El Bacho

 

The Capitol was, for me, a pretty ideal space with standing room on the floor and a decent-sized balcony so that those who wanted to stand could stand and those who wanted to sit could sit. I bet there weren't too many bad views in the house.

It was a rebuilt synagogue that was turned into a concert hall, so the balcony was there for the women to see the celebrations and the architects were quite skilled at doing this. It was destroyed in 1938 during Kristallnacht then rebuilt after 1945 but it was now too big for the Jewish community in Offenbach and they quickly moved to a smaller building across the street.

I don't have too many points of comparison for the current tour but, of course, I was quite amazed by the chain of "Being There" songs during the encore, the easy listening version of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" (sounding as you imagine the band playing the song as a cover in their "regular" style), I also dug John during "It's Just That Simple" (it shows how much has been done performance-wise since the first album). I also didn't expect "Poor Places". The sound was as tight as always ("Misunderstood" was also breathtaking when there was only Jeff on guitar) and Glenn is getting a master at silently nodding in disapproval when Jeff talks too much to the audience.

It is a very fine album indeed.

I had her previous one, which was produced by Ry Cooder. The music was fine but there was too many talking intros that consisted in pure name-dropping. On this one, I was surprised about how little Wilco-esque it sounded. Tweedy mostly refined the sound of her live band but didn't try to make it too contemporary and the result is very solid. The new songs are inspired (much more than "The Thanks I Get" would have suited Solomon Burke) and the arrangements for the covers are great.

I enjoy it indeed much more than the latest Bettye LaVette.

I'll finally be able to catch the show at Offenbach. When it turned out there was no concert in France, I had the good luck that I was near the German border at the date of the show, so it will be a 200km ride to catch the band.

The down side is that I'll miss Gillian Welch in Paris. It will be her first performance in Paris and the only European date this year.

Actually, vinyl has less dynamics (it has a very low s/n ratio for instance) and it requires some compression for the music to fit in. But this compression (or this limiting) is something instrumental in how a rock recording is supposed to sound.

Current CDs have little dynamics due to everybody wanting the music sounding louder than the competition. That's why the compression is much more aggressive than what the mastering engineer is used to do on a vinyl edition.

KT was recorded and certainly mixed in digital (the shows were taped for a cancelled companion DVD), then the high def stereo master was handled to the mastering engineer to make a CD of it. You can be sure there was a large sticker on the box where some guy from the record company wrote in red letters to "Make it loud". The guy does most of the tweaking and the record company is happy.

For the vinyl edition, you're right, they went back to the actual stereo master while many vinyl editions are just sourced from the 16 bit/44.1 kHz CD master and sound actually worse than the CD edition, hence the precision.

It won't make the vinyl sound more warm and analog but it could sound a little better than the regular CD, even if Wilco is not, by far, the worst offender in CD mastering.

I agree that it's most likely due to tour agents. There's definitely an audience in Paris, even if most of it comes from American or British expatriates.

Wilco has always sold few copies in France. They don't have something like Nonesuch to promote them and they're handled by guys at Warner Music who are quite clueless. A few years ago, when Tom Petty released "Highway Companion", the guy in charge basically saw the name on a list of releases and ordered 600 copies as he just didn't know who Petty was. The album topped the Billboard and, even if Petty is no big star in France, they ran out of stock and couldn't sell any copies for weeks. Record shops that do imports were very happy.

Around the time of YHF and AGIB, there was some definite interest in the mainstream press and the record company did some work on them in France. Since Sky Blue Sky, they've given up. I had managed to get a few features on them in a music magazine where I was freelancing at the time but then I left and there was nobody else who would fight for them there. The biggest buzz makers in France, Les Inrockuptibles, tend to favor existentialist drama at the expense of judging good music, so an happy and healthy band isn't their favorite subject but the guy who wrote on them was also more or less demoted due to internal politics. And the record company assumes they lose money on promoting such a "small" band, so I guess they've simply cut all promo on Wilco. That's the same kind of reasons that explains why Lucinda Williams only did her first show in France in 2007.

There was a very long feature on them a few months ago in a new magazine, Eldorado, that also listed Wilco several times in their Top 100 of the decade. I'll try anyway to get some kind of explanation from my sources in Paris about the lack of a date in France.

Update: The guy I talked to mentioned the lack of Paris was an "enigma" but there are still talks of adding a Paris date to the tour.

My main regret is with the live version of "Theologians" that was a bonus track along with "One True Vine" to SBS in US indie shops. The track never surfaced in Europe and wasn't featured in the companion EP. So even if I have the album three times (CD+DVD, LP+CD, CD+EP), I still don't have the track. Anyway, if somebody has a FLAC of it, wink wink nudge nudge...

That would be impossible as Rock 'n' Roll High School is the greatest film ever made.

Which is also impossible, as it doesn't feature a gratuitous softcore lesbian scene.

Mansfield played with Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour then on the 1978 world tour. He was also a band member on "Street-Legal".

He turned to film scoring with Heaven's Gate (his score is one of the only thing of the movie that isn't flawed). He also plays the band violonist in the movie and you can see him next to T-Bone Burnett. He also married Cimino's in and out partner during the shooting.

NBC and iTunes no longer do business due to a dispute about TV show pricing...so I am not sure this will end up on iTunes. The fact that Analogman's article states that it will be available on the "Zune Store" and doesn't mention iTunes also leads me to believe this will be the case.

Do you know how many thousands... hundreds... well dozens of Zune customers will be delighted by the exclusivity?

The safest guess is that Microsoft/MSN/Zune Store got some kind of a first pick concerning the soundtrack, something like cross promotion for a limited time. Then the tracks will go on sale everywhere else, including iTunes.

The conflict between NBC Universal and Apple concerns TV shows, not music tracks (all the more as NBC/G.E. is not a music label). As the iTunes Store is currently the second largest music store in the US (behind Wal-Mart), it would be suicidal not to sell the tracks there. Actually, the bulk of the conflict between Apple and Universal concerning TV shows is that Universal was afraid of letting Apple get such a stronghold on their business as they got one on music.

By the way, "Heroes" producer Allan Arkush is the same Allan Arkush who made the wonderful "Rock 'n' Roll High School" for Roger Corman, featuring the Ramones. I have never seen his follow-up, "Get Crazy", in which Malcolm McDowell plays a Mick Jagger character obsessed by his penis and Lou Reed spoofs Bob Dylan but it's reportedly as good, if not better.

Campbell was also in Bob Dylan's band for six or seven years. In my opinion, the combination of Campbell and Charlie Sexton on guitars marked Bob's best line up of the Never Ending Tour.

I'm not too hip on how the recording process translates to the release, but I seem to recall reading that summerteeth is a digital recording and a vinyl pressing isn't going to sound any better, and that for anything other than collectors value (which we all know is $$$$) doesn't do much good. Can anyone verify if this is true?

It's not necessarily true. Even if the source is digital, it can be recorded at an higher resolution than the CD and the transfer can take advantage of it. Then, the same recording can sound bad on CD and better on vinyl, because the trend is to master CDs very loud, which adds compression and digital clicks. The vinyl is generally safe from this kind of tinkering.

By all accounts, however, the "Summerteeth" vinyl doesn't sound better than the CD. I was just speaking of digital recordings on vinyl in general.

There's an interview with John in The Onion A.V. Club about the new Autumn Defense album and tour:

The AV Club Interview

FYI, the album gets a B+:

The review (on the same page, there's also a review of the "Wilco-esque" Broken West)

Then, The Washington Post confirms that "that guy from Wilco" is on bass in the latest U2 video, "Window In The Sky", with Hendrix, Keith Richards and Frank Sinatra (not on bass):

Who's Who of Pop Peers From U2's 'Window'

It seems that January 30th is now officially John Stirratt day in the press...

It is so obviously a joke. A half-assed one at that (pretty content-poor). The world amazes me sometimes.

Of course, it's a joke. Has anybody watched the video for "The Bible Says"? Would any serious Christian use "God hates fags" in the chorus or put "sodomy" in the lyrics to assess an affirmative message?

The guy is actually Jason Bolicki, a gay activist and director.

The Onion A.V. Club Thread

The Radar Online investigation

There's an interview of David Koechner in The Onion A.V. Club. Koechner is of course Champ Kind from Anchorman, the gun lobbyist from Thank You For Smoking and Todd Packer, the traveling sales manager (and closet William Hung fan) in The Office. He's also T-Bones in The Naked Trucker & T-Bones, the musical duet that got a show on Comedy Central.

Koechner is interviewed about what's on his iPod. He's got lots of Creedence, some Tenacious D (he hasn't listened to so far, as he must skip the tracks when his kids are around) and some Some Volt:

Son Volt, "Mystifies Me"

 

DK: Big fan of Uncle Tupelo, and all the drama that goes with it, I guess. I don't know many of the stories, but I love both bands. You get two bands where there used to be one. So a huge fan of Wilco, huge fan of Son Volt. Obviously, Wilco has been