Death Of An Indie Bible (or, Adventures with Option Magazine, Pt. 2)

By Johnny Mnemonic

In my last installment of Music Journalism 101 I outlined my misadventures in the land of grunge and honey circa 1991 and how a proposed story on Sub Pop lumberjacks Tad got deep-sixed, frustratingly, by Option. The magazine operated from 1985 to 1998, publishing 81 issues overall, and at its 1995 peak, according to Wikipedia, had amassed a circulation of 27,000. That's not quite at Spin level, and not even in the same universe as Rolling Stone, but still damned respectable for what was known in its time as the indie underground's bible.

People tend to remember Option rather fondly, and I'll be the first to admit that I was proud to write for it even though the pay, if adjusted for inflation, probably wasn't any better than writing for online publications nowadays - which is to say, negligible. Those of you reading this who also reviewed records for the magazine back in the day will recall that reviewers, in lieu of actually payment, got to keep the albums and cassettes sent to them by the editors. But the free music (plus free subscription, of course) combined with the ego-buzz of seeing one's byline in print was enough when it was a magazine whose mission you believed in.

Respect from the music community aside, editorially speaking, Option was pretty disorganized, and it was hard to get a handle on what, if any, editorial "stance" the publication took other than "if it's independent, we cover it," which meant one issue you'd see, say, Patti Smith on the cover, an African world-beat artist the next and an obscure British folk artist attempting to make a comeback the next. Cool, but in the long run, not the smartest strategy to employ when trying to make headway at the newsstand. Subscribers are one thing, and I suspect the magazine had a fairly loyal subscription base that re-upped each year. But the habits of newsstand browsers are different, and nowadays even the lowest-circulation fanzine knows to put a known quantity or semi-familiar face on the cover (along with names of main feature artists listed on the left-hand side of the cover, not the right, due to the way magazines are displayed); otherwise you risk nobody even picking the damned thing up in the first place, and you can't build a brand in a vacuum. Option, to its credit, wised up about this considerably during its 13-year run, but I still hear people make the occasional comment about it being "too eclectic for its own good."

As a writer, contending with Option could also be confusing, as one's story pitches seemed to be accepted or rejected on such a random basis that you imagined the editors taping ideas to a giant roulette wheel, spinning it, and making assignments based on where it stopped. Worse, it wasn't unusual to get an assignment, turn it in, and then wait for it to be published... and wait... and wait... or in the case of the Tad piece, call up the editor only to be told, "Oh, we didn't have room to run it, and now it's too old..."

Too, the head-in-sand quality I alluded to in the Tad story could sometimes be perplexing. For all Option's so-called championing of the music underground, Amerindie and otherwise, it "overlooked" (or conveniently ignored) anything that didn't quite measure up to the editors' rarified notions of what was hip. Ergo, the Seattle snub; grunge bands were kinda ratty-looking, presumably blue collar or worse (we now know that grunge's early white-trash image was a marketing ruse foisted upon the public by Sub Pop), and - shudder! - borderline heavy metal, therefore very uncool. Option played favorites; for example, you'd always see some avant-garde Independent Project Records band or shambling K Records artist being featured (one of this blog's comments, below after the Tad entry, makes a similar observation), but only occasional lip service would be given to the skronk/noise groups of Amphetamine Reptile, Treehouse and Touch & Go. (For some reason the gnarly, noisy, long-haired outfits on the SST label were mainstays of Option-land, but hey, SST was headquartered just down the road from the Option offices in L.A.) Additionally, a pervasive politically correct streak, editorially speaking, was impossible to miss; there's nothing wrong with covering females and persons of color, but that sort of lingering Great Society mindset sometimes trumped notions of actual musical worthiness at Option.

This myopia-bred snobbery extended to the Option choice of cover subjects. Certainly featuring the likes of Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets early on was admirable, and it wasn't unusual to see (as noted) Patti Smith or Frank Zappa staring out at you from the newsstand down at your local record store where Option was typically sold. (Good choices from a circulation point of view, by the way.) As that Option Wikipedia page points out, however, the frequent dialogue among staffers ran along lines of, "Is this artist too popular to be worthy of a cover?" (What do we do if Sonic Youth leaves SST and goes to DGC?) Such navel gazing further resulted in an almost formulaic rotation of non-rock cover subjects to ensure that Option was never perceived as "mainstream" or, heaven forbid, "rockist" (more p.c. groupthink there). The comment above about being too eclectic aside, part of Option's appeal, certainly, was how it wore its eclecticism on the sleeve, that between its covers nearly all genres were considered equals (again, see the Wikipedia entry for more details). But to many who discovered the magazine late during its tenure, it's likely that it did indeed have a somewhat schizophrenic reputation.

The fact that it often relied upon less-than-seasoned writers to provide the bulk of its content didn't help its case either. Nobody who picked up Option was necessarily expecting The New Yorker, but I distinctly recall getting my copy in the mail from time to time, reading an article, and wondering to myself, "Did anybody even fact-check this?" Plus, the magazine had a tendency to favor certain "pet writers" of dubious talent beyond that of extreme self-promotion. Without a doubt one of the most annoying music journalists the ‘80s and ‘90s ever produced was Gina Arnold, whose solipsistic wet kiss to alternative rock, 1993's Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana, remains a low literary point of the era; Arnold penned feature after feature for Option despite all extant evidence that her reporting skills were nil. Having edited publications in both L.A. and NYC myself, I understand how thousands of writers are out there clamoring for work, and how as a result one tends to rely on a small pool of trusted freelancers, folks who turn in clean copy, and on time. But they also have to write coherently and cogently, and they need to be mindful of the fact that their readers aren't interested in their personal diary scribblings (which is how Arnold's pieces invariably came off).

Option began life in ‘85 as an outgrowth of/successor to the late, great OP, which had enjoyed a healthy 26-issue run in the early ‘80s as the first indie music bible prior to founder/publisher John Foster imposing a built-in obsolescence rule. Two music publications sprung up in its wake: Sound Choice, a kind of anarchist/collective-minded mag published by the extraordinarily grumpy and no-business-sense-whatsoever David Ciaffardini; and Option, founded by Scott Becker (publisher) and Richie Unterberger (editor). I'd subscribed to OP (among scores of music fanzines) and faithfully sent in my money to Sound Choice and Option, too. It wouldn't be too long before I offered my services to Option, because while I'd already been reviewing records for Spin and Circus (for pay), I greatly liked the magazine's DIY spirit, and anyway, it was hard to place more than one review every few issues in the other two because the competition among freelancers was so fierce. Option seemed to be a welcoming group of peers.

That "DIY spirit" could be a double-edged sword, however. Publisher Becker reportedly had an iron-clad rule that his magazine would not accept pitch calls from record labels' publicists. A pitch call is exactly that: the p.r. agent rings up an editor in order to hype a client or follow up on a record that had previously been mailed to the magazine. In order to increase the chances of landing coverage in the magazine, sometimes the label would also provide what's known in the industry as "swag": free teeshirts, coffee mugs, shot glasses, promotional-only releases, and just plain bizarre gee-gaws with vague thematic tie-ins to the artist or the record. (Swag is far less abundant in 2009 as the labels have realized they're just giving editors and writers free eBay fodder.) I personally never saw Becker's rule being implemented during the times I visited the Option office, but I heard enough complaints from publicists who knew I wrote for Option and were begging me to pitch their artists to the magazine that I have no doubt it existed in some form or another.

So you can add a measure of hubris to the aforementioned snobbery when tallying up the Option score. Virtually no magazine in the history of entertainment coverage ever enforced such a strict mandate, for while a moderate separation between the editorial and advertising departments is generally considered good for a publication's ethical health, we're not exactly talking about someone ringing Option up and offering, payola-style, to purchase the back cover ad space in exchange for a ten-page feature. In all fairness to record labels, their viewpoint tends to be that they advertise in music magazines where their products will get the most visibility, and there's an expectation that at least from time to time those products will be covered. They don't necessarily expect a positive review (some do, actually), but they still want a fair shot at coverage. That's just the way it works. Imagine someone calling up Option: "Did you get our check and the artwork for the Johnny Mnemonic Blues Band ad?" "Yes we did, and thanks. It will run next issue." "What are the chances of the Mnemonic album getting reviewed?" "CLICK!"

For a magazine in the early ‘90s to play the gatekeeper card to the extreme that Option did, trying to remake the rules in an industry where back-scratching and favor-rendering is not only business as usual but, when done properly, an efficient and mutually beneficial process, was ludicrously out of sync with reality. That, an inability to see the music magazine milieu through the eyes of the aforementioned newsstand browser (it's no coincidence that Mojo came on the scene around this time and, with its regular rotation of Beatles, Dylan, Neil Young, Stones, Springsteen, etc. for its covers, was wildly successful due to its sheer predictability), and a series of unfortunate business decisions (notably the launching, in 1995, of sister publication UHF, a glossy "alternative fashion" magazine that was a massive, money-sucking flop and embarrassed everyone associated with it), all conspired to doom Option.

In mid-'98, we writers received a letter from Becker indicating that Option was temporarily suspending publication. At the time it was suggested that Option would eventually reincarnate itself as some sort of combined digital-print entity, although Becker's plans were pretty vague, and nothing ever materialized. The July-August 2008 issue was the final one.

In light of all the recent music magazine shutterings, the Option story probably isn't that unusual. It's even likely that, as consumer habits change and markets shift, most if not all magazines will enjoy a finite lifespan; only one in several thousand ever has a shot of lasting long enough to be considered "an institution" like Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair. But it did last for 13 lucky years, and a lot of folks, myself included, loved it dearly, which is why being privy to Option's numerous eventual missteps was so frustrating. In all my conversations back in the day with the editors I don't know if I ever leaned across the desk and asked, "Why are you doing this? Have you considered this instead?" - mainly because it wasn't my place to do so. It was their magazine, after all, and they were supposed to know what they were doing.

 By the way, I never got a kill fee for the Tad story, dammit.

***

Johnny Mnemonic is the pseudonym of a "highly-regarded" national writer with, he advises us, over two decades' experience working as a music critic, reporter and editor. We've never met him face-to-face, and he further advises he will be delivering his blogs to us via the "double blind drop-box method," whatever that is, to ensure his anonymity.

You know the drill... taking our cue from Seth Godin with the idea that what unites us is more than music -- basically, if we share the same taste in music, we likely share the same taste in other stuff, as seemingly useless as it occasionally may be. Hence, this month's compendium:

Stuff That's Kept Me from Losing My Mind This Summer

1. Harry Potter Hangover



Seriously. It happens to me every summer. Another book comes out so I have to read all of the previous books again just to remember what the hell is going on. Same deal with the films. So in advance of the Half-Blood Prince's release, it was the usual deal: start reading around midnight, can't put the damn thing down til roughly 4 AM = bags under the eyes daily.

I don't know who that kid is but I like it.

2. Air Rifle



Friggin cool. My parents pulled it out of the basement and it was love at first shot. That's my dad (sporting silk boxers with silver dragons) getting in touch with his inner badass. Forgot to take one of me. I did good. Everyone should have one of these things. Yes, I'm still a Democrat [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

Some people spend their time wondering about the meaning of life .......others worry about death and the afterlife. Me, I'm trying to figure out just how many people have recorded and released records over the last 60 years. I've concluded the answer is way beyond a million and even that may be a low estimate. Every year my brother and I take a road trip to "dig" for records, this year we did 3,000 miles, 5 states and looked at what we estimate to be over 2 million records. Our goal is to find those undiscovered gems of music that have been lost in the black hole of vinyl releases. Music that truly deserves attention but for various reasons never received any when they were released. Music that has remained unheard, sitting in the bin of a used record store until folks like us give them a spin and discover the magic within.


In Cedar Bluffs, Iowa there is an amazing store packed with vinyl called Kanesville Kollectibles....three levels of an old manufacturing plant with enough records to build a suspension bridge to neighboring Omaha......more records than most people see in a lifetime.....heaven for nuts like me. We arrived at this vinyl Mecca at 10:00AM and proceeded to spend the next 8 hours digging through racks and boxes of LP's....hoping to find that unknown gem, that musical golden ticket that makes all our time and effort worthwhile. This year's winner was found hidden away in the Country & Western section...an LP by a young couple, Kris & Jerry, who were from rural Illinois titled "A Sunny Day" released in 1966. The second the needle from my portable turntable hit the grooves we knew this was special...a great discovery....the reason we dig.


There are many amazing things about this record. The music is unlike any I've ever heard in my 30 years of vinyl addiction, sounding like a real down to earth Sonny & Cher without the Hollywood glitz that tainted their records. A folky duo that use saxaphone, accordian and viola all to their advantage.  The songs are beautiful monuments to young love and innocence and must be more powerful than both as Kris & Jerry are still married today some 43 years later.  When I realized I was in love with this record I decided to try to find Kris & Jerry which turned out to be pretty easy.

Still living in the same area, Jerry is a Music Director at a local school and had fond memories of the record he recorded in 1966. "I loved to write songs" Jerry told me, and the songs on the LP were written in very short order. "I didn't really have too many influences, I just wrote what I felt. It was a way for me to communicate". Very humble about his record I think Jerry was surprised that someone had unearthed his past.

The LP is a "vanity press", one of those records that have a generic catalog chosen cover which just happens to capture the feel of "A Sunny Day" in an uncanny fashion. The songs are short and to the point, all original songs except for the fitting cover of the Rolling Stones "As Tears Go By". This LP has that magic that very few LP's exude, something that occupies it's own special time and space while having a sound that has proven to be timeless. Cuts like "The Boy I Really Loved", "In A Far Away Place", "See The Shape I'm In" and "Little People" all reach out from my speakers and make the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention...an eerie journey into the private lives of two people who have no shame in sharing it with us. Kris's vocals which don't really jump out at first really grow on you in a beautifully haunting way that penetrates deeper with each listen.


It is with great honor that I am now able to share their music with the world and know that the message they placed in a bottle some 43 years ago has been found by an appreciative audience. Hopefully some enterprising re-issue label will want to get their music to a wider audience, until then click on the tunes below and enjoy the sounds of Kris & Jerry

The Boy I Really Loved


Can’t You See What You’re Doing To Me



In A Far Away Place

GUEST STARS, GUITARS AND SALSA: Wiyos on the Bob Dylan Summer Tour, Pt. 3

Willie Nelson is royalty! Bob Dylan smiles! When's the next tour?!?

BY CARL HANNI

August 11, Tucson, AZ: Of all possible places for a band to spend five nights in the middle of a summer tour, Austin, TX, is surely one of the most prime. And indeed, the road gods smiled on The Wiyos, and gave us five nights in a big house off Lamar on the South side all to ourselves after, during and before gigs in Houston, Austin, Corpus Christi and Dallas, including two full days off. Our host (an Austin musician friend of The Wiyos' Michael Farkas), his wife and kids were on holiday at just the perfect moment for us to turn it into a home-base; a very good thing, considering how oppressively hot and humid it was at every turn in Texas.

Arriving late Sunday (8/2) after a drive from Houston, we had the whole next day to run errands, hit thrift stores and try and avoid spending the tour profit in record stores. Highlights: Cura's for lunch, and a dip in Barton Springs at sunset. There's no way to overstate how awesome the huge, spring-fed public pool of Barton Springs is; Austinians of every stripe flocked there by the hundreds and there's still plenty of space. I got to hang out with the fabulously talented Austin musician Graham Reynolds (Golden Arm Trio, etc.) for a Texas BBQ dinner and his usual high level of discourse.

Tuesday's show was at Dell Diamond in the sprawling suburban city of Round Rock, just north of Austin. The Wiyos played a great set looking straight into a blazing sun to a huge, happy, crispy crowd. These folks were ready to party, and the show had a festive atmosphere, despite the local coppers actually busting people for pot in the crowd and - I kid you not - dragging some off in handcuffs. Apparently Johnny Law hadn't heard that WILLIE NELSON was playing, but the crowd sure knew; these were Willie people through and through. I hung with Wammo from Asylum St. Spankers, Graham Reynolds and local audio tech and musician Buzz, and soaked it up from out front with all the happy, hot people.

Willie Nelson is royalty everywhere, but he's the mayor, governor, president and potentate all rolled into one in Texas, especially in Austin and Dallas. Everyone wants a little piece of Willie; everyone feels like they own a little piece of Willie; and he manages, in his own Zen-like way, to give enough of himself that everyone seems satisfied. This is sort of the cowboy hat version of the loaves and fishes; no matter how much Willie gives, there's always more to give. His show was actually a double-header of Texas royalty, as the venerable Ray Benson of Asleep At The Wheel, another legendary Texas icon, sat in for the whole set, rocking his Telecaster and grinning up a storm. Boy, is he tall. The crowd went bananas, and stayed that way.

Bob Dylan, perhaps taking cue from Willie, also had an ace up his sleeve; local guitar hero Charlie Sexton, an alumnus of previous Dylan bands and recordings, sat in for most of Dylan's set. He totally rocked up "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum," reproducing his original licks from Love and Theft. Sexton produced an interesting chemical reaction on stage; not only did he add a hot layer of lead guitar over everything he played on, but he spent quite a bit of the show inching into closer and closer proximity to Bob on-stage, unlike everyone else in Dylan's band, who generally kept their distance.

But as Sexton got closer and closer, locking eyes with Dylan, Dylan actually started to mug back at Sexton, executing a series of subtle feints, shoulder rolls, bug-eyes and - HOLD THE PRESSES!! - an actual, face splitting, ear-to-ear grin that seemed to light up the entire stage like a torch for about 2 seconds. Now, in most artists a single grin might not be front page news, but Dylan generally seems pretty detached and sometimes a bit dour on stage. This one grin, though, was so full of genuine mirth and (momentary) good cheer that... well, it made me feel a little different about the man. It broke through the surface, and kind of made the tour.

After that...

Corpus Christi was absurdly hot and humid, and put The Wiyos in an even hotter on-stage oven in front of a fairly modest and sun-stunned, rough looking crowd. The ball park was beautiful, but the setting was desolate, situated in a totally decrepit industrial area that wasn't even coolly decrepit, just ugly. On the other hand, they had a POOL just behind and to the right of the stage; Wiyos Parrish and Joe Bass and I lounged around in the pool with Willie Nelson playing 40 yards away; ah, that's the life. A full moon shined like a sky-lamp, illuminating our way back to Austin by midnight.

On Thursday Parrish and I hit Waterloo Records for a few used vinyl scores (The Gossip, Brother Jack McDuff, John Hammond, 3 Mustaphas 3, more) while the band took care of the never ending errands and we convened for a fabulous meal at Polvo's.

My last day on the road with The Wiyos was less than scintillating, but we all do what we have to do, and what I had to do was stay behind with the tour van at the Freightliner repair shop in Austin for repairs while the band caught a ride to Dallas/Grand Prairie with Nevada Newman, another Asylum St. Spanker. I didn't get on the road till 4 pm, just in time to catch some crap traffic out of town, and it was almost 8 pm by the time I hit Dallas, long after The Wiyos' and Willie's sets. Oh well. I got in a final, fabulous meal (thank you DEGA!), said some good-byes to the promoter folks from JamUSA and some stage crew, and we beat it to a hotel. The band was up and out and on their way to Lubbock by 8 am and I caught a noon-time flight back to Tucson.

The Wiyos went on to Albuquerque and have a few shows in S. California, ending 8/16 in Stateline, NV, at Lake Tahoe. The Phoenix show on 8/11 was cancelled due to heat (what DID they expect in Phoenix in August?); instead of being at the show, I'm here writing about the tour.

Back home. To the heat, the routine, the fish tacos, the sunsets. I love it here.

But still: hey Wiyos, when's the next tour?

***

For Wiyos tour video blogs, see:

http://www.thewiyos.com

http://www.myspace.com/thewiyos

***

Carl Hanni, a music industry publicist, record collector and club deejay based in Tucson, regularly blogs for Blurt.

Has summer even happened? Good Lord, it's almost over and it feels, with the recent swelter-fest (at least in the East Coast) that it just started.

Lots of good stuff cranked at Outlandos HQ to keep us feeling somewhat cool, see below.

But first, petite favor to ask you kids. This will literally take you 2 seconds, it's super easy and you don't even have to give a rats tail about SxSW but... would you vote for us? 30 seconds of your life. It's a BIG deal in our world and would mean so much! How could we ever do it without you? Seriously. Thanks zillions. If we get in, not only do I get a free badge (let me tell you, those suckers are expensive) but we get some handy-dandy publicity.

Help me, help me? Just click the three links below and then click the "thumbs up" next to each one:

The Value of Emotional Value (Interactive Version)
VOTE HERE

Doing It like Trent: DIY for the Little Guy
VOTE HERE

Leveraging Emotional Value (Music Version)
VOTE HERE

Now on to the fun stuff:

1. Contramano, Contramano


Buy it.
Argentinian chamber-punk. Go figure. It's spectacular. Seriously, you need to own this record IMMEDIATELY. In case you missed it, they were featured on the Dose last week.

2. Roman Candle, Oh Tall Tree in the Ear



Buy it.
The Bees (US) are easily one of my favorite bands of all time [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

Garlic and mustard and linens and face creams - these are a few of my favorite things...

By Coco Hames

My friend always sends those quizzes around, you know the ones where it's a bunch of questions about you?  Whenever I've worked in offices, and been stuck at a computer, they're really fun to fill out.  You know, stuff like...

When's your birthday? May 4 (same as Audrey Hepburn and Julian Barratt).

What's your favorite color? Black or white or grey or a combo.

What's your favorite place?  Either the south of France or western North Carolina.

Who would play you in a movie? Alan Rickman or Jeanne Moreau.

Favorite sport? SEC football, but that's about it.

What word or phrase do you overuse?  I say "Oh..." when I don't want to answer something, in a scornful but playful way, like my Grandma Max did, which she may or may not have gotten from Agnes Moorehead in The Magnificent Ambersons.

Beach or mountains? Mountains.

Dogs or cats? DOGS.  Goddamnit I hate cats.

On and on it goes.  But they never give me enough room.

I like all-white linens because they are aesthetically pleasing (in that they are not aesthetically disturbing) and because you can bleach them.  Only partially because color towels look gross and it's gross to get pilly little red or black balls in your armpits after you've just taken a shower.  All-white linens are good for lots of reasons.  I've been known to fall asleep with a glass of red wine in my hand.  Bleached that right out.  No one's the wiser.  I've been in bed with someone who scratched a bug bite on their leg WITH THEIR TOENAIL and sliced it open, bled everywhere.  Bleach!  Also bleach just makes things SEEM cleaner, smells all bleachy.  Bleachy clean.

A good gift for me would be a seltzer maker because I drink a lot of seltzer water.  They have some Swiss machine at Williams-Sonoma that makes seltzer.  FYI - Christmas is coming eventually and all I'm saying is, it'd be a nice gift for me.

I love books and spend all of my money on them.  If you gave me $1,000 right now, I'd go directly to Amazon and buy all the books I want.  I love books and expensive cosmetics.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  I like things to feel luxurious, if I ever am able.  Just things.  Like the fabric on a sofa or clean hardwood floors underfoot.  I like high thread count sheets and exorbitantly priced face creams, but I wear clothes until they fall off my body and haven't gotten a professional haircut in like five years.  When I used to wear extensions.  Those were the days!  Actually I can't have hair touching my neck, it freaks me out.  I shaved my head in high school and pulled out all of my eyebrows and eyelashes.  

I compulsively touch my face when I'm talking, which I imagine is annoying to look at.  I hate things that taste sweet or smell sweet.  I don't like candy or ice cream.  I came around to ice cream briefly in Devon (of the famed Devonshire cream) where I had the most freakishly delicious fresh strawberry ice cream.  On the beach, in winter.  Nothing is more civilized than walking on the beach in winter.  Anyway, I'm lactose intolerant so anything with milk is just not going to work for me.

I like red wine very much, and believe I'm one of those "New World" people who like wines from California and South America better than wines from Spain or France.  But I do like Italian wine.  And you know what, sometimes I just like any old red wine, because I like tannins.  I like vodka because it tastes clean; I do not like rum or tequila or anything like that, retch.  My dad likes Scotch, which I do not like.  I like Irish whiskey, but only now and then.  My friend Christian gave me Irish whiskey in London in the middle of a party because that's what he was drinking, and I really liked it.  But it borders on too sweet for me, so I water it down a bit and take it on ice.

I didn't like ketchup when I was little, which doesn't make any sense, because ketchup is awesome, but maybe it had to do with the fact that ketchup has a surprising amount of sugar in it, and I don't like sugar.  I LOVE yellow mustard, probably one of my top five favorite things in the world.  Fancy candles, dogs, books, lemons, yellow mustard, those are my top five favorite things in the world.  I also love spicy food, especially vinegary spicy food, like hot sauces and things like that.  I like chiles; I grow some right now on my stoop.  I like many herbs, but not cilantro because one time in Gainesville someone put too much cilantro in the salsa and that was it, it was OVER for you, cilantro!

I like some movies but I hate horror movies because they give me nightmares.  I can be persuaded to watch a horror movie from time to time, but I will never, ever forget it.  I never, ever forget anything.  The difference in the color of several leaves I saw while driving in Georgia fifteen years ago, I will never forget that.  I don't like to think it's useless but sometimes it feels useless.  I get very upset if people talk in a movie theater.  I went to see Harry Potter and four stupid girls sat in front of me chatting away like it was hen's night at Applebees and I even said, "Shh!" TWICE!  But they didn't shush, and then the guy next to me started texting and his phone was SO BRIGHT, so I just started crying.

And it is not that I don't like coffee, it's just that you seem to have to do so much to it to make it palatable, so probably you shouldn't drink it?  I don't know, I mean because of the lactose thing, I HAVE to take my coffee black (unless there's soy, but a creepy actress in LA told me that it makes you gain weight in your womanly parts because it has something in it that mimics estrogen, but taste-wise soy's never strong as milk anyway) and so my only recourse is to add sugar?  Gross.  I like tea okay.  Yorkshire Red tea with soy milk.  But then again with the estrogen.

Anyone who shares a bed with me has to have their own blanket.  My body temperature is at a constant 105 degrees and I simply cannot stand to have that raised at any point.  Not while watching television, not while napping, and definitely not during a full night's sleep.  I don't like to touch very much at all.  I have a synapse misfiring or a general subconscious misunderstanding of what touching means, sometimes it feels like we're dating, and that is super confusing.  I am not good at holding hands, especially with friends.  Or linking arms or hugging or doing any of the things girls do together.  It freaks me out.

If you take your clothes to the cleaners and get them pressed, they look brand new.  Fear birds because they can make tools; they even use the bones of other animals - such as cuttlefish - to sharpen their beaks.  Every time you slice a piece of garlic, it breaks a cell wall in the structure of the garlic, which releases the enzyme that tastes so garlicky.  This is why garlic is milder sliced than whipped up in a food processor.  This is why you really only need one clove of garlic when you're making pesto, but you need to chop up a lot to make a pasta sauce, which is what I'm going to do right now.

***

Blurt "co-co-editor" Coco Hames fronts The Ettes - Hames on guitar, Jem Cohen on bass and Poni Silver on drums - whose album Look At Life Again Soon and EP, Danger Is, were released by Take Root. Their new Greg Cartwright-produced album Do You Want Power hits stores Sept. 29, and you bet we're gonna have a big feature on the band in our next issue. Check out the band's MySpace page for music and tour dates - a tour kicks off this week, in fact, on August 13.

Photo of the Ettes: Heidi Ross

Revenge of the Nerds, Better off Dead, Risky Business... to say we simply "watched" them would be an understatement. We practically wore the strip out on the Betamax, memorizing every scene, every line, every song. From Booger to Fronch fries to Swamp, these films became heroic keystones, handily defining us as proud children of the 80s --- perhaps in the same way that Zeppelin or the Beatles were iconic backdrops to my parents' upbringing. The Hughes' films of course being mandatory [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

RAIN, GOD, AND MORE VINTAGE GEAR: Wiyos on the Bob Dylan Summer Tour, Pt. 2

By Carl Hanni

August 4, Austin, TX: Fourteen days into a eighteen day run with NYC's The Wiyos across the country on the Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson/John Mellencamp summer tour. We're in Austin with a day off as part of a seven day/five show Texas mini-tour; a Texas five-step. The band jumped off the tour last weekend for two days to fly to Portland, OR, to play Pickathon, a study in contrasts for sure. I drove the van from Atlanta to Houston via Orange Beach, AL, where I hooked up with the Two Man Gentlemen Band, the fill-in openers for the tour on July 31.

Making good time, I dropped into New Orleans for lunch at Coop's on Sunday, which always has a good mix of locals and tourists who have strayed in off Decatur. This is the first time I've been to N.O. since Katrina; missing roofs, caved in houses and desolate looking streets can be seen from I-10, but downtown and the French Quarter look (and smell) pretty much the same. New Orleans is still, blessedly, New Orleans, in its humid, fetid, crazy-ass, dysfunctional glory.

The tour continues to unfold with its military-like precision. The marshalling of multiple semi-trucks full of gear, rigging, lights, staging and catering is carried out by a huge crew of road-tested veterans, many of whom have been with the various headliners for years or even decades. With separate production crews for Dylan, Mellencamp and Nelson, promoter staff for each show (often the same from show to show), a huge local production crew at each venue, plus security and catering staff AND three sets of band members (not counting The Wiyos) this is a huge rolling operation with many intertwined parts. After 2 weeks I'm getting a grip on who's-who, but still find someone new to meet each day that's been with the tour from day one. The Wiyos, with our five guys (including myself), are like guppies swimming with the big fish. But the tour has been great for the band so far, and they have been getting a good response to their opening half-hour set each night, making new friends and fans at each stop, selling CDs and planting themselves in the mind's eye of tens of thousands of music fans coast to coast.

The uniformity of the production is both necessary and terribly impressive, but the flavor of each city, crowd and venue comes through loud and clear.

Durham was a beautiful, urban/downtown ball park with a lively crowd that was ready to party, rock-concert style. Afterwards the band was put up by local friends, fellow musicians; a living room jam session kept everyone hopping till after midnight. Simpsonville, SC, outside Greenville, was a rolling green park of a venue in the heart of the conservative South, with a relatively sedate crowd that seemed a little less impressed with The Wiyos than other crowds; polite more than enthusiastic. A local evangelical gospel choir appeared backstage to join Willie for "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" and another couple of numbers; with their black suits and shoes and starched white shirts, they hung out outside backstage, seemingly completely peaceful in the crushing heat and humidity. A newscaster for the local Fox News affiliate was broadcasting live from the front gate and interviewed The Wiyos after the set for a spot on the 10 p.m. news. We camped at a local state park after the show, woken up at 7 a.m. by the first (but not the last) rain of the day. Rain has been a constant in the last couple of weeks; there may be a day or two that it hasn't.

The Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Alpharetta, just north of Atlanta, was blessedly a covered venue, and afforded the band our first, actual (air conditioned!) green room backstage, timely respite from the rain and humidity and general funkiness of The Wiyos' sturdy Freightliner van. Various friends and ladyfriends of the band appeared from Asheville and elsewhere, a mid-tour mini-reunion to help the band remember what life is like Off The Tour.

The band flew out at a very early 6 am for their shows at Pickathon, while I drove the van to Orange Beach for my rendezvous with the Two Man Gentlemen Band. The venue is an amphitheatre situated in a huge entertainment complex of shops, amusement park attractions and hotels on to the Alabama Gulf Coast, just off the beach. The area is incredibly lush and beautiful, half bayou and half not, with massive, kudzu- and creeper-draped trees dwarfing everything around. Churches in the area (and there are LOTS of churches) vie for having the most clever slogans on their signage out front - "Here comes the Son," "Beat the heat: instructions inside" and more witty come-ons. It's nice to see a little humor mixed in with their efforts to keep us out of hell; I wonder how many local church goers will be at the show tonight? Is this still "the devil's music" being played, or have we gotten past that?

The Gentlemen play a knockout set to a soggy crowd in the persistent rain, sign CDs and give away kazoos before hitting the road for an all-night drive to Nashville. Willie and Mellencamp play their standard sets, Willie spreading the love like only he can do. I finally get to see my second full set by Bob Dylan, whose voice is pretty rough at first, but warms up after a couple of songs. The band is incredibly tight, with guitarists Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball curling around each other like snakes in a pit and long-time bass player Tony Garnier swinging on the bottom end. Dylan is really mixing up the set-list from show to show, drawing on maybe 30 + songs for the tour. Tonight he plays "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding"), "Thunder on the Mountain," "It Ain't Me Babe," "The Levee's Gonna Break" and others before the standard three-song encore of "Like a Rolling Stone," "Jolene" and "All Along the Watchtower." Judging from a couple of his splay-legged leans into his keyboard, it looks like he might be having some fun on-stage; it's really sort of hard to tell, though.

After a Sunday sprint in the Freightliner that took me across parts of Alabama, all of lower Mississippi, Louisiana and into Texas (via New Orleans), I reach my nadir of the tour: Beaumont, Texas. I'm sure the people of Beaumont love Beaumont, and most folks were pretty decent all around, but I also got such the "you're not from these here parts" vibe from some of the locals at dinner (not the sweet waitress, thanks hon) that I almost had to check my calendar to see what decade it was.

Really guys: I'm not here to take, change or corrupt anything; just passing through and spending money. If you think I'm weird, you should see my friends. It all felt very Easy Rider for a moment. It's so humid that my glasses fog over when I step out of my hotel at 7 am.

After grabbing the weary Wiyos at the Houston airport (they knocked 'em dead at Pickathon, no sleep) we head to the beautiful (covered, thank you) Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion so they can jump back on the tour for the final twelve shows. They play through the exhaustion for a great set to a huge crowd and we hit the road for a late-night drive to Austin, for three evenings' worth of respite under a friendly roof, doing errands, hitting thrift stores, taking a dip in Barton Springs, and chowing down on Tex-Mex cooking (including my first salsa since leaving Tucson over two weeks ago). Time off in Austin: the perfect antidote to road burn.

Next: shows in Austin, Corpus Christi and Dallas/Grand Prairie.

***

Carl Hanni is a music writer, music publicist, disc jockey and vinyl archivist living in Tucson, AZ. He  hosts the vinyl-only Scratchy Record Show every Tuesday night at the Red Room in downtown Tucson, and spins records wherever and whenever he can. He believes that in a better (all analog) world all records would be released on vinyl, but takes good music from wherever he finds it--even on CD. His feature piece on legendary bass player/record producer Harvey Brooks was recently published in Goldmine.

The petty hierarchies of music - bands and songwriters

Let me premise this with saying that if I could, for every live show, I would list the musicians I'm playing with that night, as part of the billing. And in an ideal world there would be credits, like on an album, so everything was completely fair.

But why would that not work ? There needs to be a single name that tops everything, exclusively.

Well in jazz it can be different - particularly in instrumental, improvised jazz, where you sometimes see a list of musicians, as the band name. In that genre there is such an ethic of equality of musicians, that even 1 musician writing the songs, undermines the primacy of the players, so that's partly why it has to be improvised. They often eschew vocals with lyrics also, because they must know that words tend grab people's attention more than a pick hitting a guitar string.

You might point out that many classic rock bands are collaborative endeavors. But still there is the front person. Somehow there is that one person who enjoys being more public, and is in fact often better at it. Even bands with a strong stick-together ethic, will see just 1 or 2 people doing all the talking. Often there are the straight up interviews with the front person, and interviews with anyone else, will have a "behind the scenes" tone.

So far, what I'm suggesting is known to everybody - it takes all kinds. And in music its: extroverts and introverted specialists, lyricists and instrumentalists. But the truth is, this makes things ripe for unfairness. And we all play into it.

If you argue that lyrics are especially important, or that the songwriter/composer are who really make the music mean something, you have to recognize that in most cases there's a pretty steep hierarchy involved. Songs and lyrics need to be realized, and without the chemistry and talent of other musicians, no one may ever have heard certain songs or lyrics. So there's a symbiosis there of all the people who go into recording or performing music. You can even say that not all the components are equal. But honestly, in the end result, they end up very - very, un-equal

For something so symbiotic as a musical performance, or recording, it's striking how much it's TOP-MAN-TAKE-ALL. But still, We relate to a singular name, and identity for something. So this petty hierarchy as I call it, is not likely to ever change

I say this from years of inside experience on both sides of the issue. Even as a record producer, my role has been similar to that of a another musician on the record.  And I have my own band, with a revolving group of musicians, so uuhh... we just use MY NAME.. it just "makes sense". But I stand to benefit very disproportionally from anything good that could happen - cause my name is right there at the top

I'll just end with this - Think of music history. History is written and remembered as a collection of those single names - TOP-MAN-TAKE-ALL. And everyone else is a footnote. Thankfully, there are those who really care to look in depth at everything and everyone that went into the music. So, that's something I suppose

You can find Martin Bisi's songs and live appearances on my Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/theendcredits

It is with much trepidation that I write of "beach music," a phenomenon that has consistently been making waves across America and the world (yes, Virginia, there are even "beach enthusiasts" in Muncie) since the early '60s.  Over the past three decades, I have become increasingly fond of a questionable musical consciousness termed "beach music".  Yet, I fear writing about it, not just because I still do not know what IT is, but because neither does anybody else.

One thing beach-nuts do agree on is that the sounds which inspire partying on the East Coast have absolutely nothing to do with California and surf music. In the East, a beach party means shuffling a little bit in the sand (a dance called, appropriately enough, the shag) and guzzling beer or sipping bourbon.  In the Wild West of the '60s, a beach bash implied some surfing, and required the sounds of the Ventures and the Beach Boys as well as many weird bands such as the Pyramids and the Trashmen. 

Beach music of the East Coast bears the light of nostalgia and beams it through the AM radio waves--a longing for a past that was never a part of the scene to begin with.

Unlike the music on the West Coast, which was by white kids on an instrumental warpath, beach music has always been primarily music by blacks.  What's more, whereas the classic image and style of surf music suggested a homosexual subtext (with rockabilly's similar subtext right on its tail:  Roy Orbison's "Domino" being the first example of rock music emulating the sound of the waves), the theme of East Coast beach music is heterosexual love and desire, often thwarted but always remembered.

Because beach music tolerates more than it excludes, it's not really a definable genre like surf music.  The beach music categorization includes rock 'n' roll from New Orleans (Ernie K-Doe, the Showmen), Philadelphia soul (O'Jays, Archie Bell and the Drells), Stax (Sam & Dave, Booker T & the MG's), Motown (everybody), disco (Trammps, Tavares), '50s R&B (Joe Turner, Five Royales), '70's smooth soul (The Floaters, Tymes)...and yes, even garage punk (the Gentrys, the Swingin' Medallions).  

It's a mixed-up, shook-up celebration of a musical past, of passionate summers spent on the beach.

This phenomenon has been documented on zillions of excellent compilations (see above for a good example), but it was officially and best presented back in 1967 by Atlantic Records on two volumes called--you guessed it--BEACH BEAT (still, never reissued on CD).  

Compiled in response to the demands of Carolina beach lovers seeking oldies amidst the dearth of psychedelia in the late '60s, these two packages contain the quintessential beach performers and performances--classics by the Clovers, the Coasters and the Drifters; Willie Tee's "Teasin' You," Lenny O'Henry's "Across the Street," and, courtesy of Chess, Bobby Moore's amazing "Searching For My Love."

Atlantic being one of the great R&B labels, these two collections was almost ready-made, and so, in a sense, was the beach music scene. Clearly, here was a programmed sensibility, not a phenomenon based upon stylistic substance but on a memory of a romantic lie:  that music once had a meaning it now completely lacked.

The East Coast beach music sound is easy to package but impossible to pinpoint.  It's like you have to be in on IT to get IT.  

Beach music has become an institutionalized form of party ritual restricted to the coastal resort cities and inland campus areas of the Carolinas and Virginia.  The majority of the black groups branded with the "beach sound" were never intentionally creating music for this East Coast circuit. Instead, they were consumed by a locale desperately in need of an identity during a time when pop music seemed to be running riot with hippies and weird sounds.

It was an idea based on the belief that dancing to soul or doo-wop records would outlast the trendiness of the British Invasion and psychedelic rock.  And, oh, how right they were, those determined reactionary shaggers on the beach!

I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, where boys and girls at the University know how to party for weeks on end.  I have grown accustomed to the reactionary nature of beach music and its maddeningly nostalgic need to ignore the present until it becomes the past.  

I used to read loyally each new issue of the slick mag, It Will Stand, dedicated to the preservation of beach music, its very name suggesting the notion that the South will rise again.  I have listened faithfully to the old Rockin' Ray's "Hall of Fame" and "The Best of the Beach" radio shows on WBT in Charlotte.  And shopping for beach music has never been easier thanks to the Internet.

But still, amidst the beach hubbub, I have always felt that the meaning of its presence eluded me, and then one day I discovered why.

In the early '80s, I once had a long conversation with an A&R guy at Arista Records, Mitch Cohen.  Cohen was then compiling an anthology of beach music for the label called The Beat of the Beach (great title).  He had been asked by a higher-up at Arista to compile this collection because certain oldies were being consistently requested by distributors in the Carolina-Virginia area. Despite the invisibility of a discernible style, Cohen went for the job full throttle, talking with the editors at It Will Stand and oldies know-it-alls.  Never did Cohen assume that he knew what a beach record was.

At the time, Cohen agreed with me that there was no discernible style to beach music, but he did say that he understood that you had to be "on the inside" to properly pick up on the cultural codes and signs that distinguish a "beach record" from your ordinary oldie.  To know the shag beat may not involve a conscious effort but only an instinctual response to a manner of partying that has remained stable since the early '60s.

So, Cohen, in programming the anthology, went for the feeling of the record. In other words, he tried to hear exactly what a shagger on the dance floor would hear in the air, not what a rock pundit thinks someone should hear.

And what a shagger hears is so subjective it can only be compared to the gooseflesh twinge of recalling a lost love that is suddenly regained at the intimate moment of remembering. That a seemingly reactionary musical consciousness can be so romantic is a shuddering thought.  

But the idealism behind this love for an old record is also stirring:  For through the all-encompassing, albeit nebulous, harmony of the beach music scene, if a record was once loved, then there's the guarantee that it will endure.

You can find many of your beach needs daily at PopKrazy .