Col. Hapablap
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Posts posted by Col. Hapablap
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Ok good news. It's all fixed! I finally got an email response from tower. They said that the order never went through successfully, and that authorization for the purchase mistakenly appeared as a charge on my card. Tower said that since the order was unsuccessful, my bank would figure that out and put the money back into my account within 3-7 days. I checked my account today, and there the money was! I immediately withdrew the money, went to Best Buy, put the money on a gift card, and ordered the set from bestbuy.com. I got a confirmation email from them instantly! I do have to get a new credit card though. When i called my bank Saturday about the charge, they deactivated my credit card. I guess they thought it could be fraudulent and they did that as a precaution. That wasn't the case of course, i knew that too, it was just a botched transaction. I'm glad they played it extra safe & I'm not upset. I'll get a new card in about a week. I'm just so relieved everything worked out and fixed itself. $260 is a lot of cash to lose!
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you ordered yesterday - Sunday?
most businesses, even online, are not as quick on weekends, and usually not at full staff.
That's true, but I ordered the mono set last Friday morning(the 14th). It's now Monday afternoon and I'm still waiting for any kind of response from tower. I'm going to file a claim with my bank tomorrow if i don't hear from them by then. I hope i do hear something, but I'm skeptical. I ordered the stereo box set on Sunday from amazon, and when i clicked "place your order," I got an confirmation order with a tracking order number about 30 seconds later. That's how it should be done, and apparently the person who ordered from tower.com a few posts back got the virtually the same deal. I didn't get anything, except a charge on my credit card. I don't even have the order listed on my tower.com account. I think something went horribly wrong with my order. The good news is that my bank told me that if i file a claim tomorrow(Tues.), that i would likely get my money back into my account within 7-10 days. I think I'm gonna try ordering the mono set from Best Buy. Hopefully it'll work out.
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I ordered the mono box set from Tower and got a confirmation e-mail message along with a link that allows me to track the order status at any time. That link provides comprehensive information about the order, and once it has shipped, will provide carrier information and a tracking number.
You did? If i had gotten any those things, I wouldn't felt compelled to post that rant. I'm glad it worked for you. How quickly did you get that email and the tracking link after you placed your order? I'm still waiting for mine.
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I just thought I'd warn that if any of you are thinking of ordering the box sets through Tower.com, I'd advise against it. I ordered the mono box set and my debit card was immediately charged. This despite the fact that the product has yet to be released. Even worse, they sent me no confirmation email, no final record of my order. No reference number. Nothing. If i hadn't been vigilant and checked with my bank later that day, i wouldn't have any evidence that my order was ever processed. It's like i never ordered anything at all. I got no response from them when i sent an email asking them what the deal was. Customer service was worse than poor, it appears to be nonexistent. I'm gonna file a claim with my bank tomorrow morning in hopes of canceling my "order" and getting my money put back into my account, since its only been less than 72 hours since i ordered. I can't help feeling that I'll be ripped off and lose the money if i don't. I've never ordered anything online and received absolutely no response of any kind from the vendor. I'm not putting up with that. No way. Their service seems to reflect their current bankrupt status. I should have known better than to order a high-priced item from a company that is having financial trouble! Stay away from tower.com!
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If i can find a ticket to the Chicago shows, i'm going. It'd be nice to know the prices and exactly when the tickets go on sale. I've heard Saturday, August 1st, but still no official info available from TicketBastard. So i guess we'll find out very soon.
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Wow, at this rate, based upon what I'm able to pull up, the second show is not going to be even close to selling out.
Give it time. I'm kinda surprised that it didn't sell out yet, but there are 3 months to go before the show date. Plenty of time for those remaining tickets to sell out. I'm glad they added that second show. I was able to get a floor GA ticket!
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They are only supposed to be for streaming, but I've been able to capture the Velvet Underground cover videos by using the Orbit Downloader software.
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Has anyone heard these? How do they sound?
I'm very happy with them. I bought them all a few days ago and I listened to them all yesterday. I also owned all the original cd versions, save for the first self-titled disc. After i listened to these, I went to Disc Replay(that's the used music store where i work) and sold my original copies. I won't need them anymore. These remastered discs are both louder and crisper. Also, my boss took a look at an audiophile message board that he frequents, and the Neil Young fans there had apparently heard them and gave them pretty good reviews. I wish i had that link to post here, but I don't.
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The first four albums of the Neil Young catalog(Neil Young, Everybody Knows Is This Nowhere, After The Gold Rush, and Harvest) were reissued on July 14th on cd as well, for those of you who didn't know. It took me by surprise to find them today while browsing at Best Buy. I bought them all for $9.99 each!
Here's the amazon link:
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Pages for both the Stereo & Mono boxsets have been posted to amazon. Prices too!
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I found this article in this weekend's New York Times online edition. Link and full text below.
Torture-Free but Still a Rock Star
By DAVID CARR
Published: July 1, 2009
LOS ANGELES
SITTING at a Father’s Day barbecue on the day before a sold-out three-night stand at the Wiltern Theater here, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco was talking about his 13-year-old son, Spencer, a drummer in a rock band called the Blisters. Over the past five years Mr. Tweedy, the son of a railroad worker from St. Louis, whose toes touched bottom on the way to rock greatness, had come to an understanding about himself that applies to Spencer too: “I told him: ‘You are not a rock star. You get to do rock star things.’ ”
In his button-down shirt and with a Brewers cap hiding a mop of hair while he talked in a borrowed office a few steps from a friend’s party, he couldn’t have seemed less the alt-rock god. Still, it took him some painful years to find a place to stand between the nice guy at the barbecue and the bandleader at the Wiltern.
The success of Wilco’s current tour — the reviews have been ecstatic — and his satisfaction with the band’s splendid new record, “Wilco (The Album),” are fine and all. But Mr. Tweedy, 41, seems to care most deeply that he has finally reconciled his musical ambitions with more personal ones: to live in Chicago, be part of both a family and a band, remain sober (it’s been five years since he kicked a punishing addiction to painkillers) and live out a simulacrum of normalcy.
The family picnic backdrop for the interview was less a matter of media management than a reflection of how he rolls these days. No longer the tortured artist on the bus whose only steady companions were pills and the demons they were meant to tame, Mr. Tweedy keeps his tour jaunts short and his family close. His two kids pop in and out while he visits with a reporter, and he seems most at ease when they or his wife, Sue Miller, are at hand.
It’s not that he wears the success and stability like a loose garment — he’s a pretty complicated guy on a good day — but unlike the rock trope that only chronic agony produces important music, the absence of mayhem has been good for the work, he says.
“I was never at my best when I was at my worst,” he said, looking out the window as his sons — Spencer and Sam, 9 — bounce and laugh on a diving board. “When I did do good stuff in the past, it was because I was able to transcend the parts of my being that weren’t healthy.”
Mr. Tweedy has a Midwestern lack of pretension that is easy to be around, but he is a less than voluble interview, not because he doesn’t try to answer questions, but precisely because he does. He cares about being understood but struggles to explain himself because, as all writers will tell you, happy is nice, but happy is hard to explain.
“I suppose because everything about my life is better, markedly so, I’m a significantly happier person — well, I’m not being very eloquent about it,” he said, pausing, and then continued: “Having a solid base allows you to look at darker things and actually think about them. I debate people about this suffering myth, this tortured artist stuff, and they almost never buy it.”
On the new album, which was released last week on Nonesuch, his lyrics still veer into the personally apocalyptic, but the fatalism is leavened by sweetness. The guy onstage at the Wiltern the next night — the one who used to keep a trash bucket offstage so he could vomit between songs — is no longer ruled by the migraines, the panic attacks and the drug jags that seemed to go with fronting one of alternative rock’s most consistent and respected bands. He seems like a regular guy having fun doing rock star things.
When Mr. Tweedy walked onstage at the Wiltern in front of 2,300 fans, most of them likely steeped in 15 years of band lore, no introductions were necessary. He made them anyway, choosing “Wilco (The Song)” from “Wilco (The Album)” as the opening number for Wilco the band.
“This is an aural open arms, a sonic shoulder to cry on; Wilco, Wilco will love you baby,” Mr. Tweedy sang in a direct address rare for rock. After the years of tumult that became a backbeat to Wilco’s music, a big old hug seemed in order.
“I think they called it ‘Wilco (The Album)’ because this band knows who they are, and they are ready to own that identity in a very confident way,” said Rita Houston, the music director of WFUV, a progressive radio station in New York.
It seems to be working: “You Never Know,” the first single from the new record, is No. 4 on the AAA — or adult album alternative — chart. On June 30, the day the record came out, the 10 top-selling records on Amazon were understandably by Michael Jackson. No. 11? “Wilco (The Album).”
The basic tracks for the new album were laid down when most of the band was visiting New Zealand, far from the Wilco Loft in Chicago, which has served as a lab for sometimes radical rethinkings of the band’s sound, often assisted by the experimental producer and musician Jim O’Rourke. But Mr. O’Rourke was busy making films, and the record was produced by the band and Jim Scott, an engineer on several of Wilco’s recent records.
They brought in more directness and songcraft that leans harder on melody and hooks. The lyrics are also more engaged, less concerned with the alienation of modern life than with finding a way around it. The record has its share of the sonic hard turns that are characteristic of Wilco’s previous work, but as David Dye, the host of NPR’s “World Cafe,” broadcast from WXPN in Philadelphia, said, “There is nothing off-putting about this record.”
Mr. Tweedy’s singing, which once sometimes seemed like an exercise in overcoming reluctance, almost swings now. “No one is going to mistake him for Frank Sinatra, but he has become an amazing rock singer,” Ms. Houston said.
The album does not contain the off-the-hook experimentation of 2002’s “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel” or the sinister tug of 2004’s “Ghost Is Born” but is a kind of compilation of a band at the height of its powers. “This record probably sounds more like a summation than the other ones because Wilco allowed itself to just kind of do all the different things that we found that we do pretty good on the same record,” Mr. Tweedy said.
Back in 1994 Wilco was born in conflict, as a splinter of Uncle Tupelo, the influential alt-country band. But Wilco gradually shed its Americana roots. Each record, including the breakout “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” which sold nearly 650,000 copies, was a drama, creating a narrative for rabid fans and critics who served as Kremlinologists on the band’s every wiggle. “For a band of our size, not all that big in the scope of show business, we always drew a lot of scrutiny,” said John Stirratt, the bassist, who has been along for the whole ride.
There was plenty to gossip about. The members of Wilco fought with record labels, one another and, in the case of Mr. Tweedy, a host of psychic pursuers that had him on and off drugs and in and out of rehab for the Vicodin and benzodiazepines that he began abusing in the late ’90s.
Not everybody made it back safely. Jay Bennett, the talented multi-instrumentalist who went through a very public firing in the 2002 Wilco documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” died of a drug overdose in May, just weeks after suing Mr. Tweedy and the band for breach of contract, suggesting that he had not been paid sufficiently for his contributions to the film and the band’s records.
“I still see that as one of the first decisions I made to get healthy,” Mr. Tweedy said of Mr. Bennett’s departure. “One that we made as a band,” he said, his tone not changing. “It was not going to end well.” (Other band members spoke of Mr. Bennett’s death with sadness and described it as a significant loss to music.)
Even as the acclaim grew during the band’s first decade, members came and went, and Mr. Tweedy struggled with his dual role as sensitive songwriter and yard boss of a rising band. Now, with a roster that has been together for five years — besides Mr. Stirratt, the lineup includes Nels Cline, one of the best guitarists in any genre; Glenn Kotche, a composer who happens to be a brilliant drummer; and two other equally talented musicians, the keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and the multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone — Mr. Tweedy has assembled players who can match his demanding vision.
At the Wiltern, Wilco demonstrated that its two main threads of musical tradition — roots music and full-tilt experimentation — make for a grand live act. Watching the current lineup kick into gear is like seeing an enormous steam shovel rear to life. During a sprawling two-and-a-half hour set Mr. Tweedy seemed to be having it both ways: loping singalongs framed by over-the-top shredding, reverence alleviated by goofiness.
“I’ve been obsessed with seeing life through music,” he said at the barbecue. “My records, my relationship with records, my relationship with rock stars, everything that surrounds it, has been really one of the only ways that I ever started to understand the world.”
After Mr. Tweedy formed Wilco, he found himself split between being the guy who worshiped rock music and the one on the stage. “I wish I was like David Lee Roth, that some part of it came naturally to me, but I have an inherent self-consciousness that I think is hard to transcend on some nights,” he said. “I have an observing ego on top of an ego that tends to take a lot of the fun out of things. At some point I was able to embrace and understand that I actually am on the other side of it as well. It seems like way more work to conceal an ego than to actually just come to terms with it.”
In the studio and in concert he has always been clear about his objectives. “Jeff is as nice as they come, but he is ambitious and competitive, which means he’s demanding on musicians and his bands,” said Dan Murphy, the guitarist from Soul Asylum who played with Mr. Tweedy in the side project Golden Smog.
With a couple of Grammys and enough of an income to keep Spencer in drumsticks (all of Wilco’s studio albums have sold at least 200,000 copies) Mr. Tweedy is at a stage in his career when most musicians could care less what kind of trips people lay on their music. But he still reads reviews and listens when longtime members of the cult rant. “I’m never not going to care,” he said, taking off his hat to give his hair a swipe to no discernible effect. “I like getting that feedback, but I’m so naïve I get sideswiped by it every time. On this one, the funny thing is, they say we didn’t go out and surprise anybody.”
While there is less self-conscious effort to transgress on the new album, it is not a conservative document. “One Wing” opens with the quiet plaint of guitars, then kicks into a full-throated cautionary tale about the perils of trying to fly alone. “Bull Black Nova” uses dissonant organ and piano plinks and a worried, paranoid vocal for a bloody look into the rearview at events that “can’t be undone.” “You and I,” a duet with the indie songstress Feist, sounds romantic as all get out until the words come into focus: “You and I, we might be strangers/However close we get sometimes, it’s like we never met.”
Mr. Tweedy said: “It seems more romantic to acknowledge that you’re committed to a mystery. You’re pledging allegiance to an ongoing saga of disillusion and enlightenment at the same time.”
Like 2007’s “Sky Blue Sky,” the previous album, there is a level of engagement with others that suggests that while we are all fundamentally alone, it is still the wisest course to hold hands. On “Solitaire” from the new album, he sings, “Took too long to see, I was wrong to believe in me only.”
Ms. Miller, a former club owner and manager from Chicago, thinks her husband is “in a very good patch,” as she said at the barbecue. “I think he’s very comfortable with himself now. I think it feels good to be a good guy.”
Spencer, drummer, blogger and scenester, said he and his father “relate to each other as musicians.” Curled up in a large wicker chair by the pool, Sam said he liked the new record “a lot.” When it was suggested that he probably would not say otherwise on Father’s Day, he made eye contact for the first time. “I probably would,” he said.
While “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” is a classic portrait of a band at war, Mr. Kotche said that there was not much drama to fuel the legend anymore. “You get this impression that he is something of a tyrant to work with, and he’s really the opposite,” he said of Mr. Tweedy. “He’s generous as an artist and as a person. The other night in El Paso some of us were traveling with our wives and babies, and he offered to watch them while we went out for a movie. Not a lot of lead guys in a rock band would make that offer.”
During the show at the Wiltern Mr. Tweedy couldn’t help playing with the hipsters in the crowd, like when they responded wanly to his entreaties to clap. “You should have seen them do this in Pomona,” he said. “They clapped like they were born to clap.”
“The willingness to do this,” he said, raising his hands above his smiling face, clapping and looking out into the lights, the crowd, the spectacle, “is a good indication of just how free you are.”
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It's still on iTunes, too.
I think they just took it off of itunes. I don't see it up there now.
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Whoops!
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I thought i'd look the Anthology up on the Best buy website, just for the heck of it, and i found out that they will have an exclusive 5-track EP along with the CD/DVD set. The set itself is apparently a limited edition. I'll be picking this one up for sure.
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That is not always true.
That's a good point. A few of the early Wilco soundboards are a little ragged, but its still generally true.
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A recording of this show just popped up on dime.
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When i get around to getting enough money to buy it, i will be buying the blu-ray set. I got a look at it at my local best buy, and it looks awesome. Too much on my plate to buy right now, though.
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Are there any FREE players out there that support playing FLAC without converting them to another format?
The new version of VLC media player plays flac. its free. This thing plays EVERYTHING!
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An update on the story from the Tribune's website.
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/05...lco-member.html
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Comment by Jeff now up on Wilcoworld.
Link? For some reason, i can't find it there. They redesigned the site or something?
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A new article in the Tribune was posted a short time ago. It's Greg Kot's take on this very sad news.
Jay Bennett dies at age 45: Ex-Wilco member and musician extraordinaire
The first time i played WTA and "You Never Know" came on, for some reason I thought to myself 'Man this sounds like a song that Jay would love playing on.' It seems kinda weird that it was the first thing i thought of when i played that song. It seems even stranger now, but i do think he would've loved it.
Rest in peace, Jay. You were one of the most important contributors to some of my favorite albums by my favorite band. They would've never sounded quite the same without you. I hope you died knowing how many lives you were able to help change for the better. Mine included. You will be missed.
~Aaron
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Listening to Whatever Happened I Apologize right now.
That's the only Jay solo album I have. Which should I check out next?
Try the Palace At 4am...his first album Post-Wilco
EDIT: It came out the same day that YHF did. One of the most memorable days of my life. I didn't actually get to hear "Palace" until much later, though.
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I'm gonna get the Stereo boxset anyway, so i'm not sure i'd even have any use for that. I think that was made to store the individual cds and not the boxset. It looks really cool, though.
Beatles remasters are here!
in Someone Else's Song
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I'm getting both, since I'm a Beatles nerd, but if you only have the money to get one of the box sets, I would make it the Stereo version, if for no other reason than the fact that you'll get all original albums in one set. Also, I happen to like stereo better, so I'll probably listen to the stereo box more often.