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9.30.2009
Ohio Is a Piano

THIS IS THE MOST AWESOME OF ALL AWESOME THINGS.  Sent to me by my cousins in Portland (who are partially responsible for this): Ohio is a Piano.  Here's the backend and explanation

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5.23.2008
Your Legislature at Work

From yesterday's Dispatch:
Back in the days when Under the Boardwalk, Back Stabbers and Yakety Yak hit the airwaves, the groups who sang them -- the Drifters, the O'Jays and the Coasters -- were faceless voices spilling out of the radio.

But when the nostalgia craze for '50s, '60s and '70s music developed in recent years, hundreds of musical groups hit the concert, festival and fair circuit. Some of today's touring groups contain original band members, but many don't.

Most concertgoers don't know the difference. But many of the original artists sit idle at home, or have gone broke pursuing lawsuits against knock-off bands that profit from their hard-earned musical reputations.

...The Ohio General Assembly stepped into the spotlight yesterday, as the Senate unanimously passed the "Truth in Music Act." The legislation, which has been approved in two dozen other states, would require performing musical acts to have at least one original band member in order to use the original band's name.

In other words, there must be at least one original Drifter on stage, or the group can't be called the Drifters.

"False, deceptive or misleading" advertising and performances could constitute separate violations, each punishable by a civil penalty of $5,000 up to $15,000.

Seriously? This is going to be a law?

Note that the Dispatch article goes on to quote one of the founding members of the Coasters and Bowzer from Sha Na Na, itself a revival/cover group, both in support of the measure. The article doesn't, however, mention any actual examples, local or otherwise, of this problem.

I suppose that I'm greeting this thing with more bemusement than anything, since I would tend to agree that seeing a "fake" group is something of a ripoff -- but, y'know, that's what federal trademark law is already there for, isn't it? It doesn't really address who "owns" the name -- the fact that someone has adopted the name of a band decades after the original went defunct and performs the same music would seem to support the idea that there's a "brand", but there wouldn't be any market confusion, only that the participating parties had changed, right?

Thanks to the internets, here's a portion of what Wikipedia has to say about the Coasters:

Several groups used the name in the 1970s, touring throughout the country, though Carl Gardner, one of the original Coasters, held the legal rights to it. Gardner continued to tour with the Coasters and has made many attempts to stop bogus groups with no connection to the original group from using the name. In late 2005 Carl's son Carl Gardner, Jr. took over as lead with the group, when his father retired. The Coasters of 2008: Carl Gardner Jr, Ronnie Bright, Alvin Morse, J.W. Lance, and Thomas Palmer (gtr), with Gardner Sr as coach. [[1]]

As of 2007, all of the other original group members, except Leon Hughes, have either died or retired. Some of the former members suffered tragic ends. Saxophonist and "fifth Coaster" King Curtis was stabbed to death by two junkies outside his apartment building in 1971. Cornelius Gunter was shot to death while sitting in a Las Vegas parking garage in 1990. Nate Wilson, a member of one of Gunter's offshoot Coasters groups, was shot and his body dismembered in 1980. [2]

Don't get me wrong. The Coasters were a tremendously important part of rock 'n roll history and I frankly think the original members should be treated like royalty. But:

1) The Coasters, like many of the "classic" groups I suspect this law is aimed at protecting, were only performing someone else's material. They didn't write their own songs -- Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller did. At best, the Coasters can lay claim only to their own interpretations of the music itself.

2) If I read this right, Gardner is the only original member of the Coasters left who's trying to actively make money from the Coasters , only he's not even in the group, he's the "coach" -- meaning that there are no original members of the group performing. Wouldn't that be just as problematic under the new law as an "impostor" group? Where's the line between "these guys were never in the group originally but have the blessing of someone who was " and "these guys were never in the group originally"? The whims of an aging musician determine whether the state gets to fine someone up to $15,000? I call shenanigans.

3) Take this a step further. The Coasters, like many other musical groups over the last fifty years, have had a constantly rotating membership. Who's "original" in that scenario? Do they have to appear on the record in order to sing the song? What if they didn't record it but toured with the group in the 50s, or 60s, or 70s?

I have thought about this way too much, now, but I'm gonna wager I've spent more time on it here than anyone in the Ohio Senate, and this only took about twenty minutes. This is really one of the worst cases of "shouldn't there be a law...?" that I've ever seen. The answer is that there probably shouldn't.

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2.01.2008
Changes!



Be patient with it at first -- it takes about a minute to ramp up, but it's totally worth it.

(via Elliot Van Buskirk at WIRED's Listening Post)

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10.17.2007
Carl's Song of the Day: Tiny Turtle

Beginning a new semi-regular feature for the dc: Carl's Song of the Day.

Today's entry is a piece that Carl says he sings every day at school. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this claim. I present to you: Tiny Turtle.


video

Ladies and gentlemen, Carl Dahlberg.

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Wilco at the Wex 2007


Wilco at the Wex 2007
Originally uploaded by Gus Dahlberg
A lousy picture, but an amazing show (even though I really do hate "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", the song they used to end the first encore). Not as marvelous an experience as when we saw them in 2005 -- no cover of Randy Newman's "Political Science" this time around -- but how can you argue with what was essentially a two-hour-ten-minute set?

(Well, okay, I can argue, because I am snooty and this is the Internets. Nice attention to SKY BLUE SKY, but no "Either Way", probably the best song on the album, or natural closer "What Light"? Really? No "Misunderstood"? Okay, okay, it's overplayed, they have this huge back catalogue of great music that never winds up on the set list, I get it. But that's why the reliance on the snooze-inducing noodling jamfest of "Spiders" sticks in my craw -- seems like a waste of precious show time at the expense of better material.)

Andrew Bird opened for them. Although Casey had burned the disc for me a few weeks back, I hadn't given it a listen and consequently knew next to nothing about the guy. After being almost moved to tears at one point during his set (!), rest assured I'll be remedying that this week.

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9.13.2007
And That, My Friends, Is Love

Driving back to the office from a morning meeting, and my iPod tried to tell me something:

Iron & Wine / Calexico - Always on My Mind (live on NPR)

The Temptations - Just My Imagination

The Weepies - Gotta Have You [link removed for bandwidth]

[cue bawling, phone call to beautiful wife]

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8.28.2007
Thanks, But No

Fresh from my inbox:

From: Ticketmaster
To: GDAHLBERG
Subject: Collective Soul Offers You a Free Exclusive Video to Download

...thanks, but no.

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7.11.2007
braindump

I almost titled this "brandump", which is also somewhat appropriate. Herein, a list of things that I've thought "that'd make a good blog post" over the last several weeks but never developed. If some of this sounds like Greek to some of you, I apologize in advance for the lack of well-developed context I would inevitably have added to each one.
  • Fraction wrote a pretty scathing take on the White Stripes' new album a few days back. I've had it for something like two or three weeks now and only got around to actually listening to it today. For the most part, he's spot-on, but I tend to think that Jack White's actually found a new model for their stuff: early David Lee Roth-era Van Halen. Compare and contrast the Stripes' "Rag and Bone" with 1978's "Ice Cream Man" and tell me I'm insane. Otherwise? This will likely not be getting lot of repeat play on Ye Olde iPod.
  • Wilco's SKY BLUE SKY, on the other hand, is like my perfect summer album right now. It's very mellow; it's the "sitting on the porch with a glass of lemonade watching the kids run around on the lawn" album the Eagles never made. I fear that means I'm getting too old to really ROCK, y'know? Saw Columbus's Evil Queens with Casey at Comfest a few weeks back (hey, here's a video of the show!), but that's the extent of my ROCK-ness of late.
  • Vote for Springfield, Ohio! Whoops, it's over. We couldn't even muster 10,000 votes? There's more people in the TOWN than that.
  • Vanilla Coke Zero is awesome.
  • So is Jon J. Muth's ZEN SHORTS, which has become my favorite bedtime story for the kids for many reasons, not the least of which is the opportunity it has given me to perfect my Panda Accent. Muth's work is just so damned pretty.
  • In light of recent events, spent some of last week's vacation beginning to re-read Hunter S. Thompson's FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL '72, for about the third or fourth time. I always get to "June" and quit. It's amazing to me how many parallels you could find between the current political campaign atmosphere and the Democrats' scramble in '72 -- though they weren't exactly jockeying for position sixteen months before the actual election took place...
  • I got a new grill. It has four large burners and a side burner. Also, today Val accidentally dropped an earring down the drain in the bathroom and between the two of us, we managed to get the u-bend pipe off, retrieved the earring, and replaced the pipe, all without the aid of a monkey wrench -- and there's no water spraying in the bathroom, so I'd say the home repair was a success. Domestication, if not complete, is nearly there.
Vacation photos are up on Flickr but I'm too tired to deal with the formatting they will require tonight, so for the moment just turn your head for the ones that are sideways, and we'll all get through this together.

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4.27.2007
Black Friday

I knew -- I knew -- that there was something bad coming today. And here it is:

Little Brother's in Columbus To Close This Summer

Here's an e-mail from Dan Dougan, owner of Little Brother's..

----------
To friends, family, fans, musicians and community,

There are rumors flying that Little Brother's is being "taken over" or replaced by new ownership, so I thought it was important to clarify our current situation.

Just as we are hitting Little Brother's ten-year anniversary in the Short North this May, I have apparently reached an impasse with the landlord of the building, who has informed me, through his lawyers, that the only new lease he will offer me includes, among other stipulations, an immediate increase in rent of over 40 percent, and annual increases. It has been clearly implied that someone else has offered this amount for the space and that I could be asked to vacate the premises before summer begins.

This came as a surprise, because I had negotiated terms face-to-face with my landlord earlier this year and we verbally agreed upon incremental increases over the next five years that would have been difficult, but not impossible, for us to accommodate over that time. He promised to send the new terms of the lease in writing. Soon after, he stopped responding to my calls and recently began communicating with me only via his attorney.

While business has been good this year, this increase is more than I can afford. The entertainment business goes through so many highs and lows, an agreement of this nature could crush us the next time we hit a slow period. Clearly, if I am asked to leave by summertime, that gives me little time to relocate the club, which is not something I am sure I can endure again anyway.


Read the rest here.

To say that the (potential?) loss of Little Brothers would be a major heartbreak is a bit of an understatement, and I'm not even one of the REALLY COMMITTED Lil' Bros regulars. Yes, there are other places to hear/see bands, bigger and roomier and more modern than Little Brothers, but none with the same kind of scrappy, independent draw. The Newport is still the scuzzy hole it always was, but it's Promowest's scuzzy hole. Little Brothers is its own entity, feisty and dirty and hipper-than-thou, true, but also intimate and unique in its raw, sit-in-the-performers'-laps setup that puts both national acts and your next-door neighbor's band on the same level playing field.

I hope that this is just a little bit of doom and gloom before the situation is happily resolved, but somehow I doubt it. The Short North is, for lack of a better word, gentrifying (as if it wasn't there already!) and it's hardly surprising that a landlord, upon seeing the great speed of development and vast rent increases that have been going on down there for the last three or four years, wouldn't want a little piece of that. If a concert hall that doesn't even operate as a proper bar most days of the week won't pony up the rent, the thinking probably goes, then there's bound to be some latte-bar entrepreneur with dreams of IPOing who'll gladly sign up, until the money inevitably runs out there, too.

Losing Little Brothers would leave Skully's as the last "real" concert venue in the Short North (yes, there are several other bars for performances, but only Skully's and Little Brothers are really equipped/capable of booking the bigger acts, yes?) Why is Skully's, which moved down there from campus much later than Little Brothers, not having the same problems? Too far north? Different economic arrangements above Third Avenue? Who knows?

But it's still a damned shame.

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Die Hard!

Continuing in this month's theme of GREATEST MUSIC VIDEOS FOUND ON YOUTUBE THIS WEEK, I present to you: Guyz Nite and "Die Hard".

Also? AWESOME.



(before you click, it's DIE HARD, so, y'know, R-rated language and violence.)

(found via BeacoupKevin/KungFuMonkey)

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4.19.2007
Pow!



"Signal Fire", Snow Patrol, from the SPIDER-MAN 3 soundtrack.

It's very cute.

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4.12.2007
Groundhog Day



A YouTube link for a performance by Steve (BLUE'S CLUES) Burns and Steven (Flaming Lips) Drozd on Noggin's JACK'S BIG MUSIC SHOW -- there's a better quality clip here, but I can't link directly to it...

Something I remember first talking about FOUR YEARS AGO. Found the Noggin link to this one, of all places, in Maureen Ryan's TV blog over at the Chicago Tribune.

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Lollapalooza

Spotting the leaked Lollapalooza lineup on Idolator this morning made me think of one and only one cheap joke: somewhere in northern Illinois, Mike Melander is clapping his hands in glee.

(take a bow, Misha)

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3.28.2007
What? No "Cocaine"?

Via Idolator, here's a playlist all about Popping the Question, which starts off by featuring one of my all time favorite Beach Boys tracks.

(Confidential to Val: see the title to this post.)

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1.31.2007
All Songs By

Ganked from donewaiting -- definitive proof that Bob Dylan wrote every song. Ever.


Superdeluxe - No Direction, Period.

(some objectionable language, if that kind of thing bothers you, but this is VERY funny.)

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12.21.2006



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