Smart Energy

Here’s a cool rap video urging you to stop using all that plastic. This is in keeping with Plastic Planet, a documentary I reviewed here a while back. This video also puts me in mind of another film I reviewed, Gas Hole — which so totally missed the point about fossil fuels that I didn’t bother posting it here on Smart Energy (but you can read the review on Curled Up with a Good DVD).

Holy crap, Eric Skye cooks. I’ve been listening to him for a few months now after getting on to him via a guitar mag article. Today I just got his solo acoustic album, “For Lulu.” Tis amazing.

His String Trio is hot stuff, too. Check out this 6+-minute version of Skye’s composition, “Happy Cake.” Skye bakes the cake, and the mando solo is the shit!

Multi-instrumentalist Levon Helm was the chief voice of The Band -- and it's key songwriter.

I just heard an interview with Robbie Robertson, who has a new album out. In the interview, Robertson talked about what he was thinking and doing when he wrote all those great songs for The Band. The thing is, he didn’t write those songs and he continues to lie about it. Please don’t support this rip-off artist by buying his albums.

What happened with The Band and its songs was two-fold, and both were “business as usual” practice at the time.

Back then, it was standard practice to assign song writing credits to one or two members of a band. Witness the nom du musique “Lennon/McCarthy.” Paul McCarthy has said repeatedly that it wasn’t a fair way to do things and he wished he hadn’t gone along with the plan. For one thing, in the digital world, McCarthy’s name gets truncated, so it looks like his song-writing “partner” (they almost never wrote songs together) wrote everything. So it was with The Band: Robbie Robertson got credit for everything.

The other thing that has been standard operating procedure in the music industry is ripping off musicians and, when possible, musicians screwing their band mates. So it was with The Band: Robertson got the song writing credit and he and The Band’s manager shared the royalties, screwing the rest of the team.

Consider The Band’s songs and consider what Robertson has produced since the demise of The Band. The Band’s songs are noted for the stories they tell and for their deft reinterpretation of what now call Americana, American roots music. Thing is, since then, Robertson hasn’t written a single story-song. Indeed, he hasn’t written a memorable song. Ever. Period. More, though, was the subject of so many of the great Band songs, namely, life in the South. Where Levon Helm grew up (in Arkansas, in and around Fayetteville).

As a writer on NJN asks, how is it possible that Robertson, a Canadian Jew who grew up, the first few years of his life, on a Six Nations reserve, wrote “The Night They Drove Ol Dixie Down”, “Up on Cripple Creek,” or “Strawberry Wine”? Nothing Robertson did before or since is even remotely similar. Listen to any album Levon Helm was involved in since The Band (or before, when he was the leader of the Hawks) and the deep roots of his Southern American background come ringing through.

It’s a sad statement about the music business that the thief is the one inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and that music consumers are willing to go along with the lie by buying the poseur’s albums.

AWKWORD ft. Y-Love ask “Next stop?” And, depressingly, answer: “Ohio”:

“Mr. President (Wisconsin)” (prod. by The White Shadow): While we don’t keep it political on RTD all the time, we’re not just all music all the time. We come from the era of Public Enemy, where the music was a tool that helped the outside world understand what was going on. Also helped those within the scene get a better understanding of the ills that life tried throwing at us. On this leak from the forthcoming rockthedub fifth anniversary compilation, FiF, AWK and Y-Love don’t hold back in trying to educate those who might sleep on the ills of the GOP, using the crazy shit with Governor Walker in Wisconsin as a jumping-off point. Crazy to think you could have so much taken from you while trying to provide for your family. Shit like this happens a lot, and with decisions like this going on, these two are right – it’s only a matter of time that something like this spreads like wildfire across the country. Open your ears, Obama – don’t let this go down!

The title of this post comes from Nietzsche, while the video below comes from YouTube. This one-man band uses a looping pedal (if someone can tell me which pedal, that would be great) and is amazing. As one person commented on the video:

it’s so sad that rebecca blacks bullshit has 30 million something views, and this which is amazing only has 65,000 someone needs to fix popular culture

Yeah, well, as Nietzsche said, “Success has always been a great liar.”

I’ve been a fan of Diego Stocco’s since I saw his Experibass video a couple years ago. He’s up to new tricks with the Bassoforte:

I started thinking about how I could re-purpose the keyboard of the dismantled piano I keep in the garden, so I thought to build a new instrument by combining it with some other parts I had laying around. I ended up with this mechanical hybrid thing I thought to call “Bassoforte” (bass + pianoforte).

The neck is from a broken electric bass, as a bridge I used a cabinet handle, the pickups are from a guitar, and the part at the top where the strings are attached is a chimney cap, which works as resonator as well as percussive sound.

Susan Elizabeth Rotolo (November 20, 1943 – February 24, 2011), known as Suze Rotolo (pronounced Soo-zee), was an American artist, but is perhaps best known as Bob Dylan’s girlfriend between 1961 and 1964. She is the woman walking with him on the cover of his album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, a ground-breaking street image by the CBS studio photographer, Don Hunstein. In her book, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, Rotolo describes her time with Dylan and other figures in the folk music scene in Greenwich Village, New York. She also discusses her upbringing as a “red diaper” baby—a child of radicals during the McCarthy Era. Later as an artist Rotolo specialized in artists’ books and taught at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

via Suze Rotolo – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I keep telling my wife she has the rhythm to be a great drummer. She thinks I just need a drummer and that, anyway, we don’t have room in our house for a drum set. Maybe not — unless we get this kit.