kickshuffle

Check out this week’s 3 Track Shuffle, featuring tracks from Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse, G. Love and My Morning Jacket

Check out our feature on NYC pop/rock trio Beecher’s Fault here

By Chris Borchert

When the guys from Robbin’ Pain agreed to let a few friends shoot some footage for a senior thesis project, they thought they were just doing them a favor. I had the opportunity to sit in on the session, and the guys had a blast doing interviews and laying down some tracks for the cameras. Oh yeah, and they were also handed professional-quality promotional videos ripe for posting to YouTube, Facebook, Bandcamp and all the others. For free.

In this case it was the film/tech majors who reached out to the band, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been the other way around. So here’s the point: If you’re in a college band, why not reach out to the folks behind your college TV station? Chances are they are in need of some ideas. And after all, people love to plug homegrown talent.

Robbin’ Pain drummer Scott Borchert shared with me his thoughts on the potential for collaboration between the DIY music industry and the DIY video production industry: “There’s a whole world of web broadcasting out there that parallels what we’re doing with our music — producing it and distributing it ourselves over the internet, and maintaining control over the process. Those broadcasters are looking for content, stuff to cover, and we’re looking for coverage. So it makes sense for bands to take advantage of that, and the fact that we got to help out a buddy of ours in the process just makes it better.”

“We’re excited about it,” said guitarist Ricky DalCortivo. “We get to help out our friends and our friends get to help out us. It’s called synergy or something.”

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Stay tuned to the Robbin’ Pain Facebook Page as more videos will be available within the coming weeks

Will Hermes is the author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (read the Kickshuffle review here). He is a senior critic for Rolling Stone, a longtime contributor to NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and has written for The New York Times, the Village Voice, The Believer, GQ, Salon, Entertainment Weekly, and elsewhere. His writing was included in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 and Da Capo Best Music Writing 2007. Follow him on Twitter. By Scott Borchert

What made you want to write about this era of music, and what made you pick these five years [1973-1977] in particular? You have a pretty precise range starting with the collapse of the Mercer Arts Center and going through New Year’s Eve in 1977, so how did you come up with that framework?

The idea to write a book about the era evolved from researching the making of Patti Smith’s Horses. I was doing an article for the Village Voice on the 30^th anniversary of that album because she was doing a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the entire album from front to back to commemorate it. I interviewed her and I spoke to Lenny Kaye and the more I thought about things that were going on at that time – and I was at the point where I wanted to step into a bigger writing project – this period that Horses came out of became really interesting to me, for a couple of reasons. One, because there wasn’t only the invention of punk rock which Patti Smith sort of had a hand in, but also disco, also the beginnings of hip hop, also the modern composing scene with the downtown composers, and some areas that I knew a little bit less about but turned out to be equally rich: the salsa scene and the loft jazz scene. So it was interesting to me because of the inventiveness but also because that period is usually looked at as being a dead zone, the period before punk broke, the period before hip hop was actually recorded. It was looked at as being just the smoking wreckage of the ‘60s that people needed to crawl out of. But it turned out that the crawling out of the wreckage of the ‘60s or the jumping off of the experience of the ‘60s was really part of what fuelled this period and made it super interesting as a transitional period.

There was also the side attraction that I was growing up in New York then and caught some of this stuff at the tail end of the period I’m writing about, so it was a chance to research my own native territory.

I was a little surprised by the New York Times review of the book in the daily edition, because that writer described the period as sort of a silver era of music at best, not really that important except for the way it paved the way for future forms of music and dealt with the music that came before. Do you agree with that? Because there were a lot of amazing albums released and a lot of great work that was happening at the time, and I think you can look at them as important on their own and not just for the impression they made on future works.

It’s poor form in some ways to debate your critics, and as a pop culture critic myself, that’s a point that’s worth taking note of. But I really felt that critic missed the point, to evaluate this era of music in terms of record sales and chart position, as that particular writer did. My point about this era was that this music was being made underground, being made pretty much off the radar until the end of the book. The book ends when this stuff is suddenly on the radar, even disco and, later, hip hop – Saturday Night Fever opens in theaters around the country in December 1977, the last month I cover, and it’s massive. But what was interesting to me was not how many records people were selling but the aesthetic invention that was happening. And all that said, I certainly think albums like Horses and Marquee Moon are as great expressions of rock and roll as any records that have come out in that genre ever.

One thing that, for me, was really striking about this era was that everything was happening underground, as you were saying, but also in the context of a total decline in living standards in New York City, economic decline, the city going bankrupt, the theme you keep going back to of buildings burning down for the insurance money, crime everywhere. What’s the relationship between this pretty grim atmosphere and the explosion of creative, wonderful music at the same time – is there even a connection?

In some ways it’s a perfect storm of things. Part of the result of the economic collapse of the city during those years was cheap rent, and cheap rent in former manufacturing districts which meant loft spaces that were large enough to rehearse in and for lots of people to live in for very little rent. That was certainly one factor. I think another factor was that the ‘60s had happened, because while people sometimes look at punk or disco or whatever as being complete breaks with the ‘60s, I try to make the point in the book that these movements were direct offshoots of the ‘60s. The first disco parties that David Mancuso and Nicky Siano threw in the early to mid ‘70s were largely fueled by LSD, they were very specifically about peace, love, tolerance, equality. There were mixed crowds, gay, straight, black, white, which was very much coming out of a ‘60s aesthetic sensibility and ideology, although it evolved from there. Punk rock too – Patti Smith and Television, Tom Verlaine, talked about their indebtedness to ‘60s artists whether it be the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, or the Stones, who Patti and Lenny Kaye were championing and sort of bowing down to. Television were huge fans of Coltrane and Albert Ayler and even the Grateful Dead –Tom Verlaine has mentioned that he knew some songs, particularly “Dark Star,” and was very intrigued by that even though he wasn’t a fan of some of their other stuff.

So yes, I think it was part low rent, part the creative ferment of the ‘60s still fermenting, and the other factor is probably just New York – New York is always a magnet for talent and people coming from all over the world to get up on the New York City stage and make an impression, so I think that’s a constant theme of the city.

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By Brian Weidy

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the chance to talk to a variety of bands and I used the opportunity to ask each of them the following question: How have you embraced the new forms of social media as a business tool?

In Part 2 of this multi-part series (check out Part 1 here), I got a chance to speak with Brett Anderson, guitar and mandolin for Ha Ha Tonka, Rob Compa, guitar player for Dopapod, and Cochrane McMillan, drummer for Tea Leaf Green. Here’s what they had to say:

Brett Anderson – Lead Guitar and Mandolin for Ha Ha Tonka:

Absolutely. Facebook and twitter are great ways to keep your fans involved. We recently started using tumblr and instagram a lot more as well.

Rob Compa – Guitar for Dopapod:

It’s been vital to us, no doubt about it. Facebook is a great way to promote shows. YouTube is obviously a cool way to give people a sort of preview of what our live shows offer. We also just linked up with a new site called Outlisten.com that’s going to be amazing. It will basically take all the videos that fans have taken from any one tour date, and organize it into one big, multi-angle video from that gig. Check it out.

Cochrane McMillan – Drums for Tea Leaf Green:

Well, I think it’s obviously the way things are done these days. I personally have always been a person to embrace technology. I think we as a band do a pretty good job of utilizing these tools. We have been talking a lot lately of how we can continue to go further down the rabbit hole, if you will, more content, more creativity, and more presence.

By Chris Borchert

Here’s an idea: I’m VP of Marketing for the Y—– Corporation and I want to make headlines with an advertising campaign. I have a boatload of cash, so I contact management for (insert Artist here) and propose the following offer: produce for me 10-12 previously unreleased songs for a new album. The Y—– Corporation will then release, one by one, 10-12 ad spots, each one featuring a different (insert Artist here)’s song, and the 10-12 songs will culminate in (insert Artist here)’s next official album release. By way of example: Ford cuts a deal with Tom Petty, where Tom Petty pens an album’s worth of tracks to back a series of commercials for Ford’s new “Buy American, Drive America” campaign. Talk about product placement.

I know what some of you are thinking: this is exactly the kind of sleazy corporate profiteering that diminishes quality music and encourages commercialized dribble aimed at the product-consuming masses. Well, maybe. But why couldn’t this be just another creative frontier for artists to explore? After all, why is this so different than, say, composing music for a Hollywood blockbuster? After all, aren’t both artists tasked with writing music to help sell a product? – or even more simply, an idea?

Would it really be so surprising to hear that Kelly Clarkson released a string of tracks to back Weight Watchers’ new “Beautiful You” campaign, and that those tracks will culminate in her next official commercial offering? Or that P. Diddy just put out a concept album recounting the fanciful, yet clandestine tales of a night fueled by Ciroc?

Who cares if an artist has a product in mind when developing music? What is poor quality music will remain poor quality music, but what is creative and smart and engaging will survive and turn heads and remind us that we are individuals looking to be moved by things that are good and interesting. Is the source of the inspiration so critical to the character of the music that we need to reject altogether a particular medium by which it is conveyed? Can Radiohead’s IBM commercials do for me tomorrow what The War on Drugs’ Slave Ambient did for me last summer? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’d sure like to see Radiohead try.

And after all, it’s just an idea.