http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/review-the-humans-by-matt-haig-8622205.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/review-strange-bodies-by-marcel-theroux-faber–faber-1499-8662423.html

The tame peacock and peahen couple apparently walked up a dry culvert from 3 miles away to live behind my horse’s stall where he is boarded. It’s odd, the peafowl ate their food supplements and water under tall trees next to the pipestall and trolled for insects for at least a year and a half at the horse ranch before the fatal coyote attack. What changed? I can’t imagine that the widowed peahen who then disappeared survived thereafter.

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R.I.P. PEACOCK(S)

For some reason—most likely the much-reported news of his participation in the new Queens of the Stone Age album—I’ve lately found myself in a Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player state of mind. It turns out that E.J.’s sixth LP holds up well 40 years after release, suggesting that its original 1973 grade in the Village Voice Consumer Guide (C+) may have been unduly harsh.

But I think I know why the Guide guy disliked it so much, which is generally why I like it so much. Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player represents a major closet-jump for Elton: his first public embrace of pure pop, an affection that would blossom fully on his next set, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, issued later the same year. Though original, the music on his previous albums placed him comfortably within the two dominant musician trends of the early Seventies (both now revered traditions): the inward-bound singer-songwriter and the make-mine-rustic Band acolyte. 

Granted, a newfound fascination with killer hooks and catchy, early-Sixties turnarounds was in the air in 1973.That year of American Graffiti was also the year of Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Make’r,” Ringo’s “You’re Sixteen,”  the Carpenters’ Now & Then covers LP, Roy Wood’s faux-retro UK hits, and the debut of the New York Dolls. It was also the year of Dark Side of the Moon, Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play and Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VII. But there Elton chose not to go.

Don’t Shoot Me keeps a toe or two in the earlier styles.  “Have Mercy on the Criminal” and “High Flying Bird” retain a Band tint, and “Daniel,” its impact now blunted by decades of airplay, is above-average singer-writer elegiac.  Elsewhere, “Elderberry Wine” presages the toughness that would later power “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” and “Midnight Creeper” essays undistinguished funk while pushing Bernie Taupin’s often toss-off lyrics into the red on the cringe-meter (“Walk a mile in my tennis shoes…”). “Blues for Baby,” despite the riff-lift from Love’s “Alone Again Or,” is surely one of Elton’s most sublime compositions.

But it’s the exuberance of three densely packed, over-the-top pop cuts that ignites the album. “Teacher I Need You” kicks off with a brief piano roll, then segues into a shuffle that never lets up—except to admit new melodic blasts (the bridge, the whoa-oh-whoa-oh-oh’s that cap the choruses), each one further charging the track’s momentum. Elton’s vocal sells the hell out of the song, almost enough to make one forget that its theme makes it a key link between the Fifties standard “Teach Me Tonight” and the hot-for-teacher tropes of a half dozen hair-metal videos.

The stylized vocal and the piano on the verses of “Teenage Idol” recall another of the era’s superstars – Leon Russell—but they work, principally as excuses for Elton to get to the infectious chorus. And the chorus is the star of the show, with bandmates Nigel Olsen, Dee Murray and Davey Johnstone perfectly nailing the quavering-vocal backups that helped make a teenage idol of the song’s subject, T. Rex.

Elton’s first U.S. chart-topper, “Crocodile Rock” was his most unapologetic retro move to date, a record whose insistent melody (partly swiped from Pat Boone’s 1962 hit “Speedy Gonzales”) annoyed many. Was this the same guy who, barely two albums earlier, swooned over creaking porches and the horse-drawn life in “Country Comfort”? It was indeed, and his sweet tooth for hard-grabbing hooks and unshakeable bridges, first indulged publicly on this trio of tunes, would never fully abate. Next up was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, awash in riffs and harmony, and such tasty disposables as “Step Into Christmas,” “Island Girl” and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” And where’s the guilt in such obvious pleasures?

My quickie listen to partial tracks tells me this is good rock & roll, but I can hear his vocal problems; he’s not fully recovered. Etta has none; she can sing within a hair’s breadth of his vocal lines. The best backup you can get.

You be the judge; tune into CBS on June 18, 11:35 pm Eastern Standard Time, 10:35 Central Time.

Unrelated stroke of genius: I wonder what Etta Britt and Darlene Love singing together would sound like? I’m just sayin’…

Click to read the latest column from Jeffrey Morgan:
JEFFREY MORGAN’S MEDIA BLACKOUT #372

We felt decidedly unworthy when writer Karl Dallas (above right with RBP’s chief archivist Mark Pringle) paid a visit to our Hammersmith lair yesterday and regaled us with tall tales of folk clubs, jazz renegades and wife-swapping in ’50s and ’60s London.

Karl was revisiting his Melody Maker writings in our archive, having ventured down to London from his adopted hometown of Bradford to be interviewed for a doc about Mike Oldfield’s Virgin-launching Tubular Bells (which he famously slated in the pages of the aforementioned Maker…)

See you again soon, Karl!

Our heartfelt gratitude to Lucy O’Brien – former Catholic Girl and She-Bopper extraordinaire (left) – and Miki Berenyi, former Lush goddess-guitarist (sporting a Clem Burke cut specially for the night) – who joined us at last night’s RBP Album Club to talk about Blondie’s breakthrough pop-punk meisterwerk Parallel Lines.

Much fun was had by all as Lucy ‘n’ Miki talked us through the background to the Mike-Chapman-produced album, then played and discussed most of its tracks from “Hanging on the Telephone” to “Heart of Glass”.

Thursday July 11th brings “the Two Nicks” – Messrs. Hornby and Coleman – to Notting Hill’s very groovy Idler Academy to revisit I Don’t Want to Go Home, the 1976 debut by Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes. Buy tickets here…

Yes, it’s true.  I have had a longstanding love affair with… the New Music Seminar. As one in love, I can see its faults and still love it.  I have attended them since the second or third one, and missed only one or two since.  And this year’s was one of the best yet.

In its heyday, the NMS took over, in almost every sense of the phrase, the Marriott Marque on Broadway. There was a huge exhibit area, parties all over the city, concerts all over the city.  This was when the record business was charging full speed ahead, selling more every year.  There were panels about most things of interest to the DIY musician, the musician who desperately wanted to get signed, the manager who desperately wanted to get artists signed, panels on touring, panels on music journalism (my cohort Diane Patrick and I ran several panels that attempted to organize music journalists when we headed the National Writers Union Music Writers Caucus), panels on recording.  There were also panels on all manners of music, from introducing the 87-year-old calypsonian Roaring Lion to a generation that thought “Maryanne (down by the seashore sifting sand)” was a folk song, to some of the biggest artists of the time sitting on the Artists’ Panel that traditionally closed the show.  There were artists from the world over, come to learn, come to make music, come to take a shot at fame, come to get into the heart and gestalt of the music business.

This year’s (and the previous few since it came off of hiatus) was a much smaller affair, in line with the new realities of the 21^st Century music business (so far), but also in tune with the future and possibilities of the music business as that century moves on.  The theme came from a speech that the NMS co-founder and executive director (and owner of Tommy Boy Records) Tom Silverman

Tom Silverman shows us how many more donations we need to reach the $1,000,000,000 Business

gave at MIDEM, another music colloquium earlier this year in the South of France: Building a $100,000,000,000 music business.  This is not as unlikely as it sounds at first blush.  The music business has risen phoenix-like many times since Thomas Edison pricked his finger on a stylus and captured his expletives on a piece of tin foil with another stylus (Mary Had a Little Lamb, indeed).  And most of these rises came on the coattails of new technology – the glass and lacquer record, the vinyl LP, tape, the CD, and now digital. While the businesses relationship with digital (which they didn’t invent) has been a bit dodgier than its experience with those previous media (which they pretty much did invent, or at least control from the outset), it has finally begun to set up a proper infrastructure so that recording artist will not disappear from the face of the earth.  Indeed, fat chance of that happening – over the last decade, the number of annual commercial musical releases has increased at least fourfold.

I tell my students that this is the most exciting time in the last 50 years, perhaps in history, to be involved in the music business, as it reinvents itself.  As one panelist put it, “The rules change every day.”  Some of the highlights and insights included:

• The Ralph Simon led digital panel. Ralph has a way with the language that is only superseded by his abilities in the mobile music space.  Among his wonderful turns of phrase:
  • Screenagers – people who use multiple screens simultaneously.
  • Human doing – as  opposed to a human being.
  • But the term that came up most when addressing the rise of the cell phone as the preeminent musical source of the immediate future was “feels like free.”  How can the music business make their monetization painless, so that a generation that grew up with “free music” via downloads can continue to get their music “free”.
  • The new loathsome sobriquet for music: What once was “product” has become “content,” though I like the thought of it as an “asset” more.
  • The rise of the independent record company, the true musical entrepreneurs making major waves in the popular trenches, not too unlike the way things operated in the 50s and early 60s, before the corporate entities started gobbling them up.
    • For example, the fact that earlier this year, five of the top ten singles were indy
    • Indies have shown 12% digital growth over the last year.
    • That the Lumineers have had 100,000,000 streams – thought the monetary “effect doesn’t reflect that number.”
    • That the indies look at the new music business s as a net income business, while the majors still think in terms of market share.
    • While the majors still dominate radio, streaming and licensing have made the music business “more democratic.”
    • FDR taking over the legalities of the music business: beyond the “new deals” for the “assets”, there were the new ways of looking at remunerating artists, new models for “new deals” like 50/50 and 360 deals that give artists a choice rather than the standard advance/(small) percentage deals.

Jesse Clegg, Son of South African star Johnny Clegg, makes his NYC Debut

One of the other things that the New NMS has downsized is the “New York Nights” that came with the event and would have me (in younger days) criss-crossing the city to see artists like the US debut of the Gipsy Kings, The Les Miserables Brass Band, and Barenaked Ladies long before they became a hit, among hundreds of others – often taking in all or part of five sets a night.  The recent Seminar had a somewhat more limited number of venues, most of which were within spitting distance of each other on Ludlow Street. They did, however, showcase well over 100 artists.  A couple of the notable ones I caught included the US debut of Jesse Clegg from South Africa, doing a wonderful, energetic (mostly) acoustic set and the winners of the Seminar’s “Artists on the Verge” contest Air Traffic Controllers, an Americana group that you should be hearing from shortly.

Taken from this post:
My Long Time Love Affair

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ROYAL ALBERT HALL REVISITED: BOB IN EUROPE 2013