From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V10 #167 Reply-To: precious-things@smoe.org Sender: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "precious-things-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. precious-things-digest Wednesday, September 7 2005 Volume 10 : Number 167 Today's Subjects: ----------------- chicago sun times concert review [wojizzle forizzle ] chicago tribune concert review [wojizzle forizzle ] Rocky Mountain Bullhorn concert preview [wojizzle forizzle ] GOOD santa barbara tickets for sale [Hicky3000@aol.com] Music Monthly interview [handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal)] single ticket to 9/17 LA Greek show [erin martin Subject: chicago sun times concert review http://www.suntimes.com/output/rock/cst-ftr-tori02.html Amos creates musical magic as Pritzker's first rock act September 2, 2005 BY BRIAN ORLOFF Summer in downtown Chicago means listening to the Grant Park Orchestra emanating from Millennium Park's Jay Pritzker Pavilion. On Wednesday night, though, Frank Gehry's steel marvel housed a new sound: piano maven Tori Amos. Amos, the venue's inaugural rock 'n' roll artist, was no less commanding than a full orchestra, even though she accompanied herself only on grand piano and three vintage organs for her captivating 130-minute performance. Trained as a classical pianist from an early age, Amos was an inspired choice for Pritzker's pop debut, easing the venue into the rock 'n' roll world with an attentive, polite crowd and her sophisticated technique. And with its crisp acoustics and awesome city views, promoters can be sure the venue made an auspicious debut. Amos, in superb form -- her piercing soprano has never sounded sharper and her playing never richer, thanks to her onstage marriage of organ and piano - -- eschewed chitchat to perform a brooding set drawing on stormy songs invoking mythology and questioning intersections between religion and sexual politics from her penetrating perspective. She began with "Original Sinsuality," examining Eve's role in the Garden of Eden story, ornamenting it with a rolling introduction. Later she moved to her Fender Rhodes organ for a gauzy take on the subversive "God," which she spiced with lines from "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush, undoubtedly Amos' ethereal musical sister. Amos stretched out the melody, allowing the tremulous notes -- the organ's affecting reverb -- to buffer her query. She crooned, "God sometimes you just don't come through/Do you need a woman to look after you?," and her interpolations from Bush's song, also decelerated and chanted with hypnotic fervor, only augmented that power. Amos channeled the biblical theme on a cartoonlike backdrop depicting a coiled snake and the Tree of Knowledge -- which was, frankly, distracting and unnecessary. In her mint green and white, flowing chiffon dress, she resembled an enchanted Edenic figure. Seemingly soft and ultra-feminine, Amos rocked just as hard, and with just as much sexual prowess, as rock idol and inspiration Robert Plant. Watch her sidle up to her grand piano, straddling the bench with commanding zeal. On songs like "Sleeps With Butterflies," Amos crouched over the piano, plucking airy, fluttering notes from its high register. Here she was, flirting with and massaging the instrument. But on "Sugar" she pounded the piano, engaging with it and drawing deep, resonant bass notes that felt menacing indeed. It was an intoxicating, complicated relationship in which each song's mood was mirrored by Amos' fine playing. If things felt a bit too morose, a segment called Tori's Piano Bar offered a bit of levity as Amos performed fan-requested covers. Before "The Blower's Daughter," by Damien Rice, she joked, "I've never done this before, so if it's terrible, well, you'll still like me," and then delivered a simmering rendition. Her next choice, unfortunately, was Bette Midler's "The Rose," which, no matter how pitch-perfect, felt as sappy as the original. Amos easily redeemed herself with her own material and, later in the set, she converted "Carbon" into an illicit, cautionary tale, designing a riveting tension between glittering high notes and the anchoring bass line. And "The Beekeeper," the title track from her latest album, bellowed its funereal hum from deep within the organ Amos played. Immediately following the song, dozens of fans rushed the stage, gathering at Amos' feet. It's probably not something the Pritzker has experienced before, but given Wednesday's success, venue officials should brace themselves for such rock 'n' roll theatrics in the future. Brian Orloff is a Chicago free-lance writer. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 03 Sep 2005 22:20:58 -0400 From: wojizzle forizzle Subject: chicago tribune concert review http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0509010296sep02,1,1715121.story Church of Tori holds a revival in heart of city By Robert K. Elder Tribune staff reporter Published September 2, 2005 In "Crucify," one of the opening songs of Tori Amos' set in Millennium Park on Wednesday night, she proclaimed, "I've got enough guilt to start my own religion." By the time she hit the stage at 8:30, she had enough fans--near capacity with 10,000--to turn the Jay Pritzker Pavilion into own her personal cathedral. The lights of surrounding office buildings stood in for candles on a clear, calm night. Amos, playing solo, imbued the evening with a sense of intimacy--no easy feat in an outdoor venue--with songs such as "Black Dove (January)" and a stripped-down version of 1994's "God." Wednesday's concert was an experiment for the city, the first ticketed rock event for the Pritzker stage. While WBEZ's quiz show "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me," the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and others have held free shows in the space, Amos is the first pop star to inaugurate the band shell. Amos recounted playing one of her first solo gigs at Schuba's and added, "It's very special that they asked me to be the first pop performance here [in the pavilion]." With only a few minor bumps, it proved an ideal place to hear music and bid farewell to summer. Under architect Frank Gehry's web-work of overhead speakers, there wasn't a bad seat in the house. Lawn tickets went for $10, while seats near the stage were priced at $50. Food was allowed, but drinks--including water bottles--were not. News of that policy didn't reach everyone and 300-some fans chose to stay outside and drink wine they brought. "We tried to call [to find out details]," said Lisa Ellermann, 28, of Wicker Park. "There was an information line with no information on it. We thought it'd be just like Wednesday nights listening to the symphony." Inside the venue, water and soda were priced at $4. Wine was $8; beer was $6-7 per glass. Others who sat outside, like Susan Winterson, 27, of Edgewater, simply chose to find a spot on the wet lawn and listen with her boyfriend from the fringe. "A wet bum is worth a free seat," she said. Amos opened with "Original Sensuality" from her new album "The Beekeeper." The fiery-haired songstress brought out B-side favorite "Sugar" and turned "Silent All These Years" into a choral-like dirge that bled into "Crucify." A dynamic, powerful singer, Amos can be a captivating performer, especially with a full band. Solo, however, the emotive singer/songwriter tends to slow down each song, stripping away the tempo and unique inflections that define individual tracks. Little distinguished the elastic verses of "Carbon" from a rendition of "Putting the Damage On," save their lyrics. But Amos concerts are designed for the hardcore fans who know every word to every song, regardless of presentation. Like Bob Dylan touring in his sunset years, Amos has become a specialist, a self-indulgent one, making her audience strain to identify re-calibrated songs. The only spots where people didn't sing along were covers, including a version of Damien Rice's "The Blower's Daughter" and Bette Midler's "The Rose." Several hundred fans rushed past security guards to the front of the stage for a four-song encore that included "Tear in Your Hand" and "Amber Waves." "We're impressed; we loved it," said Carly Johnson, 28, who sat outside to finish wine with her boyfriend before finding their spots inside. "The sound is so good. It's like being in the heart of the city." ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 03 Sep 2005 22:32:21 -0400 From: wojizzle forizzle Subject: Rocky Mountain Bullhorn concert preview http://www.rockymountainbullhorn.com/main.php?module=article-detail&articleId=97 Marying the Marys On ner new album, Tori Amos examines the right-wings harnessing of Jesus. September 01, 2005 Tori Amos is mad about Jesus. The politics of religion have always played a large role in the songwriting of Tori Amos. Now, its the religion of politics that has sparked the interest of this alt singer/songwriter, who released her ninth album, The Beekeeper, this past winter. As the daughter of a Methodist minister, raised in the Bible Belt of North Carolina, the pianist is well versed in Christianity. And it was only when she looked around at the 21st century that she realized she didnt like what she saw. The result was The Beekeeper, a convoluted allegory that details Amos discovery of tangled lies, mythology and political manipulation of Christianity. This leads to the beekeeper characters creation of six gardens of experience, six being the magic number linking both the shape of a beehives cells and the half-dozen days it took God to create the world in Genesis. The Beekeeper was responding to not the covert right-wing Christianity that weve known, but the overt right-wing Christianity that some of our leaders have been harnessing Jesus teachings to support their agendas, says Amos, calling from Florida. Therefore, as a ministers daughter, I decided to go back to the source. For Amos, that source for discovery led her to studying The Gnostic Gospels, additional teachings of Jesus discovered in Egypt 60 years ago, in relation to the New Testament. She said this was a jumping-off point for the direction of her new album. Already considered a cerebral singer and keen purveyor of melody and song, Amos says once she found her inspiration, the songs began to reveal themselves within a loose narrative. The Beekeeper, at its core, is marrying the Marys, Amos says. The mother Mary, who was circumcised of her sexuality, and the Magdalene, who was stripped of her spirituality by the early fathers of the church. Not by Jesus, but by those who claimed his work and re-formed it to support their ideology. Through this discovery, she felt a parallel between the misguided manipulation of power in the teaching of Christianity and the current political climate, whether it be related to a war or the role of women in society. An album is something that needs to be cohesive, even in an abstract strange manner, Amos says. It needs to work together, and this was working because, at this time, sacred sexuality is not something that many women feel that they carry. Ive gotten more letters from women over the past four years about this division within themselves. A lot of them have jobs and are going to college and have careers lined up but they feel that they either need to choose the sexual self or the spiritual self, and they dont know how to join the two. Whereas Amos 2002 album Scarlets Walk was viewed as a return to a more accessible Amos, which included radio airplay, The Beekeeper has largely remained under the mainstream radar. While Amos says she doesnt bother herself with whether radio stations play her songs or not, she does believe her tackling of the political and religious aspects has resulted in a backlash from media corporations that are interconnected with the powers that be. This is not a time of equality but a time where the patriarchy is not truly holding up Jesus teachings, Amos says. So if you ask me, did I realize what I was getting myself into? Not as much as maybe I should have. I knew that I was playing with the honeybees, and I thought they would bring honey, but also the great thing about having the honeybees on your side is that they will sting those that try and control them. Amos hope is her upcoming September 5 show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre will open the eyes of her zealous fan base, of which she has been queen bee for nearly fifteen years. You know what, at a certain point, Im a mom. Amos says. I have a little girl and shes going to look at me in twenty years and say, What did you do? You call yourself a warrior and a fighter for rights and equality for men and women and children. So, where the fuck were you, Mom? So, here I am. Still a fighter, Amos has changed her songwriting in subtle but equally effective ways throughout her nine albums. Initially exorcising her own personal demons of dysfunction and experience, the red-haired chanteuse appears now to be more focused on the world around her. This brings up the unique subject that all musicians must deal with at some point in their career-how to relate to material dating from their angry youth when middle-age and perhaps domesticity has set in. For example, does the fire still burn for Amos when she sings the line Ive got the antichrist in the kitchen yelling at me again from her classic Silent All These Years. The track appears on her 1992 debut Little Earthquakes. Sure, all of the songs [from my past] are alive, Amos says. The songs are timeless. Its we who come and visit them that might see different faces when we hear the songs. I do, anyways. Sometimes I see a different person than who I originally saw when I was originally singing it. The antichrist reference gets to her, and Amos laughs briefly before continuing, And in some cases, I still see the same faces. So to me, the songs are timeless. Its us that change. As for her future endeavors, Amos writes continuously, beginning with anytime shes in the shower. With so much human injustice in the world, Amos believes she has a responsibility to push any boundaries she comes across. Of course, because I realize I change shapes with each album and I offer a different menu each time that the songs come to visit, Amos says. The songs really arent that bothered how people view them, because they know who they are, and I think that sometimes certain albums arent as offensive to the masses as others, because of the ideologies. But you cant [think about that]. If you want to be a composer that chronicles time, you have to be brave.      Tori Amos will perform at Red Rocks in Morrison on Monday, September 5, at 7 p.m., with The Ditty Bops and The Like. Tickets range from $39.50 to $48.50 and are available at ticketmaster.com. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 18:35:39 EDT From: Hicky3000@aol.com Subject: GOOD santa barbara tickets for sale i've got three tickets to sell for the santa barbara show, one single and a pair. the single is in section t, 11th row from the stage. the pair is also in section t, 13th row from the stage. i'm charging a little less than what ticketmaster charged me: the single is $70, the pair is $140 though i'll sell those individually if i need to. the show's coming up soon, so i'd like to get these off my hands asap. just send me an e-mail if you're interested. danny ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 00:55:51 -0400 (EDT) From: handal@r2d2.reverse.net (Richard Handal) Subject: Music Monthly interview Music Monthly [greater D.C.-Baltimore areas tabloid] September 2005 cover article, on center spread pages 16-17 photos on cover and page 16 are standard Beekeeper promo images cover thumbnail: Tori Amos by Alan Sculley Fans of Tori Amos know when she does a new CD, chances are her songs are going to be thematically linked together. On Amos' latest CD, "The Beekeeper," she uses the beehive as a metaphor for the world in general, using the society of bees as a backdrop for songs that explore big issues of the world, including hypocrisies of the war in Iraq, the battle women face to reconcile their spiritual and sexual sides of their being, and terrorism. What listeners might not realize is the degree to which the lyrical theme carries through to the music itself. On "The Beekeeper," Amos has stepped back from some of the complex arrangements and ornate instrumentation that has sometimes made her delicate and baroque-ish piano-centric music a little fussy. Instead, the new songs like "Parasol," "Ireland" and "Marys of the Sea" are highly inviting as Amos frequently pairs her familiar piano with Hammond organ creating a richly melodic and easily digestible sound. Amos even grooves at times on "The Beekeeper," bringing a salsa-styled rhythm to the sensual ballad "Sweet The Sting," a tense, rolling pulse to "Barons Of Suburbia" and getting downright soulful on the gospel-esque "Witness." But any impression that "The Beekeeper," the ninth CD of Amos's career, is simpler musically than her earlier music is misleading, Amos said, as she also revealed how the bee theme helped focus the music. "I think musically, if you talk to (drummer) Matt Chamberlain, he'll tell you it's really complicated rhythmically," Amos said. "People who can play music, you sit down and you try to play it. You sit and play 'Barons Of Suburbia' because Matt will tell you it's (bleeping hard)." At the same time, though, Amos noted, she did try to make the songs seem straight-forward and accessible. "That's what we wanted, but what you're getting is you're getting a complex rhythm, no different than you would in a swarm of bees," Amos said. "Their wings beat differently. So that's what we were working off of, that within the hive itself the structure is complex, yet it's very structured. So there's just this paradox that we wanted to work off of. So yes, the rehearsal time for the musicians was longer. The musicians had to put in more time on this, and I think you feel it because people sound more relaxed." Just as the music may be deceptively complex, the lyrics on "The Beekeeper" also contain strong commentary that might not sink in on first listen. That shouldn't come as a surprise considering Amos has often cloaked messages in metaphors and usually is not one to use simple language to convey her thoughts. At times her lyrics can be nearly impenetrable. Yet close listenings to songs on "The Beekeeper" reveal considerable substance, thought and stinging commentary -- be it on "Barons Of Suburbia," an attack on greed, or on "General Joy" and "Mother Revolution," two songs which criticize those who send a country's sons and daughters into war. The subtle lyrical approach is no accident, Amos explained. "How do you get through? How do you permeate? I'll tell you how you do it," Amos said. "You serve a delicious feast, and you're seductive and you invite people in. And that's what we do. I have right-wing congressmens' daughters coming to this show. How do you think you permeate? But if you look at the lyrics to the 'The Power Of Orange Knickers,' we're talking about what is a terrorist. If you look at 'General Joy' we're talking about the war. Really look at what that is." At the same time, Amos was careful to qualify the tone she sought to bring to the lyrics on "The Beekeeper." "This isn't an angry record," Amos said. "This record is not about that. There's enough anger right now happening. So we felt the only way to combat that was to create a space." The depth and thoughtfulness of "The Beekeeper" is standard operating procedure for Amos, who 15 years after her first solo album, remains one of music's most unique, compelling and intriguing talents. The daughter of a Methodist minister and Eastern Cherokee mother, Amos, 41, lives in Cornwall, England with her husband, Mark Hawley and four-year-old daughter, Natashya. She first came on the scene in the hair metal band Y Kant Tori Read, which released one rather hideous record in 1988 before disbanding. Amos, stung by the band's failure, set about reinventing herself and re-emerged n 1991 with "Little Earthquakes," a startlingly honest and powerful debut that featured "Me And A Gun," a stark song that chronicled Amos' rape. Subsequent albums, such as "Under The Pink" (1994), "Boys For Pele" and "Scarlet's Walk" (2002) have found Amos exploring topics ranging from religious oppression to motherhood to the inner battle between female spirituality and sexuality -- a topic that once again is a significant element in "The Beekeeper" and is embodied by two of Amos' role models, the Bibles' the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. At times Amos been dismissed as flaky and downright kooky -- partly because her lyrics can be flighty and she's been known in interviews to delve into extended discussions of subjects ranging from the faerie world to a host of mythology topics. But Amos is nothing if not thorough -- sometimes even scholarly -- in developing her lyrical ideas. Prior to writing "The Beekeeper," she studied the ancient art of beekeeping as well as Elaine Pagels' "The Gnostic Gospel," which suggests that Jesus' teachings were altered to diminish the role of women and that Mary Magdalene, for one, may have had a gospel edited out of existence. The depth and emotional power Amos brings to her lyrics and music has earned one of the most fervishly [*sic*] devoted followings in pop music. That, coupled with the sheer quality and individuality of her music, is probably a key reason Amos has endured in a music business that always seems ready to cast aside last year's female star in favor of this year's newer, younger model. This situation irks Amos, who said she remains determined not to be treated as an object within the entertainment world. "A lot of times in our female singer/songwriters, we like to devour them, and once we have we go onto the next one," she said. "We have love affairs instead of seeing them as the wise women. Jack Nicholson can get older and still have young women in the movies. But only Susan Sarandon seems to be able to do that, especially in (the movie) 'Alfie,' which I enjoyed. But in real life you don't see a lot of people coming into their 40s that are able to, where the public accepts this, or the media accepts this. But you also have to demand it. And I just don't accept anything other than being who you are. I'm just a lioness. That means I'm going to be hunting wildebeasts until I'm 80. And if people don't want to come watch, that's fine. I'll still be hunting." ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 09:40:56 -0700 (PDT) From: erin martin Subject: single ticket to 9/17 LA Greek show Hey everybody-- I'm in the market for a single ticket that's a really great seat to the final show at the Greek on 9/17. Ebay seems to mostly be for doubles, so does anybody have a single that's in section A? I'll pay well or trade things for it. If you don't have a ticket, but you're also in the market for a single and are willing to split the cost of a good pair on ebay, feel free to respond too. Thanks! Erin Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V10 #167 **************************************