His boot heels do go wanderin'

Bobby let me follow you down. Now, the Bobster will be shilling for the Cadillac car. Oh mama, can this really be the end? What is he stuck inside? Could the man be that much tangled up in green? How can the formerly scruffy one, the voice of his generation, sell his soul to the Cadillac Escalade, the gas guzzling symbol of all he was protesting against?

Well, times they are a changing from a reliable source and a blog:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/22/AR2007102202539.html

and

http://goog.bloggingstocks.com/2007/10/23/end-of-the-world-bob-dylan-to-shill-for-cadillac/

Is it just a simple twist of fate?

The Dylan ad and some other promotional material plays on the XM radio web site at:

http://xmradio.com/dylan-cadillac/index.xmc

Rock'n Royalties

Events off come in threes, and there are three recent post-worthy events in the world of rock.

Eric Clapton on Larry King's gabfest on Friday night was calmly revealing. Clapton on tour for his auto-bio and CD set, talked easily about his creative muses, his past addictions (including his zest for his friend's (George Harrison's) former wife Pattie B.), his perfectionism which led to him being a nasty person to work with, his tragic loss of his four year-old son, Conor, and now his mature and fun side fate, married to a much younger woman from Columbus, Ohio, where he claims to live an average-mid-America life part of the year. Clapton was refreshing.

Madonna is apparently taking another step to advance the further disintegration of the traditional recording industry (the litigious-minded RIAA and the established labels who don't have much of a clue on marketing rock in the 21st Century). Madonna is reportedly leaving her longtime record label to sign a $120m recording and touring contract with a concert promoter.

Radiohead has engineered perhaps the most promising move. Radiohead’s first major album since 2003 is available for download for whatever price you feel is appropriate. It is like visiting one of DC's art museums: you pay what you want to. If free seems appropriate, then free is it; if $8.99 seems fair, then.... The decision to bypass the big record labels and reach out directly to the public at the prices the public are willing to pay, might inspire shakeups in the music industry (apparently other groups are also considering similar approaches), and beyond. The “pay whatever" approach is refreshingly counter to the RIAA's lawsuits against grandmothers and students for downloads. A UK web site WhatPriceDidYouChoose.com. is surveying what people pay for the Radiohead album for posting on Record of the Day at the end of October. Interesting times ahead.

RFK Redux

On a beautiful, sunny Sunday in September, the last major league baseball game was played at Washington's RFK Stadium (or the "concrete dump" as many news articles mislabeled it). It was a very pleasant, yet bitter-sweet experience for the more-than 40,000 fans that filled the stadium one last time to cheer on the Nats and remember their RFK predecessors, the Senators (some of whom, including the now-legendary Frank (no-not Ryan) Howard, were on-hand for the pre-game ceremonies).

Just three years ago, the stadium, reborn and refurbished, had made it possible to bring back major league baseball to DC (after thirty-plus years of absence, and lonely treks to Baltimore). Now, RFK was being honored and abandoned by MLB one more time. Fortunately and fittingly, the Nationals rose to the occasion to beat the pennant-hungry Phillies (and their ace Cole Hamels) 5 to 3. Appropriately, the win enabled the Nats to finish their three-year, RFK stint with a home record of 122 wins and 121 loses, and to leave the fans with yet one more positive memory of baseball at RFK.

But this time, unlike in 1971, the Nats are just going across town--to a new home, to start a new tradition.

Classical death/meaning less

Continuing on my earlier theme of whether classical music is dying is a "flight-out," farewell article by Newsday's classical critic, Justin Davidson. While the farewell piece is a sad sign, it is extremely optimistic. Mr. Davidson muses that "[m]aybe it's that in populist America, we take pleasure in the thought that democratic culture can expunge an ancient tradition associated with the aristocratic."

But he goes on to conclude that "[c]lassical music isn't dying, but the term itself means less with every passing year - not because it represents an osteoporotic tradition, but because its ever-widening embrace includes musicians who refuse to be bound by notions of appropriateness." He cites various young hopes such as the NY group Alarm Will Sound (who I am listening to right now); they have a sprightly, modern sound. The full article is at the following web address:

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/arts/ny-ettop5350194aug30,0,2746910.story

Davidson ends the piece blaming the lazy, traditional classic-critic for the exaggerated death of classical music--"There are no accepted standards or styles, which means that the critic lives on shifting sands. How much easier and more rhetorically satisfying it is just to pronounce last rites on the whole thing than to strike out across an unstable landscape and send back a series of un-final reports." Breaking barriers in the unstable landscape is Alex Ross' (of New Yorker fame) blog "the Rest is Noise," which provided the valuable link to the Davidson's article.

Bobbing for Tributes

A new DC tradition is the Strathmore Music Center's (appropriately located in the suburb of "Rockville MD") annual tribute concert. Last year at about this time, it was a tribute to the music of Neil Young, and this year (last Wednesday) it was a tribute to the music of Bob Dylan (it was a good preparation for the Dylan/Elvis (C that is) concert coming up in DC/Columbia MD at the end of September.

The tributes' line-up consisted mostly of Eastern seaboard and DC talent (some Grammy and Wammie (the DC version of Grammy) winners) includes over 47 musicians including:

Bill Kirchen (from Commander Cody and other fame), The Nighthawks with Tom Principato, Tommy Lepson & Bill Holland, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, The Grandsons, Patty Reese, Laura Burhenn, Luke Brindley, Jon Carroll, John Jennings, Mike Cotter, The Hanson Brothers, The Cravin' Dogs, Nightman, Billy Coulter, Paper Umbrella, Eric Brace, Bill Starks, Tom Miller, and even a string quartet.

Not exactly household names, but a great concert of talented musicians, putting their spin on Dylan's music for about three and a quarter fun-filled hours. The sold out crowd paid their $7 joyfully and the event was topped off by a version of Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, led by a New Orleans style jazz band marching down the aisles, and each line was such by a different musician singing lead.

My other favorites were a soft "Baby Let Me Follow Me Down," the Eric Von Schmidt tune (as "interpolated" by the Bobster); "Most of the Time"; a wild "Everything is Broken"; a wistful "Simple Twist of Fate"; a John Jennings (of Mary Chapin Carpenter fame) brooding version of "Idiot Wind"; and a Byrdesque "Mr. Tamborine Man." I've been listening recently to my dollar, discarded library purchase of a used "Oh Mercy," and that may explain in part my list.

Dylan's philosophy was summed up in a line "no one stays in one place too long...," and it fit the variety of the concert.

Mix and Match Music

Although rock was always a classic mix of rhythm and blues, country, and jazz with a few other genres mixed in, the Wall Street Journal in an article yesterday notes a recent, large uptick in the mixing of musical genres, accelerated by the flat world of the Internet. The interesting article is at the following Web address:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118738765993401397.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Will it have a long-standing impact on music or will it just be a short-term blip based on the current fascination with the Internet?

Threememboring

This week saw the passing of Phil Rizzuto, and Merv Griffin, and the 25 anniversary of the first CD. All three had their impact on modern culture.

Phil Rizzuto, the "Scooter," was the talented Yankee shortstop who worked hard to make the technical tools of his trade look easy--his smooth fielding, great bunting, and clutch hitting seemed effortless. He was a Yankee that even a Brooklyn Dodger fan could root for (it turned out he was from Brooklyn, and once tried out for the Dodgers). Rizzuto was a Hall of Famer, but he was passed over for the Hall of Fame 15 times by the writers and 11 times by the Veterans Committee. Finally, a persuasive speech by Ted Williams (a pretty good authority) seemed to push Rizzuto into Cooperstown in 1994. "If we'd had Rizzuto in Boston, we'd have won all those pennants instead of New York," Williams often said.

Rizzuto would do anything to win (all with a smile and grace), but he did not take himself too seriously. As a long-time Yankee announcer he was a comfort in chaos, a natural who gave classic status to "Holy Cow," and the Meatloaf song, "Love by the Dashboard Light" (which used his call of a game to achieve a strategic success). Rizzuto was a baseball gentle man who stood tall (in spite of his relatively short size) in contrast to many of our current day players, but whose tradition is being carried on nicely by the Yankee's current shortstop, Derek Jeter.

Merv Griffin is another "down-to-earth" (no pun intended) celebrity who made a recent exit. Merv was mostly remembered in the mass media as a TV impresario (credited as creator of recent era's two most popular game shows, "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy"). He was also remembered for his talk shows, in which he made easy patter a landmark that even Seinfeld's Kramer could relate to. In one memorable episode, Kramer had purchased the set of the Griffin talk show and used it as his living room; Kramer put his all of his visitors (including Jerry, Elaine, and George) into the set and started the easy, now fake-sounding, talk show patter.

I also remembered Merv's hosting of Play Your Hunch early in his career, 1958-1962, when he was a modest, unassuming, former band singer, and easy-to-take game show host of a clever game show. One day, Jack Paar accidentally emerged onto the set of Play Your Hunch during a live broadcast (Paar was superstitiously trying to avoid the elevators at Rockefeller Center), and Griffin held Paar captive for a friendly, unplanned interview. As legend has it, Paar was so impressed by Merv's effort to hold him, that he brought Merv on as a replacement host on the Paar version of the The Tonight Show, and that started Merv's more than 20-year talk show career (1965-1986). Merv made his projects seem easy and accessible, somewhat like the work of Scooter Rizzuto. Merv added much to the lure (or lore) of TV.

The CD and digital sound were first created on August 17, 1982, after the first CD first went into production at a Philips plant in Germany. For the record (pun intended), the first CD, 25 years ago was a copy of "The Visitors" by Abba, with the first batch going on sale in the retail market in November that year. It led to our supposedly better sounding, more portable world of digital music and data. Or do we continue to miss vinyl?