BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Marc Myers Tells Us 'Why Jazz Happened'

'Jazz, man, that’s where I’m at':
Chronicling the history of America's music

Myers provides the reader with a deep, rich, and broad perspective on the confluence of jazz and U.S. history in the decades following World War Two.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / November 18, 2013

[Why Jazz Happened by Marc Myers (2012: University of California Press); Hardcover; 266 pp; $30.51.]

After a very brief introduction, Walt Myers begins his history of jazz music with the bebop era. Charlie Parker’s saxophone floats in the background as he sets the background for a unique look at the economic, cultural, and even political circumstances of the last 70 or so years of jazz in the United States.

Truman Capote once called the writing of Jack Kerouac “typing, not writing.” A similar mindset met the advent of bebop in the 1940s. This snobbery came from a misunderstanding of the improvisation Beat writing and bebop insisted on. Within a decade, however, bebop had replaced the Big Band swing sound as the dominant force in the music.

Why Jazz Happened details this transformation. There are a multitude of details between the covers of this book. These details require a quality writer to arrange them and make a readable story. Myers performs that task nobly. In doing so, he provides the reader with a deep, rich, and broad perspective on the confluence of jazz and U.S. history in the decades following World War Two.

It may be difficult for anyone who first began listening to music on the radio in the 1960s to believe that jazz was at one time a popular and bestselling musical form. Indeed, concerts by swing band masters like Benny Goodman and shows by masters of the solo instrument like Charlie Parker were the mid-twentieth century equivalent to today’s hip-hop and rock artists. When the phonograph became affordable and the vinyl record common, the popularity of the form grew even greater.

Myers relates the intriguing story of the relationships between jazz artists, producers, electronics corporations, and the recording trade. He tosses into that mix the struggles of composers and performers in gaining compensation for their works and the growth of the musicians’ union. In his telling, the reader gains an understanding of the nature of art in an economy rapidly becoming corporatized, with the accompanying contradiction of simultaneous compartmentalization and centralization monopoly capitalism demands.

Advances in technology did more than enhance accessibility to the music and increase sales. It also changed the music itself. Instead of short solos made for a three minute song -- a virtual necessity on the shellac 78 RPM discs in existence at the beginning of reproducible music -- the advent of the 33⅓ RPM LP enabled producers to lay down extended solos.

Given the nature of bebop, which is defined by long solos by individual band members, the LP provided thousands more jazz listeners with an opportunity to hear their favorite ensembles and soloists. This popularized the music yet also removed its avant-garde allure. Now, anyone with a record player had the potential to be hip.

The downside to the development of vinyl records for jazz music and musicians, especially the shorter playing 45 RPM variety, was that record companies began to record other genres of music that were less established in the industry. This was done in part because many of these artists were less aware of the economic possibilities of the format and therefore easier to exploit.

Indeed, one could reasonably argue that it was the 45 RPM record that popularized both rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Both genres depended on a catchy hook and the songs usually ran less than three minutes each. As anyone who grew up listening to 45s knows, this format was perfect for those little round pieces of plastic with big holes in the middle.

In today’s world of Mp3s, downloading, ITunes, and Bittorrent, the pages Myers devotes to discussing artists’ attempts to gain control over the rights to their work takes on added interest. The story of musicians fighting to make money from other artists performing their works is a long one. It is also one that seems to contain more victories for the corporations that control music publishing and recording than victories for the artists.

The creation of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1914 was the beginning of an organized attempt to distribute the royalties from such performances. Its enhancement in the 1930s and 1940s created a stalemate between the industry and the Musicians Union that was resolved when one record company acceded to the union’s demands, thereby forcing the other corporations involved to do the same or rsik losing their stable of artists to another company.

The incorporation of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 1952 added another layer of accountability to the process, albeit one that took a slightly more industry-favorable position than either ASCAP or the union.

Never lost in the story’s telling by Myers are the changes in the music. He chronicles the history of postwar jazz from its bebop and swing roots to the smooth sounds of West Coast jazz to hard bop and into the fusion sounds of the late 1960s and 1970s. In between, he tells the story of avant-garde jazz and its modern music influences from returning GI musicians studying atonal composition and modern classical in university music departments on the GI Bill.

He also discusses the changes wrought by rock music’s British invasion and Berry Gordy’s softer R&B that became known as soul music. The cultural revolution of the 1960s, whether it was the fury and fight for justice boiling up in Black America or the psychedelic brew being mixed in the counterculture of America’s youth, influenced the direction jazz would take, as well.

Myers touches on them all to create a detailed, well-researched and readable history of the essential musical form of the United States.

Why Jazz Happened is a book for anyone interested in jazz music. This history penned by Marc Myers places jazz within the cultural, technological, and economic currents of the period covered. The writing is fluid and accessible. Myers provides a complex story of a cultural phenomenon where the context is more than incidental.

Not only will readers understand jazz music on a deeper level after reading this book, they will also better understand the history of the United States after World War Two.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, was published in 2013, along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'Love Goes to Buildings on Fire'

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire:
New York City, just like I pictured it

From the steamy streets of the South Bronx and the future that would become hip-hop to the steamier bathhouses and clubs in lower Manhattan that became world-famous dens of disco, Hermes relates his tale.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever by Will Hermes (2012: Faber and Faber); Paperback (Reprint Edition); 384 pp; $16.

My stated reason for being in New York in 1973 was to go to school, but my real intent was to immerse myself in leftist politics and rock and roll culture. Almost every weekend I headed to the Village and Lower East Side in search of weed and music or politics.

There were plenty of protests even after the heyday of 1968-1972 and the issues were still the same. Imperialism, war, poverty, racism, and police brutality. The music, however, was starting to change. There were rumblings of something new in the dives and occasional street fair.

I remember seeing a band (I think it was the New York Dolls or their predecessor) near St. Mark’s Place one Saturday afternoon. I was not into the poor quality of the music, but found the presentation fascinating and unlike anything I had seen before. Still, though, my primary musical preferences were Bob Dylan, the Stones, the Grateful Dead and the Beatles.

One weekend a friend and I saw a poster for a rock show at the Hotel Diplomat near Times Square. The show featured a woman whose book of poetry I had just bought on the Lower East Side. The book was called Witt and the poet's name was Patti Smith. The show I remember I remember because of Smith. The hotel I remember because it’s where Abbie Hoffmann got busted for coke and then went underground.

I was a scholarship student at Fordham University in the Bronx. So was almost everyone else on the floor of my dorm. There were only a couple of us white-skinned guys on that floor. The rest were Puerto Rican and African-American. I heard more salsa than I knew existed. Smoking pot, discussing Marxism and Eddie Palmieri was how I spent many Saturday nights.

Sometimes, nobody in the dorm would go home for the weekend. On those weekends, the music leaking under the dorm room doors with the pot smoke included the Allman Brothers, the aforementioned Palmieri, Earth, Wind and Fire, Sly and the Family Stone, the Dead, and Bob Dylan.

I left New York after seven short months. A floormate from Teaneck, New Jersey, had just introduced me to a new band on the scene known as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I saw him in Maryland a few months later.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.

The changes I felt were soon to rule the world of popular music. This is the story rock music writer Will Hermes tells in his 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York City That Changed Music Forever. Recently released for the first time in paperback, Hermes’ text is more than a look at music in New York. It is a history of the city during the period covered that rarely mentions economics and politics yet ekes them.

From the steamy streets of the South Bronx and the future that would become hip-hop to the steamier bathhouses and clubs in lower Manhattan that became world-famous dens of disco, Hermes relates his tale. Like his namesake, he carries the message that punk rock shouted and salsa sang. The period herein may have been the last time New York mattered as much as it did in the world of popular culture.

Jay-Z may still be there, but there is no creative center any more. In fact, the dispersion of that center into the global world may have been the unforeseen result of the bands, beats, and jazzmen Hermes writes about so wonderfully.

Lurking behind Hermes’ tales of Patti Smith and Richard Hell; Afrika Bambaata and David Murray; and the multitude of others that star in this book is the spectre of corporate greed destroying culture and pretty much anything else it touched. Indeed, this included an attempt by Gerald Ford and Donald Rumsfeld to make Manhattan default. Yet, while this attempt to force austerity on the world’s cultural capital ultimately succeeded only partially, the mélange of cultural mixes did create what became termed world music.

This is a book about Debbie Harry and Eddie Palmieri; Bruce Springsteen and Grandmaster Flash; Abe Beame and CBGBs; Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton. It’s a book about the clubbers and the brothers and sisters attending the DJ contests in the Bronx and the punkers bleeding in the Bowery. The names are so familiar that some are forgotten.

The cover art is by Mark Stamaty, formerly of the Village Voice (back before Murdoch destroyed it). He is also the author and illustrator of one of my favorite children’s books, Who Needs Donuts? The drawings he does are cartoonish, encompassing and busy, as if he was on stimulants. They are the artistic representation of the story Hermes has written down.

In a nutshell, that story is about the birth of hip hop via the transition of the beat; the C-section that was punk and the future of rock and roll that was Bruce Springsteen. Love Goes to Buildings On Fire isn’t about passing a torch. It’s about that torch enveloping the past and the future of popular music in its flames.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Ivan Koop Kuper : Stacy and Bunni: A Montrose Love Story

Stacy Sutherland tombstone, Center Point, Texas. Image from Mindspring.com.
Stacy and Bunni:
A Montrose love story

If Stacy Sutherland of the 13th Floor Elevators were alive he'd be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / March 31, 2011

HOUSTON -- On the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in the east Montrose section of Houston is a vacant lot with an untended vegetable garden. The lot was the previous site of a Craftsman-era bungalow that was recently demolished due to neglect. In this house lived Stacy Sutherland, lead guitarist of Texas’ legendary psychedelic music pioneers, the 13th Floor Elevators, and if Sutherland were alive, he would be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

Known as the soft-spoken member of the band, when the introspective Sutherland did choose to express himself, he did so not only with his thick central Texas drawl, but also with his reverb-drenched leads that cut through the band’s wall of sound, and whose sustained notes seemed like they would never end.

His signature guitar style appeared on four 13th Floor Elevator albums and countless live performances from Austin to San Francisco. But Sutherland had another side of his personality he kept hidden deep inside and that was known only to those close to him.

Stacy Sutherland. Image from Emerald Wood Archives / Flickr.

Montrose is a neighborhood still in transition whose early 20th century architecture has all but vanished. Once considered a “hippie neighborhood,” by the late 1970s this inner city community was approaching the eve of gentrification, with each neglected bungalow soon to be torn down and replaced with several modern townhouses per city lot with no particular continuity regarding their style or design.

Long time Montrose resident and small business owner Robert Novotney recalls a Montrose in the 1970s when rents were “cheap” and a party atmosphere prevailed in the neighborhood seven days a week. He also recalls a “repressive” police force that was always on the lookout for “longhairs” to harass and search, as well as a neighborhood where home invasion by the criminal element was a common occurrence.

“I was broken into once and I had friends that were always getting broken into because they had these nice stereos that you could hear from the street because nobody had air-conditioning back then and they always kept their windows open and it invited burglaries,” Novotney said.


Stacy Sutherland’s all too short life journey can be traced back to his early days in central Texas, when he used to skip high school and practice guitar all day on the banks of the Guadalupe River that flowed through his family’s ranch in Kerr County. Sutherland also spent a brief period in Port Aransas one summer performing with the Lingsmen, a band that included future Elevator drummer John Ike Walton, as well as future bassist, Benny Lynn Thurman.

When Sutherland joined the 13th Floor Elevators, his personal journey took him from the live music clubs of Austin in the 1960s, to the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium of San Francisco and eventually to Houston, where he found himself out of money, out of luck, and on the skids.

The 13th Floor Elevators performed together from 1965 to 1969. The band’s core membership and songwriting collaboration always included Sutherland on lead guitar; Roky Erickson, vocalist and rhythm guitar; and Tommy Hall, electric jug, lyricist, and spiritual advisor.

They were just your average Texas rock band that openly proselytized the use of the psychotropic drug LSD as a vehicle to higher consciousness, and who spread their message through their music and lifestyle. They were also one of the first bands of their era to use the term “psychedelic,” and when the 13th Floor Elevators were guests on “American Bandstand” in 1966 promoting their breakout single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” a naive Dick Clark asked Tommy Hall, “Who is the head man here?” Hall then smugly replied, “We’re all heads.”


Sutherland was a survivor. He survived the turmoil of being in a band signed to a record label whose owners engaged in questionable business practices, numerous arrests for drug possession, an addiction to heroin, and seven months of incarceration in the Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections near Huntsville. In exile from his central Texas home of Kerrville, in 1975 Sutherland decided to find refuge and a change of scenery in Houston.

Houston was very familiar turf to Sutherland. The 13th Floor Elevators recorded in Houston studios, as well as performed countless concerts in Houston nightclubs. The band also lived communally for a time in an old mansion located on Old Galveston Road owned by their record label and known as “Funky Mansions.” However, what really drew Sutherland to Houston after the demise of the Elevators was the fact that it was home to Ann Elizabeth “Bunni” Bunnell.

Ann Elizabeth "Bunni" Bunnell. Photo courtesy of Jim Hord.
“She was brilliant and a member of MENSA,” said longtime friend and former Montrose neighbor, Jim Hord, “but she couldn’t handle the everyday little things in life. Bunni displayed bad judgment in men and had a lot of slimeball friends.”

Bunnell was a New Jersey transplant to Texas whom Sutherland initially met in the late 1960s during the time he lived in Funky Mansions. She was an “exotic dancer” who took the name “Bunni” when she danced at the “Boobie Rock” on Houston’s lower Westheimer Road. Bunnell was now working as a typist supporting herself and her two children from a previous marriage, and studying to be a court reporter at night.

Sutherland and Bunnell rekindled their relationship in the summer of 1976, and settled into east Montrose where rents were affordable, drugs were plentiful, and crime was rampant. The next year, on Sutherland’s 31st birthday, May 28, the couple married, traveled to central Texas to visit family and friends, and then returned to Houston to resume their domestic routine of volatility and substance abuse.

“Stacy had a very bad temper and the alcohol brought out the worst in him,” said Hord who now resides in Waco, “but Stacy and Bunni brought out the worst in each other. The house was always dirty, and it was infested with roaches. Bunni wasn’t the best housekeeper. Every time I went over to visit, the condition of the house used to really bug me. Bunni had some really bad times in her life, but the time spent with Stacy was the worst.”

516 Pacific Street, The Montrose, Houston. Photo courtesy of Paul Drummond.
Hord remembers Sutherland as someone always toying with the idea of putting another band together, but who went to extreme measures to forgo actually playing music during this unproductive time period. As a frustrated Sutherland sat on his front porch, neighbors were known to come up to him and ask for an autograph, which served as a reminder of by-gone days in the spotlight.

“I don’t remember ever hearing Stacy play guitar when I went over to visit. He used to talk about drugs a lot. He had a fascination with drugs, and he would do anything that came his way. Bunni once told me that when she and Stacy used to go out bar hopping in the neighborhood, Stacy would bandage his hand before leaving the house, and when people would buy him drinks and ask him to play guitar with the band, he would have an excuse not to play and sit in with them, choosing to drink all night instead,” Hord said.

By 1978, the Sutherlands were at an all-time low in their on again, off again relationship, and in the early morning hours of August 24, after a full day of drinking and arguing, Bunnell shot Sutherland in the kitchen of their east Montrose bungalow. The bullet severed a major artery causing massive internal bleeding. Later that day, the Houston Chronicle included the following story:

A Montrose resident was shot to death today in his residence at 516 Pacific Street. Police identified the victim as Stacy Keith Sutherland, 33. Shot once in the stomach with a .22 caliber rifle, at 3:30 a.m., Sutherland died at 5:07 a.m. in Ben Taub Hospital.

Officers arrested a 34-year-old woman at the scene. No charges have been filed.

Hord believes that Bunnell’s actions were taken as a measure of defense to protect her teenaged son who was staying with them at the time from an irrational acting and inebriated Sutherland.

“Stacy was making threatening remarks and acting belligerent towards Bunni’s 15-year-old son,” recounts Hord, “and when Stacy lunged at Bunni in an attempt to enter her son’s bedroom, she pulled the trigger to the .22 rife that the couple kept in the house for protection against burglars.”

On April 10, 1981, after seeing evidence and hearing arguments from council, the Honorable Judge Frank Price of the 209th District Court of Harris County issued a motion for dismissal to Ann Elizabeth Sutherland for the murder of Stacy Sutherland.

More than two years had passed from the time Bunnell was indicted for the felony offense by a Houston grand jury, and according to Bunnell’s attorney, Audley H. Heath, “because more than 120 days had passed since the commencement of the action, the defendant was entitled to a dismissal of the indictment filed in the cause in accordance with the ‘Speedy Trial Act of 1974’ of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.” This statute was later repealed by the Supreme Court of Texas in 2005.


Sutherland died before experiencing the worldwide recognition and the accolades now paid to him and the 13th Floor Elevators from adoring fans, musicians, and the music press. Their music has found a new audience from an entirely new generation, that discovered the band and the body of work they recorded, from that brief moment in time they performed together.

Sutherland is buried at Center Point Cemetery near his family’s ranch in Kerr County, not far from where he used to practice his guitar on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Bunnell eventually became a court reporter, remarried and continued to live in the house at the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in east Montrose where she died of cancer in 1987 at age 43.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]

Also see:

• Mesmo's Reflections on the Sixties by Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008
• Roky Erickson to Houston: Return of 'Two-Headed Dog' by Andrew Dansby / Houston Chronicle / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2009
• Long Strange Trip: Austin's 13th Floor Elevators and Still Trippin' Tommy Hall by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2009
• Austin Rock Musician Benny Thurman Dead at 65 by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2008

The 13th Floor Elevators -- Tommy, Bennie, Rocky and Stacy -- at the New Orleans Club in Austin, 1965. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.
Roky Erickson, Stacy Sutherland, and John Ike Walton perform at La Maison in Houston in May or June, 1966. Image from last.fm.
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Bob Feldman : A People's Folk Music History

Folksinger/activist Phil Ochs. Image from Child of the Sixties.
A people’s folk music
History of the United States

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2010

If you’re a Rag Blog reader who’s into either urban protest folk music or anti-corporate country music, you might be interested in listening for free to “A People’s Folk Music History of the United States” by clicking on the music links for the following public domain folk songs:

1. “Living On Stolen Goods” is a protest folk song from the early 1970s that summarizes the history of U.S. settler-colonialism and U.S. imperialism.


2. “Big Bill Haywood” tells the story of the IWW (“Wobbly”) leader.


3. “Remember Sacco and Vanzetti” recalls the Sacco and Vanzetti Case of the 1920s.


4. “Upton Sinclair” is a folk song about the muckraking author of the novel, The Jungle. novel.

Wobbly Big Bill Haywood. Image from Salt Lake City Weekly.

5. “They Drove Woody Guthrie,” “The Hollywood Ten,”Source,” “They Killed The Rosenbergs,” and “Ben Davis” are folk songs about political repression during the late 1940s and 1950s McCarthy Era.


6. “Kerouac and Cassady” is a folk song about the Beat Generation.


7. “The People’s Folksinger” is about 1960s protest folk singer Phil Ochs.


8. “Richard Farina Is Gone” is a eulogistic folk song about the author of the 1960s book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.


9. “Bloody Minds” is a folk song that protested against Columbia University’s Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] institutional affiliation and Columbia’s collaboration with the Pentagon during the 1960s.


10. “Ted Gold’s Wisdom” is a folk song about former Columbia SDS Vice-Chairman Ted Gold.


11. “Enemy Number One” is a folk song about the Weather fugitives from the 1970s.


12. “Dhoruba” is about the case of a former Panther 21 political prisoner.


13. “At Age 42” is a folk song about the negative effects of the celebrity star system in the corporate music industry.


14. “Ballad of Harvey Milk” is a folk song about the San Francisco activist and elected official who was slain in the 1970s.


15. “Their Armored Brink’s Truck” is an outlaw folk song about the 1981 incident in Nyack, New York.


16. “Prisoner In Auburn” is a folk song from the 1980s about U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert.


17. “The Marines Have Captured Grenada” is about the Pentagon’s 1983 invasion of that island.


18. “Free Leonard Peltier!” is a 1990s folk song about the Leonard Peltier Case.


19. “Marilyn Buck” is a 21st-century folk song from a few years ago about a recently released U.S. political prisoner.


20. “Die To Defend Exxon” is an anti-war and anti-recruitment folk song from the early 1980s.


21. “Let Me Tell You About 9-11” raises some questions about the Big Media’s official version of what happened on September 11, 2001

San Francisco's Harvey Milk. Image from collider.com.

22. “Destroyed By A Rising Flood” is about the 2005 Katrina disaster in New Orleans.


23. “Let the Big Banks Fail” is a folk song that protests against the use of public funds to bail out the Wall Street big banks in 2008


24. “High Technology Homeless” is a folk song from the 1980s that looks at how high technology has affected the quality of life of some folks in the USA.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

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MUSIC / Dynamic Compression : Yes, It Really is Too Loud!

Christopher Clark graphed the peak levels of and RMS levels of three hit songs a year over the past three decades. Here is a link to a PDF of his full poster, "A Visual History Of Loudness."
The loudness wars:
Why music sounds worse

By Carrie Brownstein / January 2, 2010

As we have come to the end of the decade, we turn to one of the more dramatic changes we've heard in music over those 10 years: It seems to have gotten louder.

We're talking about compression here, the dynamic compression that's used a lot in popular music. There's actually another kind of compression going on today -- one that allows us to carry hundreds of songs in our iPods. More on that in a minute.

But first, host Robert Siegel talked to Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. For more than 40 years, he's been the final ear in the audio chain for albums running from Jimi Hendrix to Radiohead, from Tony Bennett to Kronos Quartet.

Bob pointed to a YouTube video titled The Loudness War. The video uses Paul McCartney's 1989 song "Figure of Eight" as an example, comparing its original recording with what a modern engineer might do with it.

"It really no longer sounds like a snare drum with a very sharp attack," Ludwig says. "It sounds more like somebody padding on a piece of leather or something like that," Ludwig says. He's referring to the practice of using compressors to squash the music, making the quiet parts louder and the loud parts a little quieter, so it jumps out of your radio or iPod.

Ludwig says the "Loudness War" came to a head last year with the release of Metallica's album Death Magnetic.

"It came out simultaneously to the fans as [a version on] Guitar Hero and the final CD," Ludwig says. "And the Guitar Hero doesn't have all the digital domain compression that the CD had. So the fans were able to hear what it could have been before this compression."

According to Ludwig, 10,000 or more fans signed an online petition to get the band to remix the record.

"That record is so loud that there is an outfit in Europe called ITU [International Telecommunication Union] that now has standardization measurements for long-term loudness," he says. "And that Metallica record is one of the loudest records ever produced."

Old news

"The 'Loudness Wars' have gone back to the days of 45s," Ludwig says. "When I first got into the business and was doing a lot of vinyl disc cutting, one producer after another just wanted to have his 45 sound louder than the next guy's so that when the program director at the Top 40 radio station was going through his stack of 45s to decide which two or three he was going to add that week, that the record would kind of jump out to the program director, aurally at least."

That's still a motivation for some producers. If their record jumps out of your iPod compared with the song that preceded it, then they've accomplished their goal.

Bob Ludwig thinks that's an unfortunate development.

"People talk about downloads hurting record sales," Ludwig says. "I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you're through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don't really feel like going back and listening to it again."

Ludwig's final assessment of the decade in music?

"It's been really rough, folks," he says. "But it can get better and I think it will get better. I'm glad it's going to be over."

Digital compression

Digital compression is the process that allows a song to go from being a very big sound file in its natural state to a very small file in your iPod -- so you can carry your entire record library in your pocket. But at what cost?

Dr. Andrew Oxenham is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota. His specialty is auditory perception -- how our brains and ears interact. He also started out as a recording engineer.

Robert Siegel asked him to explain digital compression.

"Really, the challenge is to maintain the quality of a CD, but to stuff it into a much smaller space," Oxenham says. "Let's think about how digital recording works. You start out with a very smooth sound wave and we're trying to store that in digital form. So we're really trying to reproduce a smooth curve [with] these square blocks, which are the digital numbers [the 1s and 0s that are used to encode sound digitally].

"Now, the only way you can make square blocks look like a smooth curve is by using very, very small blocks so it ends up looking as if it's smooth. Now using lots and lots of blocks means lots of storage, so we end up using [fewer] bigger blocks. Which means we end up not representing that curve very smoothly at all."

Lost? Go back and re-read it -- you'll get it.

"The difference between the smooth curve and the rough edges you end up with in the digital recording, you can think of as noise because that is perceived as noise," Oxenham says. "It's perceived as an error, something that wasn't there in the original recording. The trick is to take the noise -- which is the loss of fidelity -- and just make it so you can't hear it anymore."

In hiding

It's called "masking." Think of it this way: You're having a conversation in a quiet room, and you can hear every word, every mouth noise, every stomach rumble. But if you were having that same conversation outside on a busy street, you'd get the gist of what was said, but you'd probably miss a few words. The traffic noise would mask them.

So let's say you're listening to a Brahms symphony.

"[The loud parts of the music are] giving the coding system a lot of leeway to code things not quite as accurately as it would have to," Oxenham says, "because the ear is being stimulated so much by the loud sound it won't pick up very small variations produced by the coding errors."

In other words, the loud parts of a recording are used to "mask," or hide that noise produced by the rough-edged squares of those digital 1s and 0s.

But are we missing something?

"There are really different levels of MP3 coding," Oxenham says. "You can go from much less data -- which people can hear the difference -- to higher levels of coding which take up more space on your MP3 player but sound better and are basically indistinguishable from a CD. And I would argue that under proper listening conditions -- if it's really indistinguishable from the CD as far as your ear is concerned -- then you really haven't lost anything perceptually."

Oxenham likes the convenience of portable MP3 players. But ultimately, he says, he prefers going to concerts.

Source / National Public Radio

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Hall of Fame Concerts : Rocking the Garden!

Hall of Fame rock 'n rollers: Bono and Mick Jagger. Photo from Mirror, U.K.
Hall of Fame benefit:
Taking rock and roll to a new level

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2009
[With Gary Baumgarten and Abbie Wasserman]

NEW YORK -- Music history has been made with two uniquely powerful nights of performances at Madison Square Garden in celebration of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- and the educational foundation it supports.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band; U2; Simon and Garfunkel; Metallica; Aretha Franklin; Annie Lennox; Stevie Wonder; Crosby, Stills & Nash along with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and James Taylor; Dion; Patti Smith; Smokey Robinson; the Jeff Beck Band; a surprise appearance by Mick Jagger; intros (both nights) by Tom Hanks (who said he did it "just to get the access pass") and much much more turned midtown into the center of the musical universe once again.

With two (almost) completely different concerts (Jerry Lee Lewis played both nights) the Hall of Fame celebrated its 25th Anniversary and raised more than $4 million for a permanent endowment for the Cleveland-based museum and the educational work in which it specializes. An HBO special from the show will debut at the end of the long Thanksgiving weekend, Sunday, November 29.

Both concerts opened with the 74-year-old Lewis who, in a signature move, kicked over his piano bench the first night, then did it again on Friday.

Since his "Great Balls of Fire" was instrumental in kicking off the musical revolution that became Rock and Roll, it was a fitting pair of gestures.

Crosby, Stills & Nash's impeccable set opened with their loving ode to the festival at Woodstock, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary. As Graham Nash reminded the audience, 30 years and one month ago, CSN was here in the Garden for the legendary "No Nukes" concerts, whose platinum triple album and feature film raised money and awareness for Musicians United for Safe Energy.

The trio was joined on "Love Has No Pride," "The Pretender," "Teach Your Children" and more by MUSE veterans James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, whom David Crosby described as "my favorite singer in the world."

The "CSN and Friends" show took the form of a "swing (and hug) your partner" fest in which a close-knit extended family of world-class musicians moved from their own songs to hits shared by the group in a graceful, loving minuet. It set the tone for all that followed.

Paul Simon (also a MUSE vet) opened with "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes," "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard," and "You Can Call Me Al." He was joined by Dion on "The Wanderer," Crosby and Nash on "Here Comes the Sun," and Little Anthony and the Imperials on "Two Kinds of People." Art Garfunkel brought "The Sounds of Silence," "Mrs. Robinson," "Not Fade Away" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water," in which he indeed conquered the high notes.

Stevie Wonder then delivered Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," "Uptight," "I Was Made to Love Her" and more. He was joined in succession by Smokey Robinson for "Track of My Tears," by John Legend for "Mercy, Mercy Me," by B.B. King for his signature "The Thrill is Gone," by Sam Moore for "Hold On, I'm Coming," by Sting for "Higher Ground" and "Roxanne," and by Jeff Beck for "Superstition," among others.

Stevie Wonder at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert. Photo by Henny Ray Abrams / AP.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band then anchored the stage for the rest of the night. Tom Morello joined in for "the Ghost of Tom Joad," John Fogerty for "Fortunate Son" and "Proud Mary," Darlene Love for "A Fine, Fine Boy" and "Da Do Ron Ron" and Billy Joel for "You May Be Right," "Only the Good Die Young," and "New York State of Mind." For a Star Spangled Finale reminiscent of the one with which they closed two MUSE nights in 1979, Fogerty, Moore, Browne, Love, Peter Wolfe and others joined Bruce and the E-Streeters in an unforgettable "Higher and Higher."

After Hanks again hailed Rock & Roll, and Jerry Lee Lewis again kicked over his seat, Night Two opened with the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin's "Baby I Love You" and "Don't Play that Song," in honor of the man who first signed her, the recently departed Ahmet Ertegun. Annie Lennox joined her for "Chain of Fools." Then came Lenny Kravitz for "Think." With "Respect" Aretha nailed things down, backed as she was by a 20-piece band that included her son Teddy on guitar.

Jeff Beck returned with a jazz/blues quartet in a set highlighted by "Drown in My Own Tears." Sting joined in for "People Get Ready," bluesman Buddy Guy for "Let Me Love You," followed by ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons for "Rough Boy" and Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady."

After an instrumental version of "Day in the Life," Beck gave way to Metallica's high-amp renditions of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "One." Lou Reed contributed "Sweet Jane" and then gave way to Ozzy Osbourne's "Paranoid" and "Iron." The Kinks' Ray Davies set the stage for U2 with the classics "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night."

The rest of the show belonged to Bono and his bandmates and friends. Opening with "Vertigo," the quartet sailed through "Magnificent" and "No Line on the Horizon."

Springsteen and Patti Smith came out for a group cover of her "Because of the Night" -- twice, apparently for the benefit of HBO, which may have needed the second take to cover a glitch the first time around. It's a good bet you'll see that one on the HBO Special at the end of the month.

Also a good bet is "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," along with the Black Eyed Peas' guest version of "Where is the Love."

To top the two nights, Mick Jagger brought his aerobic instructor's physique center stage with Fergie to do "Gimme Shelter" and "Stuck in a Moment."

U2 closed down more than ten hours of the two-night extravaganza with "Beautiful Day."

But not before Bono gave a monumental nod to "the saints, the heretics, the poets and punks that now make up our Hall of Fame." Rock, Springsteen added, is a form of liberation that demands everyone "have fun with it."

The fun was more than evident through both big nights, from Hanks's loosey-goosey introductions and Jerry Lee's pyrotechnics to a beautifully choreographed but gritty and completely professional 10-hour marathon from those who have created a culture that simply did not exist a half-century ago, and does not seem to be going away.

That a uniquely crafted museum stands to commemorate it in the nation's heartland seems every bit as fitting as two powerful nights in the nation's media center, a landmark event that has made possible the institution's first permanent endowment.

Close your eyes, for example, and the beautifully bedecked Aretha could have been singing in Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church, founded by her father, where she first began to sing in the 1950s. The music industry has changed over the decades, she told us after her Friday performance, but it must do that to stay strong. "R&B, hip hop are alive and well," she says. "Some of the lyrics I like," she said, "some not so well." But the karma of the Rock Hall allows her to "see older members... that have come a long way" along with "the new people."

Among them might be Jeff Beck, who "thanked" Eric Clapton for being grounded by the gall stone operation that turned Beck from a back-up to a headliner. And Ozzy Osbourne, who challenged us to name another profession in which a performer knows that "when he's fucked up it's gonna be a good show."

A more subdued Steven Van Zandt paid homage to "the British invasion" which got the industry "where we are today." It was "fun to do a review" of multiple songs with multiple artists, as the E-Streeters did with Springsteen Thursday night. "It's like an old school rock and roll show. That's the way it used to be."

After nominating Darlene Love for membership in the Hall, Van Zandt lamented that if the Rolling Stones were beginning now, his radio show, the "Underground Garage," would be the only one to play them. "There is no format for new rock and roll," Van Zandt said. "It's almost impossible these days" for new groups to make a dent.

"When our generation goes," he added, "it's going to be weird."

John Legend might agree. "I am the luckiest kid in the world," he told us. "I haven't paid my dues, and I am humbled and honored to be with Stevie Wonder" and "all these amazing artists that have been making music for a long time."

"A new generation will be changing the world in different ways," added Bonnie Raitt. "In the change we feel brewing, I think the Internet and the advent of satellite radio and independent newspapers... will help get the truth out and keep the debate going," she told us. "I think music and rock and roll will continue to shepherd that along."

"Rebellion is a life-long thing," said Jackson Browne. "Rock and roll has always been the language of self-empowerment, freedom and community, and always will be."

[Harvey Wasserman is author of Solartopia! and Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States. He helped co-found Musicians United for Safe Energy, and spoke (for Greenpeace USA) at Woodstock II in 1994. Gary Baumgarten is the Paltalk News Network's director of news and programming and host of the network's News Talk Online; for CNN Radio he covered the 9/11 attacks in New York and Hurricane Katrina. Abbie Wasserman is a senior at Stern College in New York City, majoring in English literature.]

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Stevie Wonder



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Carl R. Hultberg : Jazz Cigarettes

Lester Young was left a shattered man. Photo by Herb Snitzer.
The Beatles called them 'jazz cigarettes'

Race mixing was the fear and marijuana perceived to be the social lubricant making it happen.

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / October 23, 2009

Jazz cigarettes. That’s what the Beatles called them, and you know they got that right. And that’s really the reason why those type of cigarettes are still illegal.

Jazz musicians.

What did that mean exactly back in the early years of the twentieth century? One thing really: black and white folks having fun together. Creating the potential for what? A once unspeakable thing that we now know as... people like Barack Obama. Race mixing was the fear and marijuana perceived to be the social lubricant making it happen.

As one “expert” testified in Congress when marijuana was being made illegal in the 1930s: “reefer makes a darkie look a white man in the eye.”

So Jazz musicians were hounded. A sensitive creative black genius like Lester Young was forced into the army. When the tough sergeant told Lester to get rid of that picture of a white woman, Lester replied that was his wife. The punishments and humiliations he was forced to undergo left Lester a shattered man, drained of the laconic spark he’d used to ignite the Basie band.

Gene Krupa, a young white Jazz drumming sensation was singled out for special attention in the 1940s. The movie The Gene Krupa Story (1959) would have been the first time many of us kids heard about the demon weed. How it ruined that young man’s life... or was it the years he was forced to spend in prison?

Another Jazz fiend (and friend of my grandfather) was Mezz Mezzrow, an early Jewish hipster clarinet player who moonlighted as pot dealer to the stars (Louis, Fats...) in 1930s/1940s Harlem. As Mr. Waller used to sing: “the real Mezz, but not too strong.” Fats Waller and his buddy, the Madagascarian Prince Andy Razaf would sit around smoking and writing the hit songs that are still famous. Some, like “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” they sold to white publishers for $10. That’s what you do when you’se a viper.

The bi-racial culture created by Jazz/Pot in the 1920s-1930s blossomed in the 1960s. Suddenly it all seemed to make sense. Drop out of the straight white culture. Become a non-conformist artist. A poet. A musician. A dancer. Get down with black Soul brothers and sisters.

Who knew the backlash that was coming? Nixon. Reagan. Rockefeller. NY State’s (and other state’s) repressive drug laws. Grand Juries (I was on one in NYC) indicting nobody but black and Hispanic street dealers. No undercover action in the yuppie office dealing scene, that’s for sure. But somehow that situation changed when 9/11 brought panic to America. How best to stop terrorism? That’s easy, mandatory drug screening for employees and job applicants.

Everybody knows that pot smoking leads to terrorism. Doesn’t it? As I said to my ex-boss as NYU after they’d rejected the best candidates for the job I was vacating: “There goes your talent pool.”

Think about it. Your employer or would be employer has the right to test your body, regulate your behavior off the job for reasons totally unrelated to ability or work performance. And we accept this, either because we have been totally cowed or else we smoke a little to help us cope with the Orwellian realities.

But wait, there’s hope. The president who represents the essence of free will (non-slave) race-mixing in the USA has ordered, through his black Attorney General, that Federal prosecution of state-condoned medical marijuana sales and use will be discontinued.

That’s right the black helicopters can take a break and the jackbooted DEA agents can lay off kicking down the doors of granny and grampa, puffing or growing a little on the side, if their states have medical marijuana statutes.

It is also totally within President Obama’s power to simply reclassify marijuana as a non-class B controlled substance. With states like California’s fiscal futures hanging in the balance, it’s hard to imagine that full scale legalization/taxation are not just around the
corner. But this is America and not doing the right thing is a long honored sacred tradition. Besides the folks who would be most effected by any legal change regarding weed are just too peaceful, philosophical and accepting to make a big stink. Don’t you wish more people were like that?

Smoke American

Previous title: “Legalize Mexico.” Stop the drug wars at home and abroad. Give people a future or else allow them the right to self medicate. On the positive side, just look at the brainpower behind the home growing revolution. It takes a lot of smarts to create the high potency potflower medical mind bongler material now in circulation (in some
places).

Another paradox of life. And also, another reason to be proud to be an American. Those are our kids developing tomorrow’s killer weed. Here’s a growing field (!) where the USA can still be #1.

Bong Hits for Jesus, anyone?

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Juan Cole : Michael Jackson, Islam and the Middle East

Michael Jackson. Photo from Getty Images.

Michael Jackson was deeply hurt and humiliated by the experience [of his 2005 trial], and his withdrawal to Bahrain and search for a different tradition of spirituality may well have come out of that abasement.

By Juan Cole / June 26, 2009

See related videos, Below.

Michael Jackson's sad death at age 50 has provoked an outpouring of emotion around the whole world. Because of globalization, it is an event that affects fans in Asia and the Middle East, as well. In early 2007, his brother Jermaine, a Muslim, announced that Michael would embrace that religion. In November of 2008, just months before his death press reports said that Michael Jackson had formally converted to Islam.

Jackson was a man of multiple identities, which helped account for his enormous worldwide popularity. It seems clear that he was deeply traumatized by his rough show business childhood, and that things happened to him to arrest his development. Just as a stem cell can grow into any organ, Michael's eternal boyishness made him a chameleon. Increasingly androgynous, he expressed both male and female. A boy and yet a father, he was both child and adult. In part because of his vitiligo, he interrogated his blackness and became, like some other powerful and wealthy African-Americans of his generation, racially ambiguous. Toward the end of his life he bridged his family's Jehovah's Witness brand of Christianity with a profound interest in Islam. He was all things to all people in part precisely because of his Peter Pan syndrome. A child can grow up to become anything, after all.

Jermaine Jackson explained that it was the experience of touring the Gulf that brought family members into contact with Islam. Interestingly, he found that Islam resolved some dilemmas he had about Jehovah's Witness beliefs. Just as Malcolm X had been converted by his pilgrimage to Mecca from a narrow sectarian folk religion in America to Sunni anti-racist universalism, so Jermaine took a similar path.

We can only speculate about the attractions for Michael Jackson of Islam, but likely his 2005 trial in which he was acquitted of all charges was implicated in his desire for a change. The court psychiatrist confirmed his psychological innocence, saying he had been arrested at the stage of a 10 year old. Michael Jackson was deeply hurt and humiliated by the experience, and his withdrawal to Bahrain and search for a different tradition of spirituality may well have come out of that abasement.

Those who lived through the 80s will never forget the Michael of "Thriller" and other breakthrough videos.

But it seems to me that the iconic later Jackson is "Black or White," which powerfully makes the points above about the fluidity of identity in a globalized world, and underlines the common humanity of us all, something that the eternal boy could see through the ravages of hurt that clouded his never-ending childhood. Young children don't know about racial or religious prejudice. The great tragedy of Michael Jackson is that his childlike withdrawal from reality may have left him more vulnerable to himself and others, and never protected him from bigotry or, other human realities. After all, children shouldn't die.

Here are the lyrics of "Black or White":



Jackson is still enormously popular in the Middle East. Here is a Gulf tribute to the King of Pop. Given the stereotyping of Gulf Arabs as medieval and fanatical, and given the hurtful prejudice against their very form of clothing in the West, it is only right that they should have the last word here on Michael Jackson's universal appeal:



Source / Informed Comment

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Academic Study : Hot Sounds, Cool Stock Market

Dan Burrows: 'Sir Mix-a-Lot's “Baby Got Back” beat variance is as smooth as, well, a baby's bottom. Maybe that's why there was mad volatility on the market's dance floor.'

'When the stock market endures periods of high volatility -- such as the one we’re in right now -- chart-topping songs tend to have low “beat variance,”' according to research by New York Poly's Phil Maymin.

By Dan Burrows / December 5, 2008

Investors have sought portents of the market’s future in everything from the length of ladies’ hemlines to which NFL conference wins the Super Bowl. Now -- in the midst of the financial crisis -- here’s a new theory on where to find omens: the Billboard music charts.

Phil Maymin, an assistant professor of finance and risk engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, has crunched 50 years worth of stock-market data -- along with more than 5,000 hit songs. And he says he’s found an inverse correlation between stock-market volatility and whether the hot music of the moment is frenetic or steady.

What that means: When the stock market endures periods of high volatility -- such as the one we’re in right now -- chart-topping songs tend to have low “beat variance,” according to Maymin’s research. The opposite is also true, he says. Low-volatility markets correlate with music showing high beat variance. (Read the abstract of Maymin’s paper.)

It isn’t a question of whether the music is fast or slow, but instead how much the pace varies within a song. Some of the highest beat-variance marks in Maymin’s work came from crooners like Bobby Vinton and Barbra Streisand (think of how “The Way We Were” starts off slow and then speeds up). And while Billy Idol may have rocked the “Cradle of Love,” the beat he pounded out was steady -- giving his hits a low beat-variance score.

Maymin says he doesn’t know whether the music is the chicken or the egg when it come to market volatility, only that a relationship exists. Maybe it’s just that people need to chill out when the market’s behaving like Spinal Tap on tour.

"What music do you listen to when you freak out?" Maymin asks. "Do you listen to crazy, volatile music? Or do you listen to Rick Astley’s 'Never Gonna Give You Up' to kind of calm yourself down?" (Memo to Ben Bernanke: Maybe you should try rickrolling the economy.)

It's a bit counterintuitive at first. During periods when market volatility is relatively benign -- such as in the early ’80s, ’90s and 2000s – music with higher average beat variance has been more popular. "That's when people have more of an appetite for something like Alice Cooper," Maymin says.

What’s more, Maymin says that it appears as if musical tastes can predict future market volatility. A strategy based on predicting market volatility from past beat variance appears profitable, on average. “The model predicts that realized volatility next year will be lower than it was this year,” he says. “So if I could sell implied volatility for one year in the high 40s, I would.”

So will reading Billboard magazine help you make a killing on the VIX, betting on market volatility through contracts on the Chicago Board Options Exchange? Finance blogger Paul Kedrosky called Maymin’s work “one of the stranger financial research papers I’ve seen in a long time.”

Maymin, whose resume includes advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard (along with a three-year stint with Long-Term Capital Management), says his trading model based on year-end Billboard charts and year-end average stock volatility has been very profitable. And -- guess what? -- its best year was 1987, our last great market crash.

Most investors, of course, shouldn’t play around with super-sophisticated trading strategies based on volatility implicit in the prices of near-term S&P 500 options and exhaustive regression analyses of beat variances of songs in the Billboard Top 100 since 1958 vs. the standard deviation of the stocks in the S&P over the same time frame. Still, it has given us an idea for Wall Street’s next hit band. Vixie Chicks, anyone?

Source / SmartMoney

See slideshow of Money to Buy, Sell or Hold By.

Thanks to Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

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