Errors-To: owner-ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu From: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@ns1.rutgers.edu Bcc: ecto-digest-outbound@ns1.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #310 ecto, Number 310 Tuesday, 4 August 1992 Today's Topics: *-----------------* SBH on GMA More Man Called (E) well, well, well! RE:the Happy promo photo Re: Thanks... Re: Thanks Doug... I give up News from the papers In an effort to provoke some discussion... ======================================================================== Date: 3 August 1992 15:14:04 CDT From: Subject: SBH on GMA This morning, Sophie B. Hawkins was interviewed on _Good Morning America_ (ABC television). After finishing part 1 of a two-part interview with Clint East- wood, they announced the SBH segment, using a fragment of the bikini version of the DIWIWYL video as a visual. After the commercials, they got down to business. She was wearing a too-large ruffled blouse, and very ripped jeans. I couldn't tell for sure if she was wearing shoes. She has an audible New York accent. The first thing the interviewer asked was what the B. stands for. She said that it stands for Ballantine, and added that she had a difference of opinion with the record label over whether to leave it in (she wanted to, becau se she's always used it; they apparently felt it would make things too compli- cated). I almost forgot: before she came on, they did a fragment from her next video, "California Here I Come," which is in black and white with her reclining on her stomach on the hood of an old pickup truck in the middle of nowhere. There is rain on the windshield (I think), despite it being sunny weather; the camera is looking out at her from inside the truck. If they ever show _The Grapes of Wrath_ on TV at a time when I'm awake, I'll have to watch to see if the video is a knockoff of anything in the movie (a phenomenon of which I can cite numerous examples on request); though I have a hard time visualizing Sophie in the Henry Fonda role :-). Anyway, back to linear time-- almost. Just one more digression. I was up until nearly 5 this morning fin- ishing up the history of latter-day Schaumburg, Illinois that I'd been sweating over for the last four weeks in general, and the last two weeks in particular. While I am indeed "smiling and warm" over this accomplishment, at least until I get the revise-and-resubmit ukase that I just know is likely to occur, the fact remains that I've been tired all day, and my mental acuity is not its usual sel f. All this by way of explanation for my failure to retain the Q and A in meticulous detail. I forget the exact next question, but the answer included the statement that she used to have to reach out to people, but now they keep flowing toward her so she has to work at keeping them at a managable level. She was then asked about her often being likened to Madonna. She said, in effect, that she blows hot and cold on the issue, sometimes pleased to be thoug ht in the ssme league with a heavy hitter like Madonna, other times pissed off that the differences between her music and Madonna's were being given short shrift. (Note that all of this is my poaraphrasing of what I remember; far be it from her, I'm sure, to respond in these exact terms.) After another commercial, she and her band performed DIWIWYL live--no lip sync. It generally was a good rendition, though part of the end was cut, presu mably for reasons of time. Those of us for whom Sophie's true sexuality was recently an object of fascination may be interested to learn that a couple of women in the band seem to be buying into certain dyke stereotypes. One of the backup vocalists was decked out in overalls and a close haircut, while a guit- arist shaved her head. I wonder if she's at any serious risk of being asked by the naive if she was on the U.S. Olympic volleyball team :-). Time to go home and try to get some rest, so as to stand a fighting chance of staying awake for the real U.S. Olympic volleyball team, and their cohorts of all the other nations and sports. Mitch ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 3 Aug 92 15:30:44 PDT From: "John M. Relph" Subject: More Man Called (E) As a followup to the message about "A Man Called (E)", I have just discovered that Tori Amos and (E) will be appearing here in San Francisco, a show that I will be attending. Definitely. C U there. -- John ======================================================================== Subject: well, well, well! Date: Mon, 03 Aug 92 20:17:54 -0400 From: jeffy@syrinx.umd.edu Last week, someone posted to Gaffa about hearing what he thought was a new KaTe song called "Words Weren't Made For Cowards." He called the radio station to find out if KaTe's new album was out and was told that it was a woman named Happy Rhodes. Drukman threw a fit, Vickie threw the person the usual info. Well, it's happened again. There's a new post from someone at UC Irvine who heard "Words Weren't Made For Cowards" last night and thought it was KaTe. He, too, turned to the logical place for info. We'll get back on r.m.g yet! Mua ha ha ha! (no, of course I wouldn't want to drag the mailing list back to Love-Hounds. We do just swell on our own...) In any event, this would seem to be a trend--the West coast is indeed Waking Up. Why now, and why "Words..."? I still thinkg "Wrong Century" is the most likely single from the album (though one of my least favorites). I'm listening to my _Ecto_ CD for the 3rd time today. Or is that 4th? Jeff |Jeffrey C. Burka | "Show what you are / Be strong, be true | | | Time for you to / Be who you are." | |jeffy@syrinx.umd.edu | --Happy Rhodes | ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 3 Aug 92 20:55:02 CST From: (Jeff "Chip" Lueck) Subject: RE:the Happy promo photo In Message Mon, 3 Aug 92 11:49:17 -0700, Michael G Peskura writes: >Any of you have the ability to display gif files MUST load the promo.gif >that Jessica scanned of Happy's promo photo. It is WONDERFUL. Probably >the best photo i've seen of her! I second that. It's a great photo --- It's now my new wallpaper in Windows! People always come to admire my wallpaper -- now I can do some more Happy-vangelizing! ======================================================================== Subject: Re: Thanks... From: tlb@bsbbs.columbus.oh.us (Tracy Barber) Date: Tue, 04 Aug 92 00:06:45 EDT To: MTARR@eagle.wesleyan.edu Thanks for the Tori tape. I found it quite different from the CD but refreshing at the same time. A few other friends found it the same! Catch you on the circuit... tlb --- * SLMR 2.0 * I like my QWK OFFLINE reader! ---- Tracy Barber tlb@bsbbs.columbus.oh.us {n8emr|nstar}!bluemoon!bsbbs!tlb The Big Sky BBS (+1 614 864 1198) ======================================================================== Subject: Re: Thanks Doug... From: tlb@bsbbs.columbus.oh.us (Tracy Barber) Date: Tue, 04 Aug 92 00:05:43 EDT To: dbx@olympic.atmos.colostate.edu (Doug Burks) Thanks for the demo / Interview tape. I finally got to reply since all my recent mail has been bouncing. Talk to you on the circuit. BTW, IT WAS "Point & Pull" she wanted. 8^) I now await her response! tlb --- * SLMR 2.0 * Surly to bed, and surly to rise. ---- Tracy Barber tlb@bsbbs.columbus.oh.us {n8emr|nstar}!bluemoon!bsbbs!tlb The Big Sky BBS (+1 614 864 1198) ======================================================================== Subject: I give up Date: Tue, 04 Aug 92 13:47:51 -0400 From: jeffy@syrinx.umd.edu I've racked my brain for the last two days and still haven't come up with an plausible reading/explanation of the fragment "..and all our animals" in the first verse of "Look For the Child," a song I otherwise like. Very much a combination of _Warpaint_ish and _Ecto_ styles (Warpaint in the arrangement, earlier styles in the various vocals). So does anybody have any thoughts on this? Oh, and while I'm here, the liner notes say "This album is a compilation of songs recorded between the years 1984 and 1987" This is in marked contrast to the story Vickie related a year and a half (or so) ago about Happy putting _Ecto_ together whilst Kevin was out of town on a 2 week (business?) trip. So, Ectoma, what's the real story here? Jeff (who's off to work wearing his Ecto shirt) |Jeffrey C. Burka | "Show what you are / Be strong, be true | | | Time for you to / Be who you are." | |jeffy@syrinx.umd.edu | --Happy Rhodes | ======================================================================== Date: 4 August 1992 11:38:00 CDT From: Subject: News from the papers Since Vickie has not gotten around to posting this, I thought I'd help out. "The next Sinead? McLachlan came first, thank you." (from _Chicago Tribune_, July 16, 1992) Two years ago, every record label was looking for another Sinead O'Connor. Arista Records thinks it has found one in Sarah McLachlan, 23, a critically acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter. McLachlan is bothered by the comparisons. "Personally, I don't think we're really comparable except on a very shallo w edge. We're both female and we're both siger-songwriters and we both sing personal, emotional songs," McLachlan says. "But I draw the line there. I think we probably grew up with not too diss imilar musical backgrounds. I was into traditional Irish folk songs and Gaelic ballads. All those inflections that she and I both do, that's not original; it 's stealing from traditional songs. "But I got signed [to a recording contract] before Sinead O'Connor even existed in the public's eye." In fact, the classically trained McLachlan was offered a recording contrac t before she had ever tried to write a song. When she was 17, she was singing in a club in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when another band heard her sing the Cocteau Twins' "Evil." The band asked her to move to Vancouver and sing demo tapes. Her parents wouldn't permit it, but two years later one of the band members offered McLachl an a five-album contract with Network Records. Network allowed her six months to write some material. The results led to McLachlan's debut album, "Touch," which was released in 1988. It took McLachla n six months to write the material and nine months to record her second album, "Solace," which was released early this year. "Solace" is finding a warm reception. About 100,000 copies have been sold in Canada and 140,000 in the United States. She has drawn praise for the incredible range of her voice and the very haunting quality of her singing. Her music has a dreamy, mysterious kind of quality, one one that is tough to classify. When told that Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn had ranked her work in the company of Los Lobos, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen and the Jesus and Mary Chain, McLachlan asked, "Is that like a big deal? I don't know anything about what goes on down there" in the U.S. Arista Records seems to think it's a big deal, she was told. "Well, if they're impressed, it must mean something," she said. While we're still on the subject of Canadian artists, this morning's paper had an interesting story, to wit: "As Expected, 'The Sweater' Is Unraveling" (from _Chicago Sun-Times_, August 4, 1992) You haven't made out yet. But you slept right next to him in a sleeping bag on a camping trip with eight other kids from school and you listened to him breathe and your heart thud-thudded. And this mmmm-boy gave you his sweater. So spins the yarn [sic] of "The Sweater," a novelty song about a girl with a crush on a guy who crushes her. The quirky nostalgia tune, rapped over a pal pitating organ by Toronto performance artist Meryn Cadell, continues to draw th e curious to record stores demanding: What's with that sweater song? And how'd the teen angst ditty whine its way to No. 24 on Billboard's mode rn rock chart? Is this another "I'm Too Sexy" freak hit? Yup, according to local radio music directors. Fans flooded the phone lin es requesting the song at both WCBR-FM (92.7) and WXRT-FM (93.1) when the sta- tions started playing "The Sweater" a few weeks ago. Now, the callers still phone in, but now they tell the stations to pull the song. "That song fell into the pattern of most novelty songs," says 'XRT music director Paul Marszalek. "When you first start playing it, phone calls explode with positive responses. But novelty songs have very short lifespans. People get sick of listening to them as fast as they fall in love with them." WCBR's music director Tommy Lee Johnston concurs. "We played it about twice a day two months ago, but now it'll come up maybe once every four days." "It's not just a wacky little story," says Cadell. The Partridge Family-l ike drums beat under deep lyrics about "the fear of ever looking stupid." Girl digs boy. Girl gets boy's sweater. Girl sleeps with sweater. Girl dreams of future with boy. Girl flutters into school wearing boy's sweater. Horrified boy wants it back. Ouch. "Memories stored in my head spill out into a piece," says Cadell. The boy in her song has "Alpine ski-chisled features and that sort of blank look which passes for deep thought or at least the notion that someone's home." His sweat er wafts "that slightly goatlike smell which all teenage boys possess." Eau d'Adolescence. Her album, "Angel Food for Thought," is a smart collection of satiric riff s on sexism ("I dreamed I won the lottery in my Maidenform bra"), relationships (Oh my love, you are worth your weight in popcorn husks stuch between my teeth" ) and growing up ("Barbie, I want to come and live with you.") "I think the CD is actually very interesting," WCBR's Johnston says. "She 's a good songwriter." Yesterday, the Sun-Times ran a story on the Lollapalooza alternative rock/polit ical message festival in a Chicago suburb over the weekend. I don't have the story before me, and didn't absorb too many details when I read it, but it seem s the promoters resisted the entreaties of one of the headliner acts (male) to put L7 on the program; as I remember reading it, they did so due to the limits of their faith in a female hard-rock band to hold the interest of the festival' s target audience. This would seem to be of a kind with the apparent "invisi- bility" of women at an alternative music conference last month, which Vickie made reference to in these pages. On the other hand, the festival did have Lush among the headliners. Go figure. In the same issue, the Sun-Times gave a good review to the performances of Tori Amos and E in Chicago last Saturday. Fans of Paul Winter, whose New Age orchestra headlined the NPR Winter Solstice concert last December, may be amused by an item which appeared in Garrison Keil lor's spoof of _All Things Considered_ over the weekend: "A biologist in Flori da has decoded the songs of humpback whales. According to him, they're mad as hell and they're suing Paul Winter." Which, in turn, feeds into a joke I recen tly read in a magazine: "What do you get when you play New Age music backward? New Age music." Mitch ======================================================================== Date: 4 August 1992 13:59:21 CDT From: Subject: In an effort to provoke some discussion... A recent article in Gaffa by Ken Woodruff raises some points that I think are relevant to us on ecto (some of them seem to mirror my "Class Acts and Mass Acts" posting a couple of months ago). He says, in pertinent part: >By the end of the summer I had made 5 copies of Y Kant Tori Read, >and couldn't get a single friend to listen to and entire side >of a Kate album. > >By now you may asking me why the long, convoluted story? Well it's >because I take some umbrage at the people in this group who are >dismissing Tori's first album with such haste because it doesn't >fit in with the image they first learned from her newer album. >It is a fine album, it was very accessible, and I never quite >understood why it never received note in the group. (I posted >about the album several times my sophomore year and never got >more than a "Oh, yeah, I've heard that.") What is it about >Kate and other "erudite" musicians that inspires among their most >avid fans this utter contempt for music which might be appreciated >by those with more mundane tastes? Why is it that music must have >an aura of "inaccessibility" before it is discussed in this group? >Have any of us stopped to think that if we could open ourselves >somewhat to more mainstream music, more mainstream folks might listen >to Kare et. al. People are offended by our pretense, and close >their minds to music they might otherwise enjoy simply >because we make such a point of telling them what garbage they are >for not liking our kind of music already. I learned an important >lesson that summer, which I can sum up as follows: > >If you take the view that your tastes are superior to someone >else's, they will almost never accept what you're trying to >expose them to. However, if you introduce something new, and >intriguing in a non-threating manner, it will be evaluated without >prejudice, and is much more likely to have a lasting effect. > >--Just some thoughts, >--Ken Granted, there may be a tendency on gaffa toward greater rigidity in these matters. For all that, he may have a point. Anybody have any thoughts on that? BTW: It was also mentioned in gaffa that NBC used the Trio Bulgarka's instrume ntal riffs from "The Sensual World" in the background music for a profile (which I saw) of Janet Evans. Mitch ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 4 Aug 92 15:36:40 -0400 From: gb10@gte.com (Gregory Bossert) Subject: Re: In an effort to provoke some discussion... Mitch ends an interesting cross-posted message with a much less significant point, upon which i will express a divergent opinion: > BTW: It was also mentioned in gaffa that NBC used the Trio Bulgarka's > instrumental riffs from "The Sensual World" in the background music > for a profile (which I saw) of Janet Evans. i read Mitch's posts with much more interest and concentration than almost anything on gaffa, so i am not sure at which point the mistake was made, but to avoid confusion amongst any new fans of bulgarian music, i should clarify that the Trio Bulgarka do not, in fact, play any instruments -- they are vocal soloists from the state radio choir, as featured in the "les voix mysterious de bulgarie" [please excuse my french ;] recordings... i am not sure whether NBC in fact used the instrumental riffs from the song "the sensual world", which were performed by the usual irish trad suspects, or if, in fact, they used *vocal* riffs performed by the Trio, from the end of "rocket's tail", for example... i *am* certain, however, that either way, the music was the most interesting thing about the segment, and even so, the time would have been better spent showing archery, synchronized swimming, or equestrian tiddly-winks... as to Mitch's first, far more intriguing point, as originally expressed by Ken Woodruff in gaffa, well, i agree. ;) footah! -greg -- bossert@vizlab.rutgers.edu -- "come here" -- HR ======================================================================== The ecto archives are on hardees.rutgers.edu in ~ftp/pub/hr. There is a README file explaining what is where. Feel free to send me (or leave in the incoming directory, just let me know) things you'd like to have added. -- jessica (jessica@ns1.rutgers.edu)