would. (Actually, I know where it is, but I’m lacking in AC outlets on that side of the room, and I am loath to go buy a 20-socket power strip.)

And the integrated audio in question, Realtek’s High Definition chipset, while it didn’t sound too bad, had a severe deficiency for anyone wishing to do this sort of thing: you can’t record something while it’s actually playing. I’m an old hand at Audacity, but there wasn’t any way I could persuade this damnable audio section to talk to it.

To complicate matters further, one of Ion’s USB turntables showed up on my doorstep this week (thank you, O generous one), and while Windows duly swapped the sound drivers upon detecting the device, the motherboard — I remember saying something similar to that — refused to feed the recording software.

So after a few moments of unfiltered Anglo-Saxon, I pried open my old Win98SE box, demounted the Sound Blaster Live! card, a pretty decent card for its day but now just this side of antique, and moved it to my current desktop. Horrid squeals emerged from the speakers; Creative, to their credit, had some actual XP drivers for this old card, and there was no further noise. I plugged the Ion back in and procured a test 45: “Dynomite” by Tony Camillo’s Bazuka, one of those proto-disco numbers I am no longer denying I enjoyed. No actual sound from the speakers, but I wasn’t wanting any: I wanted to record the track on Audacity. Success. And the Ion did distinctly better than the Teac; I needed to run only one simple noise-reduction pass, followed by a slight tweak of the bass around 60 Hz, before pronouncing myself pleased with the results.

Moral, if moral there be: Don’t buy integrated audio if you have any interest in playing with sounds. And while the old Live! card is sufficient for now, I’m contemplating buying one of the newer X-Fi cards.

Rolling Stone these days has slightly less hipster cred than Popular Science, but inasmuch as they did send me an issue in the hopes of luring me back onto the subscription rolls (hint: it won’t work), I figured I’d at least read the Singles of the Year piece, which lists a hundred records they think had some sort of impact this past year. And, I decided, if I had heard of more than four or five, there’s something seriously askew with the world.

To my horror, I discovered twelve of them in my iTunes install at work. (Current song count: 4,045.)

I guess it’s time to subscribe to PopSci.

No major record label ever started with as little promise as Warner Bros. Records. According to Stan Cornyn, who was there, this was the initial LP release in 1958:

• For Whom the Bell Tolls (re-creation of movie score)
• Ira Ironstrings: Music for People with $3.98, Plus Tax, If Any
• Warren Barker: The King and I for Orchestra
• Jack Webb: You’re My Girl (recitations)
• Connie Stevens: Concetta
• The Warner Bros. Military Band: Sousa in Stereo
• Irving Taylor: Terribly Sophisticated Songs
• Buddy Cole: Have Organ, Will Swing

They shouldn’t have been around five years later, let alone fifty, with that sort of dreck, although Mr Ironstrings (who turned out to be Alvino Rey) proved to be a steady seller.

By 1960, Warner Bros. had more of a idea of what they were doing, and they lured the Everly Brothers away from Cadence. In 1963, they brought Frank Sinatra and his Reprise label into the fold. By 1970, they were the hippest label in the nation, with a catalog that defied comprehension and the willingness to let you sample it for cheap.

Which brings us to Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records — The First Fifty Years, available in deluxe and deluxer box sets, celebrating the home of Tab Hunter and the White Stripes. And “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” by the immortal Napoleon XIV, one of the fastest-rising (and falling, once the outrage kicked in) singles in history, is present and accounted for.

My thanks to Artie Wayne, who did not record for Warner Bros., for the heads-up.

Wait a minute. Did I say “greatest”? I meant, um, something else.

(Found here.)

Someone, I think maybe Cynthia Heimel, once said that you should never stop listening to the music you grew up with, but that doesn’t mean you keep playing “Crimson and Clover” over and over: you have to listen to bands that still exist.

I have no particular fondness for Korn — I admit, I was amused enough to buy their cover of Cameo’s “Word Up” — but I understand Michele’s premise here:

Conversation I had with a friend while listening to this album:

“You’re 36 years old, why are you listening to this crap?”

“Because it makes me feel like I’m 15.”

“Name one good thing about being 15.”

“No one told me I was too old to listen to anything.”

I concede that I probably shouldn’t have been listening to Jethro Tull when I saved this.

Michele explains the appeal of Neil Diamond:

I love him in the same way I like Abba and Air Supply and Death Cab for Cutie. Sometimes four chords or shouting at the devil is not what the day calls for.

I’m a sucker for nostalgia. And nothing makes me more nostalgic than music.

Similarly motivated, I put together a single-disc Diamond compilation this past summer, and described it thusly:

Neil Diamond’s recording career, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: the Big Bang (on Bang Records, natch), the West Coast Incubation (on Decca/MCA’s less-unhip Uni label), and the OMGWTF Period (on Columbia, mostly). The man had dozens of hits, and a fair compilation wouldn’t attempt to squeeze him down to a single CD, but I never said I was being fair. And give Diamond credit: even some of the latter-day stuff has held up pretty well, and the ones that didn’t, well, they didn’t make it onto this disc.

I must point out here that I am sufficiently removed from Red Sox Nation not to have learned to hate “Sweet Caroline.”

And if you ever stumble across the original 45 of “Two-Bit Manchild” (Uni 55075), flip it over and give a listen to “Broad Old Woman,” subtitled “6 A.M. Insanity,” a non-LP B-side full of false starts, retakes, and “If you think I’m putting my name on this you’re out of your mind.” It’s the perfect antidote to the deadly-serious stuff like “Play Me.”

As seen here in October:

[T]he single, “24 Hour Breakup Session,” is the best rewrite of the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night” since the Doors hacked up “Hello, I Love You.”

Which is not intended as a slam on Local H: it’s an excellent song. When I first noticed this, I began singing “Hello, I Love You” over the “Breakup Session” outro, and pointed out the similarities to Trini. “Doesn’t mean they plagiarized it,” I said; “hell, this stuff is forty years old now.”

Shortly thereafter, there arrived in my mailbox an MP3 of Local H performing “Hello, I Love You” live. Okay, so it’s not like they never heard this chord progression before.

This has become almost a parlor game for us, finding songs that sound a lot like other songs. I think the first one we hit upon was “Falling Down,” by Atreyu, which has a distinct “Radar Love” rhythm to it. (Her ear for bass lines is way better than mine.) I explained to her how George Harrison got sued for plagiarism, and I noted that there are lots of examples of bits of songs that seem to have originated elsewhere: Melissa Manchester’s “You Should Hear How She Talks About You” was echoed in Madonna’s “Material Girl,” and it’s impossible for me to hear “C’est La Vie” by Shania Twain without hearing Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”

Still, we hadn’t come across anything quite this blatant:

We’d previously checked “Viva La Vida” against Creaky Boards’ “The Songs I Didn’t Write” and had noticed some similarities. (Here’s the Creaky Boards position, since retracted.) Joe Satriani, however, is actually suing Coldplay.

I found the video at Patterico’s, along with this astute comment: “This isn’t a surprise. As lefty enviromentalists, Coldplay is into recycling.”

Okay, who picks the tunes?

When I was studying for my GCSEs, I remember hearing someone on the local radio station discussing the merits of listening to music during revision sessions. I needed no further reason to whack up the volume on OK Computer and The Fat Of The Land (have you guessed the year yet?), and since then I’ve always played music while I worked.

It’s fine when you get to choose the tunes yourself, but what if you’re one of many in a workspace? The factory I worked at in school holidays would never budge from the local dance music station, and subsequent offices have kept strictly to one channel, usually the one with five ever-repeating tunes.

We maintain a music server at 42nd and Treadmill, with a surprisingly-wide variety of stuff, though people who have access to it are generally expected to keep it to themselves, dammit. I occasionally raid it for single tracks, often at Trini’s suggestion, but in general, what plays in my office is my iTunes install, currently closing in on 4000 songs, mostly ripped from my own Stacks O’ Wax.

Then again, I spent 99 cents yesterday for Leo Kottke’s “Up Tempo,” from his eponymous 1976 album, mostly because I hadn’t heard it in a long time and I figured it would be a while before I got around to ripping that LP. At 1:41, that’s almost one cent per second, so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t download, say, Quadrophenia.

Michele remembers the Archies, and not on vinyl, either:

It was cardboard and it came on a cereal box. You had to punch it out of the back of the box and I remember being so surprised that you could actually play this thing like a real record. It was all the rage back then (late 60s, early 70s) and all the cool bands were doing it: The Banana Splits, the Monkees, The Jackson 5 and even (sigh) Bobby Sherman.

No one would let me play it on their stereo. Not my parents, not my cousins, not even the next door neighbor. No one would dare let their precious needle touch a piece of cardboard pretending to be a record. I suspect now that it wasn’t so much the cardboard as it was the Archies themselves.

I broke down and played it on my Fisher Price record player. I thought of this as a toy more or less, one which played nothing but novelty records and damn it, the Archies were not novelty. They were real.

If only she could have been there the first time “Sugar, Sugar” was sung live, in person, in public, by the original artists.

In, um, 2002.

Syd Nathan had already failed at a couple of businesses when he came up with the idea of a record company targeting the “hillbilly” market. In 1943 he borrowed twenty-five grand from family and set up King Records, taking over an old Brewster Avenue icehouse in Cincinnati’s Evanston district, and signed Moon Mullican and Louis Marshall “Grandpa” Jones. (The nickname notwithstanding, Jones was only thirty.) Knowing that independent labels often ran into major problems, Nathan resolved to be as self-sufficient as possible: he set up his own pressing plant and did his own distribution.

The country stuff sold well enough, and after World War II ended Nathan saw a new trend coming, which wasn’t yet called “rhythm and blues.” To capitalize on it, Nathan hired musician Henry Glover away from Lucky Millinder’s band and put him in charge of A&R for what would at first be called Queen Records, but which eventually became the dominant sound on King — and on Federal Records, started in 1950 with Ralph Bass at the helm.

And then there was this:

Legend has it that King Records owner Syd Nathan, hearing [James] Brown and his Famous Flames working up “Please, Please, Please” back in 1956, demanded that the tape recorder be stopped, then informed producer Ralph Bass that the song was a bunch of crap. Only he didn’t say bunch. Or crap.

Bass finished up the record anyway; Nathan reportedly fired him for insubordination. Brown and his managers eventually persuaded Nathan to issue the track, though it came out on the subsidiary Federal label (as #12258) rather than on King. “Please, Please, Please” eventually moved about a million copies and even hovered just under the bottom of the pop chart; Bass got an apology from Nathan and his job back, though three years later he left King to work for the Chess brothers in Chicago.

Syd Nathan died in 1968, and the company was sold to the country label Starday; it’s changed hands several times since. The old Brewster Avenue headquarters, meanwhile, fell into typical urban desuetude.

Until this week, anyway:

For quite some time, there has been a frustrating effort on the part of Cincinnati’s music lovers to install a plaque on the King building, without much interest from civic leaders. However, on Sunday, November 23, a large group of musicians, volunteers, educators, reporters, and prominent Cincinnati citizens converged in front of the old icehouse to join Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum president Terry Stewart in unveiling a plaque designated to honor King Records.

As Little Willie John (on King 5142) once said, “Let’s rock while the rockin’s good.”

So how about that previously-unreleased Beatles track? Bill Wyman reports that there are ulterior motives, and it’s obvious whose motives they are:

What the potential release of the song at this point is about, however, is yet another lingering example of McCartney’s bruised ego about having his aesthetic reputation overshadowed by the work of “the experimental one,” John. “Carnival of Light” was put together a year and a half before Lennon’s “Revolution 9,” the group’s sole contemporary excursion, leaving aside the Christmas releases, into something approaching avant-garde song construction.

McCartney thought he led the group into adventuresome musical territory, and wasn’t above noting that Lennon had been living “out in the suburbs by the golf course with Cynthia” (Lennon’s first wife) while he, McCartney, was grooving with the real avant-gardists of the time.

And indeed, Macca told the BBC that he is an ardent fan of experimental music, as you’d expect from anyone who did a cover of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and that “Carnival of Light” was inspired by the work of avant-garde composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Not having heard “Carnival,” I don’t know whether McCartney actually learned something from those guys or is merely dropping names, but what I’m expecting is something along the lines of “Revolution 6¾.”

I think it’s safe to say that Craig Burrell is not a fan of Iannis Xenakis:

The Wikipedia page for Iannis Xenakis calls him “an important and influential composer of the twentieth century”. To the extent that this claim is true, it serves as an indictment of twentieth-century music. If you thought the Moog machine was sufficient reason to hold electronic music in contempt, Xenakis is going to introduce you to a whole new world of pain.

It gets better, or worse:

Parts of it sound like garbage trucks being dropped through plate-glass ceilings. Certain episodes made me want to phone a fax machine in order to hear something more beautiful. The “compositions” bear pretentious titles like Diamorphoses, Concrete Ph, and S.709. This nonsense is sufficient proof that being “important and influential” is a very equivocal honour.

J. S. Bach had a perfectly nice S. 709 — Chorale-Prelude “Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend” — but we won’t go there.

Certainly Xenakis’ electronic compositions can be something other than pleasantly sonorous, but perhaps the weirdest of the lot are the pieces he worked up with the UPIC device, which basically takes a paper drawing and derives sounds from it. Mr Burrell includes a video of Mycenae alpha (1978), which I concede is a bit unsettling. However, Xenakis has written orchestral, vocal and piano works, in addition to the electronic stuff for which he’s best known; I can’t claim a great deal of familiarity with his catalogue, but I will admit to a certain fondness for Mists for solo piano (1981), which is aptly described by the chap who uploaded the video as “chaos splattered across a fairly rigid framework, interspersed with little flurries of aggravation.” It’s easier for me to handle than, say, the twelve-tone ditties of Schönberg and friends.

And yes, I know: the last post I did on things musical (yesterday) included references, albeit indirect, to Waylon Jennings and Megadeth. I am nothing if not inconsistent in my tastes.

Dan Snierson wonders about this:

A University of Maryland study suggests that listening to your favorite “joyful” music can be beneficial to your cardiovascular system by promoting good blood flow, while “anxious” music can cause constriction of one’s arteries. Most participants in this study (and granted, there were only 10 test subjects), selected country music as their “joyful” music, while heavy metal caused anxious feelings.

As one who enjoys his fair share of the devil’s music, I was immediately perplexed. First of all, I love nothing more than to unwind with a glass of white wine and a copy of Back in Black. And most times I listen to country music, I find myself getting tense like a cat that you pick up but it doesn’t want to get picked up and then it starts squirming and scratching until you let go of it. But was I gravely mistaken? Every time that I rocked some Killswitch Engage, was I actually rocking myself to death?

I keep two albums on the work box specifically for their cathartic effect: Sir Adrian Boult’s 1967 take on Gustav Holst’s The Planets, and Twelve Angry Months by Local H. Both start out fiercely, run for about 45 minutes, and wind up downright placid. Perfect for when my fits rise to the level of Hissier Than Thou.

And really, if all this were true, shouldn’t Dave Mustaine have died a million deaths by now?

“I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” she had said. “I never committed any crime.”

South African singer Miriam Makeba died following a performance in Italy last night. She was 76 and had been in failing health for some time.

In the late 1950s, Makeba, already a star in Africa, arrived in London, where she met up with Harry Belafonte, who gave her career a boost in the US. In 1960, she attempted to return to Johannesburg for the funeral of her mother, and was told that her passport had been revoked; after she testified before the United Nations about the nature of apartheid, her citizenship was summarily canceled as well. It was 1990 before she returned to South Africa, at the request of Nelson Mandela.

Few of her recordings gained traction in the States: she did an early version of Solomon Linda’s “Mbube,” which eventually mutated into “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and she scored a pop hit with the bouncy trifle “Pata Pata” in 1967. I remember a particularly heartfelt cover of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” circa 1969. And she went back to her Xhosa roots (on her father’s side) with the international hit “The Click Song.” In 2005 she went on her farewell tour; this weekend’s performance was a benefit for Italian writer Roberto Saviano, who has chronicled organized crime in his native Naples and has been threatened for so doing. Activist to the last, she was.

Rock Band has landed the Beatles, kinda sorta:

A Beatles-branded interactive music game along the lines of Rock Band and Guitar Hero will give gamers and music lovers a chance to play songs from every stage of the Beatles’ storied career, from the sweet simplicity of “Please, Please Me” to more sophisticated fare like the songs on Abbey Road.

Unlike previous editions of Rock Band, this one will exist as a “Beatles game” rather than as a branded version of Rock Band. The basic gameplay will be familiar to those who have played other versions of Rock Band, said Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos, but the Beatles’ version represents “a unique opportunity for us to forge into new creative terrain in the music game genre and do things that have never been done.”

The game is due out in fall ‘09, and Wired is polling readers for the Beatles tracks they’d like to be incorporated into the game. (I voted for “Day Tripper,” if you must know.)

Said I, many moons ago:

I don’t think I play any pop album of the last 20 years all the way through anymore, with the possible exception of Jagged Little Pill.

And really, there aren’t that many albums that demand you play them all the way through, which is a good reason for Michele to call for titles:

Perfect end-to-end means not skipping any songs. It means every song fits snugly with the song before it and the song after it and it all just flows like some magical musical journey.

And truth be told, I tend to skip “Ironic,” which would seem to eliminate Alanis’ magnum opus from this particular Pantheon. (”The Lemon Song” puts Led Zeppelin II out of the running.)

More or less obvious choices: Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon, Pet Sounds, Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours.

Slightly-muddled choice: Benefit, the third Jethro Tull album, which flows a little better in its UK release; but the US version contains the minor single “Teacher,” which I’d hate to be without. (The CD version reproduces the British LP plus four bonus tracks, “Teacher” among them.)

Another slightly-muddled choice: T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, which is so goofy you almost have to listen to it twice just to satisfy yourself that yes, you really did hear that.

A choice which surprises even me: Twelve Angry Months by Local H, the anti-Pet Sounds, a chronicle of the end of a relationship, thirty pissed-off days at a time. I don’t know whether to commiserate with the guy or slap him upside the face and tell him to snap out of it already, which tells me that he’s gotten the emotional aspects down cold. And the single, “24 Hour Breakup Session,” is the best rewrite of the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night” since the Doors hacked up “Hello, I Love You.”

Lynn links to this list of the “25 Cheesiest Hits of the 1970s,” though she is not quite so inclined toward mockery:

We’re supposed to think these songs are so bad they’re laughable but frankly, a big reason I stopped listening to pop music and moved on to something else was that they stopped writing songs like these. So, I guess it was a good thing they did stop writing stuff like that but I still remember these fondly and I refuse to laugh at them or be embarrassed by them. Well … some of them.

Which means, of course, it’s time for Your Humble Narrator to gauge le fromage for himself. Under the general heading of A Lot Better Than This Guy Says:

24. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (B. J. Thomas)
20. “Macho Man” (Village People)
19. “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” (Donna Fargo)
18. “Baby I’m-a Want You” (Bread)
17. “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” (Lobo)
15. “Sweet City Woman” (The Stampeders)
7. “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” (The 4 Seasons)
2. “Escape” (The Piña Colada Song)” (Rupert Holmes)

Much of the irritation factor, I submit, is due to massive overpromotion; now that those songs are settling into their dotage, they can be appreciated for what they are.

Although these songs, I contend, do contain more than slight traces of fermented curd:

25. “Don’t Cry Out Loud” (Melissa Manchester)
23. “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” (John Denver)
22. “You Light Up My Life” (Debby Boone)
21. “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight” (England Dan and John Ford Coley)
16. Tie: “Squeeze Box” (The Who) and “My Ding-A-Ling” (Chuck Berry)
14. “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” (Wayne Newton)
13. “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” (Mac Davis)
12. “Have You Never Been Mellow” (Olivia Newton-John)
11. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” (Tony Orlando and Dawn)
10. “After the Lovin’” (Engelbert Humperdinck)
9. “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” (The New Seekers)
8. “Brand New Key” (Melanie)
6. “Your Mama Don’t Dance” (Loggins and Messina)
5. “The Candy Man” (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
4. “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” (Rod Stewart)
3. “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” (Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond)

It should be noted that almost all of the performers in question appeared on better records than those, even Debby Boone, who cut a non-hit but not-all-that-bad cover of “Oh No Not My Baby,” the Maxine Brown classic. What’s more, she had the temerity to redo an Abba tune for the B-side of “You Light Up My Life,” which scores for sheer guts.

Still, there’s one song left, reeking of Venezuelan beaver cheese:

1. “(You’re) Having My Baby” (Paul Anka with Odia Coates)

I defy anyone to defend that bit of ruminant vomit.

Geoff Brown admits in The Times that he doesn’t like Tchaikovsky, sort of:

No, that’s too blunt. How could anyone brush into the dustbin one of the world’s greatest writers of melody, a superb orchestrator, a piercing musical dramatist, sometimes an adventurous experimenter with form, and the most inspired and congenial of all composers for the ballet? I can’t. I won’t. Yet the fact remains that of all the cornerstone figures in classical music, excepting the prolix Wagner, Tchaikovsky remains the one most capable of making me feel unwell.

Case in point: Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74, Pathétique:

It’s that self-dramatising, neurotic and morbid aspect of Tchaikovsky that I find hard to take: the side that lends itself to orchestral melodrama, big yanks at the heartstrings and volcanic moans, repetitive cymbal clashes at climaxes: the side that encouraged Ken Russell to direct that most vulgar biographical film, The Music Lovers. This is music that preens itself, that lives on its nerves and expects the listener to do the same. My stiff upper lip can’t take it.

Conductor Vladimir Jurowski, in charge of a ten-concert Tchaikovsky series, blames the Americans:

Jurowski stoutly defends the Pathétique … and places any blame for overheated performances with the composer’s interpreters rather than Tchaikovsky himself, or the type of instruments being played. “The tradition of overexuberant and sentimental Tchaikovsky playing comes from the US, primarily from Leopold Stokowski, who was the first to record a complete Tchaikovsky symphony, the Fourth, in 1928. That performance set a benchmark.”

Stokowski was indeed prone to tinker with composers’ intentions, but it wasn’t always to inject bombast: his take on Romeo and Juliet, for instance, ends not with a bang, but a whisper.

And truth be told, an occasional “overheated” performance isn’t going to get me hot under the collar.

Rare is the music video that follows the words to the song.

Even rarer, though, is the song that is resung to follow the music video. Dustfilms (no relation) has produced two such, and here’s one of them:

Here’s another one. This might even replace misheard lyrics.

The Four Tops went forty-three years without a personnel change, starting way back in 1954. Lawrence Payton died in 1997; Renaldo Benson (friends called him “Obie”) made it to 2005.

And now Levi Stubbs, the man who fronted the Tops, one of the most soulful singers ever at Motown or anywhere else, is gone: weakened by cancer and a stroke, which drove him to retirement in 2000, he died today in Detroit at seventy-two.

There are so many great records that I can’t even begin to tell the story here: there’s “Bernadette,” the closest Motown ever got to “Like a Rolling Stone”; that mighty grrrunt that leads off the instrumental break to “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes,” the Supremes’ first Top 40 single; the only really good cover of the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee”; the fact that you will sing along with “I Can’t Help Myself,” especially the “sugar pie, honey bunch” bit.

But for me, Levi Stubbs was never better than he was on “Ask the Lonely,” the Tops’ third single for Motown, which stalled at #24 on the charts. If, lucky you, you’ve never known heartbreak, here’s your roadmap to the dark heart of the soul, in just under three minutes.

When the bar bet calls for you to sing a classic TV theme, this is the one you want: the tune is simple, and you already know the words.

I always figured the late Neal Hefti — he died Saturday at his home in Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley — was somewhat bemused by its success; it’s not exactly the sort of thing he did with Woody Herman’s First Herd, and it in no way resembles the charts he did for Count Basie. But by the middle 1960s, Hefti, then in his early forties, was already getting TV and movie work, and he probably figured it was easier than heading up a big band of his own, which he’d also done. And he wasn’t too proud to play trumpet on his own record, given its sheer difficulty.

Yes, I said “difficulty”:

It was, Hefti later said, the hardest piece of music he ever wrote.

“I tore up a lot of paper,” he told Jon Burlingame, author of TV’s Biggest Hits, a 1996 book on television themes. “It did not come easy to me … I just sweated over that thing, more so than any other single piece of music I ever wrote. I was never satisfied with it.”

It got him three Grammy nominations, and one win (”Best Instrumental Theme,” 1967). And it is an instrumental: there are no actual voices on Hefti’s RCA Victor recording of the theme, or on the theme as used on the television series. Adam West says so, and he should know, right?

Rich Appel tosses this out in the current Hz So Good newsletter:

July ‘65 was when the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — a song about a man doing manly things, a song whose appeal was decidedly male — was #1, and went on to be, arguably, radio’s #1 song for that entire year.

My theory? That was the last time testosterone tipped the scales at contemporary radio. The following year, the ultra-macho “Ballad of the Green Berets” racked up impressive 45 sales, but radio’s biggest hits were decidedly for the girls: the Association’s “Cherish,” Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” the Righteous Brothers’ “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration.” The next seven years brought us #1s-for-the-year by Lulu, the Beatles (”Hey Jude”), the 5th Dimension, Simon & Garfunkel, 3 Dog Night, Roberta Flack and Tony Orlando & Dawn. See what I mean?

Was “Satisfaction” the last 45 lots of teen boys could proudly buy before the album age began and 45s became uncool?

Gawd, I hope not, if only because it was the first 45 I ever bought, and I wasn’t even a teen yet. (I turned twelve that year.)

But a larger question now gnaws at me: while I don’t doubt that boys’ and girls’ tastes in Top 40 didn’t exactly coincide in those days, does it make any difference? I remember taking the school bus fifteen or twenty miles each way, and we’d kill time with our own no-budget Motown Revue. (I did a pretty mean Diana Ross back then.)

And the last time I bought a current hit on 45 was … 1987. Same year I bought my first CD player, now that I think about it.

When EMI got around to releasing the Beatles LP catalog on CD, they stuck pretty close to the “official” UK releases: only Magical Mystery Tour, originally an EP in England, was released with the American track listing, though the bogus-stereo tracks (except for the last half of “I Am the Walrus”) were replaced with the proper stereo mixes.

Some listeners Stateside noticed that the early albums were nothing like what they’d grown up with, which suggested to Capitol that there might be a market for a CD release of the US albums, which were wildly different from the UK versions, and not just in track listings: rather a lot of the songs received heavy post-production work at Capitol, which often included the creation of bogus stereo (so-called “duophonic”) out of mono masters and/or the application of heavy echo.

Beatles expert Bruce Spizer has noted:

While some critics give the impression that all of the four Capitol stereo albums are full of duophonic echo-drenched mixes, this is clearly not the case. Capitol only made duophonic mixes for the seven songs that had no stereo masters at the time the albums were compiled. Most of these songs, especially “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You” and “I’ll Get You,” are effective simulated stereo mixes. However, the duophonic mixes for “I Feel Fine” and “She’s A Woman” are truly horrendous.

The stereo versions of those last two eventually showed up on EMI’s Past Masters Volume One CD, one of two discs collecting all the non-LP sides. They’re clean and dry, especially “She’s a Woman,” which is almost devoid of reverb.

And after hearing that flat recording in the car a couple of times, I came up with the rather dumb idea of trying to restore that reverb without losing the stereo image, not so much because I loved the version on Beatles ‘65 — although I did — but because I had an exaggerated sense of my own capabilities in this realm. The first few attempts were horrid: the maracas wound up smeared and McCartney’s Little Richard-esque vocal got all phasey. Eventually I hit on the idea of applying some simulated plate reverb to the left channel (guitar lick) only, with damping substantially reduced from the software default. I’m still not entirely happy with it, and I can’t make a perfect A/B comparison because my copy of Beatles ‘65 is mono, but I suppose I’ll get over it. (About half a minute can be had here for now.)

If you happened to notice that the University of Central Oklahoma was opening an Academy of Contemporary Music, you might be inclined to think that they’re ripping off the original ACM in Britain.

And you would be, as I was, mistaken:

ACM today announced the creation of ACM@UCO in partnership with The University of Central Oklahoma.

ACM@UCO is scheduled to open its doors to its first wave of aspiring musicians, producers and industry professionals in September 2009. The school is planned to open in The Oklahoma Hardware building, on Flaming Lips Alley in the heart of Oklahoma City’s vibrant Bricktown area. ACM@UCO will include special features integral to ACM’s distinctive style of education and success. The curriculum is focused on structuring courses that work hand-in-hand with fulfilling the needs of the music industry, ensuring that students are fully equipped to secure jobs in the sector.

ACM Founder and Director Phil Brookes said, “We are delighted to be working with UCO, to bring ACM’s unique brand of music industry education to America. The people involved with UCO are some of the most creative and forward thinking individuals we have had the pleasure of meeting. Everyone at ACM is looking forward to a great partnership and future with UCO, training tomorrow’s musicians, producers and music business leaders.”

Speaking of the Lips, manager Scott Booker will be the executive director of the new Academy.

UCO’s Jazz Lab will of course be continuing.

(Found here.)

Complain about the conductor once too often, you’re off the orchestra beat:

For years the classical music critic at The Plain Dealer of Cleveland has taken shots at the conductor of his hometown orchestra, saying he lacks musical ideas and brings little life to many of the works he conducts. Supporters of the orchestra, one of the world’s best, and even some players have long complained about his opinions regarding the maestro, Franz Welser-Möst.

Now some people fear those opinions have been heard. The critic, Donald Rosenberg, has been removed from the symphony beat. A brief announcement in Sunday’s [9/21] Plain Dealer said that he had been reassigned to be an “arts and entertainment reporter.” Zachary Lewis, a former intern who worked with Mr. Rosenberg and recently joined the paper as an arts writer, was named to succeed him.

A sampling of the critic’s complaints:

[R]eferring to a “repressed” performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7, Mr. Rosenberg wrote, “Welser-Möst never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, neutralizing most of Mahler’s dramatic and poetic intentions.” Of a performance of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra in 2005, he wrote, “The performance wasn’t a matter of disagreeing with a conductor’s ideas but wondering if he had any view of the piece at all.”

This is fairly harsh stuff, I think, and while I haven’t gone back through the Plain Dealer archives, I suspect we’d have heard about it had the Plain Dealer’s man at Severance Hall made so many complaints about Welser-Möst’s immediate predecessor, Christoph von Dohnányi.

Baltimore Sun critic Tim Smith blames orchestra boosters:

I imagine they dismiss as irrelevant the fact that the orchestra, while on tour, has been known to generate reviews by other critics expressing reservations about Welser-Möst. Of course, there’s nothing that can be done about out-of-town naysayers, but there’s always good old-fashioned lobbying that can be tried at home. That, it seems, has now been successful. The Plain Dealer has clearly caved into pressure from a faction representing the orchestra and the man on its podium. By silencing Don, those myopic folks must think they’ve achieved a great victory. They haven’t. They’ve made a venerable newspaper look cheap and act cowardly. They’ve made a sterling orchestra look a little less so.

And apparently there were naysayers even before Welser-Möst accepted the position in Cleveland:

[T]he London press loathed him.

It was the critics, not the orchestra, that wrecked his career at the time in the British capital; he kept talking about this nightmare era in interviews for years. It is not entirely clear how it happened, but seems to go back to his first-ever press conference for the LPO, which most of the critics left with the impression that FWM was arrogant, abrupt, inexperienced and so forth. All of which may have mean that he was just bloody nervous. But what’s certain is that the resident vipers developed a serious grudge which only got worse. The difference was, they didn’t lose their jobs — whereas eventually the unfortunate youth, after enduring five and a half years of printed hell, packed his bags earlier than intended.

Then again, there are a dozen newspapers in London covering the Philharmonic; only the Plain Dealer covers the Cleveland.

And how often do I get a chance to say that?

Anyway, Snot, the band — and isn’t it amazing that Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for “snot”? — will be here on the 7th of November along with 10 Years, an act I have heard of, opening for Mudvayne, another act I have heard of. (Mudvayne’s new album The New Game will be shipping shortly; I heard the first single, “Do What You Do,” at their MySpace page, and it’s not bad, if your taste runs to nonferrous metal.)

It’s an album on a microSD card:

SanDisk has teamed up with EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group to bring DRM-free MP3 music preloaded on microSD cards. These cards, dubbed “slotMusic,” will be available at Best Buy and Walgreens, where they’ll be sold alongside CDs in a designated section.

SlotMusic cards can be inserted into any microSD-enabled mobile phone or MP3 player (or into your camera, if you’re feeling crazy). The cards will be bundled with a USB sleeve that is compatible with all Windows, Linux, and Mac computers; no downloads are required.

Hmmm. I have a microSD card in my phone, and it contains some audio files. Maybe I should try this in my camera.

The cards will hold 1GB of content, enough room for songs, liner notes, album art, videos, and other creative elements of the artist’s choice. The rewritable cards will have enough space left over for consumers to add their own content as well. And since the music will not be locked to the card, users can drag and drop songs into whatever media player they use.

One disadvantage I can see: they’re going to have to package these things in something big enough to be noticeable if someone tries to sneak one out of the door. (Jeebus, it’s Longbox II: Electric Boogaloo!) Pricing has not been announced, and I have yet to see a policy on “Hello, Warner Brothers? I just bought this [name of artist] album on a microSD card and I accidentally deleted the first three tracks.”

Legendary Motown producer/songwriter Norman Whitfield, who presided over some of the greatest hits from Hitsville, USA, died Tuesday in Los Angeles from complications of diabetes. He was 67 (some sources say 65).

Whitfield was born in Harlem; his family moved to Detroit in the early 1960s, and young Norman began hanging around Motown. Berry Gordy put him to work in the quality-control department, and eventually he started writing. (”He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’,” a 1964 hit for the Velvelettes, a bigger one in the 80s for Bananarama, was written by Whitfield, Eddie Holland and Mickey Stevenson.) Whitfield also got some feel for production, and when “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” another Whitfield-Holland collaboration, outsold “Get Ready,” the previous Temptations hit, Whitfield became the Temptations’ producer. (When you beat out Smokey Robinson, you’ve accomplished something.)

Whitfield’s production was radically different from Smokey’s: more dance beats, more individual vocal parts, less in the way of old-fashioned harmony. Lead singer David Ruffin found himself singing above his range, which made him both more gravelly and more distinctive. Whitfield’s new songwriting partner was Barrett Strong, who’d cut one of the very first Motown hits: “Money (That’s What I Want)” way back in 1960. After Ruffin dropped out for a solo career, Whitfield moved the Tempts, now fronted by Dennis Edwards, into a psychedelic sort of funk that produced even bigger hits.

Perhaps his finest moment, though, was “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which was recorded by Smokey’s Miracles, the Isley Brothers and Marvin Gaye without ever getting approved for release. Finally a version by Gladys Knight and the Pips passed muster, and sold well as a single; the Marvin Gaye version was dropped onto an album (In the Groove), where DJs discovered it and started riding it. Motown was forced to put out a single, and as Tamla 54176, Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” became Motown’s biggest-selling single of the entire decade.

By 1973, Whitfield had split from Motown; Warner Bros. had given him his own label. It was not successful, though his 1976 production of “Car Wash” by Rose Royce, issued on MCA, was a smash. For most of the next two decades, he lived primarily off his songwriting royalties; failure to report some of them to the Feds got him six months of house arrest and a $25,000 fine in 2005. His health was already failing, so he drew no jail time.

The record I was listening to while writing this was “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” Whitfield’s last big hit for the Temptations, a twelve-minute wash of strings and bass and wah-wah guitar and agonized vocals and one chord — B-flat minor — cut down to a mere seven minutes for the 45. I find more in this record every time I play it.

The “most inappropriate,” anyway, says Craig Burrell:

This is a 2002 release (I think) on the French Opus 111 label.

In terms of sheer impropriety, though, it comes second, maybe third, to this early-1970s number:

(With thanks to WestminsterGold.com.)