From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V3 #345 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Thursday, November 27 2003 Volume 03 : Number 345 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [loud-fans] Believe in Love ["Rex.Broome" ] RE: [loud-fans] Was: H E G T A P E Now: Wants to Like Love ["Micah Bed] RE: [loud-fans] Believe in Love ["Micah Bedwell" ] [loud-fans] c.v. for your viewing pleasure [Jenny Grover ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 09:12:29 -0800 From: "Rex.Broome" Subject: [loud-fans] Believe in Love Miles: >>During my first date in college, I had something by Roxy Music or Ferry on in >>the car and the girl said "that guy sounds like Dracula!" There wasn't a >>second date. Had a massive crush on a girl in college who alway had a violent reaction to the Pixies. "Oh, I hate these guys!" Second time it happened I found out she thought I was listening to Jene Loves Jezebel. This happened a few times until eventually she would say "Oh, I hate--" and me and my roommate would cry out in unison, "It's not Gene Loves Jezebel!!!" Yeah, that one didn't go anywhere either. But I did get some wonderful performances out of her in several of my film school projects. In her mild defense she usually said that when "Motorway to Roswell" was on, and that is indeed one of your more structurally-normal and vocally-whiny Pixies songs, but... > Is the Stills album worth an iTunes > download? Missed them opening for Echo & the Bunnymen a few weeks back. That's what happens when you have to negotiate Downtown Disney to get to your show. Speaking of the Bunnymen and Love, I've always thought of Ocean Rain as just about as good a replica of Forever Changes as you could make without covering the damn thing. The Daily Planet and Silver even start with the same chords, and see if you can't draw a pretty straight line between some of the guitar leads on FC through to Verlaine and on to Will Sargeant. And there's a similar tension between light and dark themes on both records. Plus, I think I probably encountered them at around the same point in my life, so that may factor into it. I dunno if it would help Miles to equate FC more with the Bunnymen than the High Llamas, but I can't imagine it would hurt. Can't add much to what's been said thus far about Forever Changes but how come nobody's yet stood up for the other early Love albums? The first one is a nice look at their high-velocity mean-version-of-the-Byrds phase (and contains that there Little Red Book cover), and Da Capo is amazingly great *despite* having a meandering jam covering the entirety of side 2... Side 1 would certainly be one of the greatest EP's ever realeased. - -Rex PS: >>R.E.M. has fared far better than >>most. Even if they haven't aged as imaginatively as, say, U2 ...I so wish I could stop hearing this so I could stop disagreeing with it. Whatever your opinion of the resulting records, I think that, in the mid-to-late '80's, swiping from '70's Eno and Cohen is more imaginative than imitating Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers. Oh, well. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 12:40:03 -0800 From: "Micah Bedwell" Subject: RE: [loud-fans] Was: H E G T A P E Now: Wants to Like Love All the talk on the Television list has been the reissues of the first two records and a live disc. I haven't heard them, but the general consensus is one of glee. No talk of any studio work. Micah Bedwell System Administrator DonSueMor, Inc. micah@donsuemor.com - -----Original Message----- From: zoom@muppetlabs.com [mailto:zoom@muppetlabs.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 7:03 PM To: Robert Toren Cc: loud-fans@smoe.org Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Was: H E G T A P E Now: Wants to Like Love > While visiting former-lister Karen Eng in the U.K., > Bumped into Love's Forever Changes, which I knew by > rep. She said it was one of here all-time faves_ I've > put it in the player twice, but took it out ~1/2 way > through_ For what it's worth, I frowned at my first copy of FOREVER CHANGES and sold it. Just didn't rock hard enough. Later, what I came to recognize as more rational voices persuaded me that rocking hard wasn't the point. The point of the record has Human Be-In manna dripping from one side, and Sharon Tate's blood from the other. I'll humbly suggest you at least play it all the way through, once. Speaking of the Television list, what's the word on a new studio album, Andy Not quite the end of the world as we know it R.E.M.'s new career retrospective reminds you of the extraordinary cultural moment the band forged in the '80s -- and leaves you hungry for more. - - - - - - - - - - - - - By Shannon Zimmerman Nov. 25, 2003 | "Michael Stipe ate a Whopper. Pass it on." That was the sarcastic remark a buddy of mine used to make whenever he could take the obsessive cult of R.E.M. no more. From the moment the Athens, Ga., quartet released their first EP, "Chronic Town," in 1982, anyone attuned to the ragtag world of alternative rock (or progressive or modern or underground rock -- the labels were still in flux) felt a seismic shift in the musical order of things, a disturbance in the force of the aural kind. Other independent acts had made inroads by then, sure. The wonderful Los Angeles punk band X shocked the music industry by shifting 80,000 or so units of their essential 1981 album "Wild Gift" on the low-rent Slash imprint, and R.E.M.'s fellow Athenians the B-52s had already made a much-ballyhooed appearance on "Saturday Night Live," slaying the studio audience (and much of late-night America) with a deeply weird rendition of their party-startin' classic "Rock Lobster." A slew of adventurous British acts had broken through by then, too. But R.E.M. were different. They were less a band, it seemed at the time, than a phenomenon. A subcultural force with the aesthetic equivalent of gravitational pull, the group brought a far-flung sonic universe into a kind of rough orbit. It helped that in interviews with fanzines and more widely circulated publications such as the late, great Trouser Press, the band members (guitarist Pete Buck, bassist Mike Mills, drummer Bill Berry and frontman Stipe) dropped a gazillion names, groups their acolytes quickly filed for future reference: H|sker D|. The Replacements. The Minutemen. Meat Puppets. Love Tractor. Pylon. For aspiring hipsters -- and certainly for all record-store geeks -- articles about R.E.M. were basically required reading: They were veritable Cliffs Notes of coolness. So it's hardly surprising that a movement of admirers and imitators quickly coalesced. In Orlando, Fla., where I was living at the time, the best record store in town was dubbed Murmur, and not one but two bands on the local scene lifted their names from R.E.M. tunes. (One even began life as a straight-up cover band.) Another outfit, a group that was more likely to cover "Cruel to Be Kind" than "Radio Free Europe" whenever they played live, felt obliged to make a pilgrimage to Winston-Salem, N.C., to record their debut disc with Mitch Easter, leader of contemporary jangle rockers Let's Active and producer extraordinaire of "Chronic Town" as well as R.E.M.'s next two (and still-amazing) albums, 1983's "Murmur" and 1984's "Reckoning." So Michael Stipe ate a Whopper indeed. Still, oversaturation and adoring music nerds aside, it was virtually impossible not to be charmed to the point of seduction by R.E.M. With ample assistance from Easter, the band made lush and sensuous music, cranking out records fueled in large part by Buck's Byrds-like arpeggios and Stipe's incoherent (but lovely) mumbling. That latter trait in particular was one of the group's huge hooks: Southern-accented phonemes hung on melodies so large they basically dared you to write your own damn poem. The other thing that made R.E.M. so special was that the group played its peculiar folk-rock variant with the same spastic passion that hardcore punk acts were bringing to bear on their mosh-pit screeds around the same time. In concert during R.E.M.'s early days, Mills seemed ready to catapult off the stage and onto your lap. Stipe, meanwhile, hunched over his microphone behind thick locks of long, curly hair (yes, hair), lurching frenetically from side to side in some sort of weird approximation of a guy having a seizure and a guy contending with ants in his pants. But a funny thing happened on the way to R.E.M. becoming a thing of beauty and a joy forever for you and your music-obsessed buddies: superstardom. And that's where the group's new career retrospective, "In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003," picks up the story. The 18-track collection tracks the arc of mega-success that followed R.E.M.'s departure from IRS (a major label that was run like an indie) and their arrival at Warner Bros. Songs culled from the band's best effort for the label, "Automatic for the People," bookend the disc (the Andy Kaufman tribute "Man on the Moon" and the gorgeous "Nightswimming"), but sandwiched in between are all manner of fits, starts and a certain career-jolting rocket booster. The latter, of course, is "Losing My Religion," which liner-note scribe Buck regards as a pivotal song in the band's oeuvre. At a time when hip-hop and grunge seemed set to take over the world, R.E.M. reasserted their shaky claim to pop music's throne with a hyperemotive little ditty powered by ... a mandolin. Tarsem Singh's canvas-popping Technicolor video (basically a homoerotic milange of mythology, Bollywood cinema, and Stipe in seriously prime posing form) didn't hurt matters a bit, either. Always fan friendly, R.E.M. sweeten the tried-and-true best-of deal with a pair of newish tunes. "Bad Day" upends the manic glee of the earlier "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)," with Stipe tapping into the same strain of stream-of-consciousness logorrhea that made the earlier track so infectious as the band rustles up a twangy pop tune. "Animal," meanwhile, finds the group ricocheting gamely between tuneful psychedelia and crusty garage rock. These new songs are fine, better by far, in fact, than listless and click-tracked ditties such as "Pop Song 89" (from "Green," the group's 1988 Warner's debut) and "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" (a funny-once joke from 1994's "return-to-rock" contrivance, "Monster"). "Stand," "Everybody Hurts" and the ironically martial "Orange Crush" are here in all their not-so-ragged glory, too, as is "At My Most Beautiful," a sun-kissed souvenir from the group's 1998 hey-at-least-we're-tryin' foray into vaguely ambient terrain, "Up." A couple of soundtrack toss-offs ("All the Right Friends" from "Vanilla Sky" and "The Great Beyond" from "Man on the Moon") round out the collection. A few choice semi-hits, however, are missing in action. There's no "Shiny Happy People," for instance, and while hardly anyone is likely to complain much about that sin of omission, the disc also leaves out "Near Wild Heaven," a swirling keeper from "Out of Time" that harks back to R.E.M.'s early work in a way that the group would only rarely attempt after making the leap to Warner -- particularly after drummer Berry opted for country-life retirement in 1997. And that's the thing, of course. Once a rock group's career path marches toward the masses (not to mention toward a scary-huge conglomerate like Warner), it's almost inevitable that at least a measure of what made them unique will get lost in translation. R.E.M. has fared far better than most. Even if they haven't aged as imaginatively as, say, U2, they have managed to negotiate pop music's mainstream without selling their souls. One can only imagine the amount of money they've probably been offered by advertisers for just a snippet of big dumb pop song like "Stand," let alone "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)." For my money, though, that's way too low a standard for a band of R.E.M.'s caliber, a group that basically conjured a scene into existence before they had enough money to make a down payment on a tour bus. So here's hoping that when the band sets up shop in Athens early next year to begin work on its 13th studio album, R.E.M. finally gets around to uncorking that whacked-out two-disc country set you just know they've got in them. That, or maybe a hardcore record. Either would be cool by me. - --Shannon Zimmerman, from http://salon.com/ent/music/review/2003/11/25/rem/index.html ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 12:47:02 -0800 From: "Micah Bedwell" Subject: RE: [loud-fans] Believe in Love I can understand Will Sargent appreciating Tom Verlaine's guitar playing. Still, they were worlds apart. The main difference, to these ears, is that Verlaine could phrase in a little more of a supple way. While Sargent just banged out 8th notes. This does not mean I am giving up my Echo and The Bunnymen picture 45's. As for "Ocean Rain", I loved that record. The only crack I have is that "Crown of Thorns" would not be missed if it is ever omitted from the track listing. Micah Bedwell System Administrator DonSueMor, Inc. micah@donsuemor.com - -----Original Message----- From: Rex.Broome [mailto:Rex.Broome@preferredmedia.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 9:12 AM To: loud-fans@smoe.org Subject: [loud-fans] Believe in Love Miles: >>During my first date in college, I had something by Roxy Music or Ferry on in >>the car and the girl said "that guy sounds like Dracula!" There wasn't a >>second date. Had a massive crush on a girl in college who alway had a violent reaction to the Pixies. "Oh, I hate these guys!" Second time it happened I found out she thought I was listening to Jene Loves Jezebel. This happened a few times until eventually she would say "Oh, I hate--" and me and my roommate would cry out in unison, "It's not Gene Loves Jezebel!!!" Yeah, that one didn't go anywhere either. But I did get some wonderful performances out of her in several of my film school projects. In her mild defense she usually said that when "Motorway to Roswell" was on, and that is indeed one of your more structurally-normal and vocally-whiny Pixies songs, but... > Is the Stills album worth an iTunes > download? Missed them opening for Echo & the Bunnymen a few weeks back. That's what happens when you have to negotiate Downtown Disney to get to your show. Speaking of the Bunnymen and Love, I've always thought of Ocean Rain as just about as good a replica of Forever Changes as you could make without covering the damn thing. The Daily Planet and Silver even start with the same chords, and see if you can't draw a pretty straight line between some of the guitar leads on FC through to Verlaine and on to Will Sargeant. And there's a similar tension between light and dark themes on both records. Plus, I think I probably encountered them at around the same point in my life, so that may factor into it. I dunno if it would help Miles to equate FC more with the Bunnymen than the High Llamas, but I can't imagine it would hurt. Can't add much to what's been said thus far about Forever Changes but how come nobody's yet stood up for the other early Love albums? The first one is a nice look at their high-velocity mean-version-of-the-Byrds phase (and contains that there Little Red Book cover), and Da Capo is amazingly great *despite* having a meandering jam covering the entirety of side 2... Side 1 would certainly be one of the greatest EP's ever realeased. - -Rex PS: >>R.E.M. has fared far better than >>most. Even if they haven't aged as imaginatively as, say, U2 ...I so wish I could stop hearing this so I could stop disagreeing with it. Whatever your opinion of the resulting records, I think that, in the mid-to-late '80's, swiping from '70's Eno and Cohen is more imaginative than imitating Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers. Oh, well. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 18:17:56 -0500 From: Jenny Grover Subject: [loud-fans] c.v. for your viewing pleasure A link to the new Cobra Verde video for "Riot Industry", starring Mike Watt. http://www.cobraverde.com/index.php?subject=discography-multimedia&sub=riot-industry Jen ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 07:33:10 -0000 From: "Ian Runeckles & Angela Bennett" Subject: RE: [loud-fans] Believe in Love > Miles: > >>During my first date in college, I had something by Roxy Music or > >>Ferry on in > >>the car and the girl said "that guy sounds like Dracula!" > There wasn't a > >>second date. Way back when.... started seeing a woman who I worked with (first big mistake), then visited her room in the house she shared which was full of stuffed furry toy animals (second big clue that things weren't going too well) and as it was my birthday she asked what I'd like. "Trout Mask Replica" I replied. The end. Ian :-) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:54:34 -0800 From: "me" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Believe in Love thank you for a very much needed laugh!!!! brianna - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Runeckles & Angela Bennett" To: Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 11:33 PM Subject: RE: [loud-fans] Believe in Love > > Miles: > > >>During my first date in college, I had something by Roxy Music or > > >>Ferry on in > > >>the car and the girl said "that guy sounds like Dracula!" > > There wasn't a > > >>second date. > > Way back when.... started seeing a woman who I worked with (first big > mistake), then visited her room in the house she shared which was full > of stuffed furry toy animals (second big clue that things weren't going > too well) and as it was my birthday she asked what I'd like. "Trout Mask > Replica" I replied. The end. > > Ian :-) ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V3 #345 *******************************