Local Man Stops Robbery by Quoting Steely Dan Lyrics

Actually this never happened, but I would be curious to see how it would turn out.

Becker and Fagen: You really want to fuck with these dudes?

See, a number of times on Facebook recently, I have seen people link to this Onion-esque article about some guy who used dialogue from Pulp Fiction to scare off a couple who were robbing a coffee shop (if you haven't read it yet...). I didn’t peruse the piece thoroughly, but I glanced through it enough to digest it as a piece of mildly entertaining absurdist satire (as opposed to those who seemed to think it was a real news story) exploring a geek’s fantasies of badassitude, getting the opportunity to (pretend to) be the menacing man of action he saw in the movies.

It was amusing enough. Obviously (at least to most), something like this would never work. I mean, really, Pulp Fiction? Too well known. Sure, it has somehow retained a reputation as a “cult movie” long after it completely permeated mainstream culture, but let’s be serious. It was a cult movie for about 20 minutes in 1994 in that gap between the indie hype wearing off but before the Oscar nominations. Fine, sure, for a while into 1995, Pulp Fiction was still a favorite and inspiration to film students whose idea of a good time was to watch epic Kubrick and Kurosawa marathons in their dorm rooms until they were so sensory-overloaded and exhausted that they could be completely distracted from issues like student loans for worthless degrees and wondering why they were still virgins. But then I digress. The fact is that I would not take someone quoting Pulp Fiction dialogue seriously unless they had their stiletto blade already sticking half-way into my esophagus. It’s just too common.

Making hardened criminals so shocked and disconcerted that they would just turn and run? That takes some seriously obscure references, man. That requires material so oblique and ironic that the attacker will be forced to ask himself “is this 80 pound weakling crazy in the ‘makes sculptures of his first grade crush out of his own excrement’ way, or the ‘will kill me and carve Philip K. Dick quotes over my mutilated body’ way?” What would have that effect?

The answer to this conundrum is Steely Dan. “But they were mainstream, too,” I hear you say. Sure, they had some hits in the 70s. They snuck a few overly intellectual bits onto the Billboard charts. They also composed some of the most sophisticated and darkly humorous music of the 70s. They wrote songs about Charles Whitman type clock tower snipers, down and out criminals, and perverted old men who show pornographic 8mm films to the neighbors’ children. I mean, they won a fucking Grammy for writing about a guy trying to schtup his cousin. Not to mention that they named themselves after a talking dildo in a William Burroughs novel, for shit’s sake. And I’ll tell you this: Taken out of context, a lot of their lyrics, spoken with a steady gaze, unwavering voice, and ambiguously malevolent intention, can be pretty menacing.

So try this: Next time you find yourself in yourself in the presence of someone who is armed and wishes to use that advantage in the furtherance of a crime of violence or economic gain, confront the attacker and say these words:

I could be wrong but I have seen your face before. Are you with me? Or are you really just a shadow of the man that I once knew? I don't care. A man of my mind can do anything. You got the muscle; I got the news. Anybody on the street, has murder in his eyes. So unhand that gun. There's no one to fire upon. And I don't need that kind of action. Don't you know there's fire in the hole and nothing left to burn? It's Cancellation Day. Yes, the Big Adios is just a few hours away. Be glad if you can use what you borrow. In the end, will you still have a song to sing when the razor boy comes and takes your fancy things away?

I think it will make any would-be assailants think twice before they tried to tangle with someone as cultured as you.

(Note: The author of this piece bears no responsibility for injuries or other repercussions arising from actually trying this stupid shit.) 

The End of an Era, or Something

Another Collector Weighs In on the Closing of Bleecker Bob's

Anyone who reads music blogs has probably seen
this image a lot lately

If you told me ten years ago that the near-legendary New York record store, Bleecker Bob’s, was closing, I would probably be less upset than I am now. Back then, I used to wander around the Village every week on my day off and hit the circuit of record stores in the area around West 4^th Street and 6^th Avenue, usually dropping about a hundred dollars on old records and bootleg CDs. Bob’s was just another stop on the tour, and I generally bought fewer records there as they were noticeably higher priced than the other places. Still, I’ve found some great things there, and even though in recent years my record collecting has slowed down considerably, I still pop in now and again. (I believe my last purchase was a copy of Something Else by the Kinks. The fifty dollar sticker gave me pause, but it was in such immaculate condition that I couldn’t not buy it.)

Looking back, in spite of its notoriously cantankerous staff and its high prices, I do have some affection for the place and for what it represents. After all, the first LP I ever bought in New York was there. I was working in a considerably less hip chain music store in Boston when I took a trip to New York to see The Who perform Quadrophenia at Madison Square Garden. One of my managers at the store told me that I could get some great bootleg vinyl at a place called Bleecker Bob’s. I will never forget the day after the concert when my friend and I wandered around the Village in the rain trying to find the place. I guess, we were kind of thrown off by the fact that Bleecker Bobs was, by this time, not actually on Bleecker Street. (The record I bought that day was an LP bootleg of The Who at Swansea in ‘76.)

Patti Smith at Subterranian

In the past decade, I have seen so many of my favorite haunts close down, places that I used to spend much more time hanging out in than Bob’s. I used to spend hours hanging out at Subterranean Records on Cornelia Street in spite of the fact that the place was approximately the size of a walk in closet. The owner, Michael, was a decent guy, but it was usually Kenny behind the counter when I showed up. Kenny was one of those rare animals: The quiet, unpretentious music fan who seems to know everything but would never make anyone feel bad for knowing less. Always happy to turn people on to new things, his tastes were so broad that he would play everything in the store from the most obscure garage rock to late seventies Alice Cooper songs when the Coop apparently began to fancy himself a balladeer (he particularly liked the song “I Never cry). The steps that led down from the street were so treacherous and with such low head clearance that anyone over the height of five feet would have to contort one’s body just get in. Every time I was to enter or exit, the thought went through my head: “How do I do this without hurting myself?”  Once in, I would usually stay for at least an hour to postpone the perilous journey up those three steps.

When I first moved to New York, though, I spent most of my time at Second Coming Records. Not nearly the mainstay that Bleecker Bob’s and Subterranean were, I found myself there because, in addition to their vinyl, their CD shop (the vinyl and CD stores were separate, but next door to one another) had an extensive selection of bootlegs. When I was unemployed during the summer of 2001, I spent most of my time there. Usually Adam was behind the counter, a spectacled, diminutive, skinny-jeaned hipster, but in fact was quite good company. We would hang out and argue about music (Adam was of the school that believed that the Who never made anything worthwhile after 1966 and I also don’t think he ever approved of my predilection for prog rock). We would often be joined by any number of other denizens, such as Javier, who was a hardcore and metal freak who looked like the offspring of character actor (and former Sonic youth drummer) Richard Edson and Harvey Keitel’s character in Taxi Driver, and would often come in with hardcore tapes with hand drawn covers (which were pretty damn good, actually).

One day that fall, after a fruitless day of handing out resumes, I stopped by the shop and saw Adam and a few of his friends sitting on the street outside of the store, still locked. The owner had not shown up to open the store, and was unreachable by phone. So we just sat on the street, and began on another one of the epic music conversations/arguments that we typically had inside. As the sun went down, I proposed we continue the conversation in a bar somewhere. I think we ended up at a place on 8th Avenue.

I didn’t see those guys for a while after that. A couple of years later, I wandered into Bleecker Bob’s and saw Javier behind the counter, and he told me that Adam was working there too. After that, I would saunter in from time to time and occasionally get into a somewhat watered down version of the music debates that we used to have. Sometimes I would just buy something and leave. Javier is still there. From what I understand, Adam moved to Texas a while ago, Austin, I think.

Though a lot of them are gone, a few of the other places that I used to hit up years ago are still there and some foolhardy record geeks are even opening new shops in the outer boroughs. Bleecker Bob’s is not the last place to get records, but for some reason, I kind of thought it always would be. It was an institution, the biggest of the independents. There has been enough talk about changing music consumption habits and digital downloads wreaking havoc on brick and mortar stores (places to buy actual albums, even CDs,  are becoming so rare that I even find myself looking back wistfully on the days of the Virgin Megastore), and enough of it has come from me. Still, on one hand, we are losing places to obtain tangible artifacts, but more importantly we are losing the places where people with a somewhat more intense affinity for music could come together. These are places where habits of obsessive compulsive consumption, which might be considered a pathology in normal circles, are met with admiration and respect, and ultimately to admission to that exclusive club of insider/outsiders.

To be sure, those people still exist. They can be found every day in the few remaining record shops, but I also have to assume that these stores also survived over the years due also to the patronage of more casual fans, and they don’t seem to come around as much anymore. New York real estate is too expensive for any business to rely solely on a small group of outsiders. And who knows?  People blame the internet for the loss of patronage of the casual fan, but perhaps it also has, to a lesser extent, effected the patronage of the hard core fans who now have a different place to bitch about music.

So anyway, Bob’s is closing, and I guess it’s sad. There is talk that they may retain a kiosk in the chain frozen yogurt shop, but I can’t imagine it being a great hangout for hipster malcontents.

Anyway, in conclusion, here is a great little joke you can tell a record collector if you really want to really piss him or her off: “What is the difference between a record collector and a comic collector? Record collectors think they’re cool.”

HEY YOU GUYS!!!

The Continuing Adventures of Sloth and Chunk

It is a testament to the popularity of the classic 80s adolescent pirate treasure adventure film, The Goonies, that talks of a sequel continued even until the principle cast was in their early forties. However, I do think it was for the best that they avoided the temptation to make a sequel, particularly this far on. I don’t think that the feeling would be the same with an adult cast. I will admit, though, that vicariously partaking of the escapades of that rag-tag gang was a big moment in my childhood, and I know that many of my friends have a similar nostalgic feeling for the movie.  Back then, we certainly wanted a sequel. We would have loved to have been able to revisit that place of adventure and wonder. In addition, though, there were a number of questions that I, at least, would have liked answered.

Everyone remembers the end of the movie, after the search for pirate treasure and the narrow escape from the booby-trap filled cavern. The kids are reunited with their worried families on the beach, while at the same time being besieged by a horde of reporters, who treat the story as if the kids had been missing for 18 years instead of merely 18 hours. Then the Fratellis, the vicious family of criminals who had pursued the kids throughout the movie, inexplicably wander toward the gathering of family members, media, and law enforcement as if they wish to be caught, and the local asshole shows up to complete the foreclosure on the families’ houses to make way for the expansion of his country club. The Fratellis are arrested, except for Sloth, the good-hearted but deformed brother who had saved the kids from his kin. Chunk, the fat kid, who had bonded with Sloth earlier, offers to take Sloth into his home and take care of him. The happy ending is completed when the discovery of jewels in Mikey’s marble bag forestalls the foreclosures, and the previously doubting authorities finally believe the kids’ stories about the search for pirate treasure when One-Eyed Willie’s ship suddenly appears and sails off into the distance to the astonishment of all.

So here are my questions:

What happened to the ship? Didn’t anyone go after it? (In the DVD commentary, director Richard Donner joked that the coast guard went out and sunk it.)

Did an appraisal of the jewels in Mikey’s marble bag ever actually prove that they were valuable enough to take care of the back mortgage payments of the family’s homes? Were there any legal issues concerning ownership of the gems, or did the finders keepers argument prove salient?

I suppose that these are mere trivialities and that a sequel is hardly warranted to address them.  However, there is one thing about the ending that was so bizarre that it agonized me not to know what happened next: The adoption of Sloth.

I was eight years old when the movie came out, and a pretty skittish eight year old at that. And Sloth scared the living shit out me. His horrific, deformed visage was so unsettling that it took a long time after he had been established as an innocent and sympathetic character that I was able to look at him without blurring the screen’s image by peering between my fingers. Of course, by the end I was won over by this sweet-natured freak, whose good heart and considerable strength ends up saving the day.

Still, I was perturbed when Chunk embraced the newly freed and abandoned Sloth and told him that he and his family were going to take him in. I couldn’t imagine myself asking this hideous, foul-smelling creature into my home (Chunk established his pungent aroma early in the film, proclaiming that he “smelled like Phys-Ed”).  Was I the only one who found it odd that Chunk would invite a mentally disabled, psychologically marred, super-strong mutant from a family of criminals that he had known for less that day to live with him without even consulting his parents?

Who knows? Maybe a scene that ended up on the cutting room featured Chunk’s horrified mother and father, berating their son for his impulsive decision, smacking him upside the head a few times, screaming “Bist meshugeh?” (He was the Jewish kid, after all.) This would have been followed by the awkward scene where the parents tell Sloth that they are going to buy him some ice cream and “just to wait right here.”

After all, we have seen the kind of damage that this hulk of a man was capable of, even when well intentioned. Furthermore, Chunk and the audience have had only a thin slice of time in which to discern his overall temperament. We may have been seeing Sloth on a relatively good day. It is not unreasonable to postulate that someone with those kind of developmental disabilities, combined with years of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of his family, could suffer from terrible mood swings. While I have to assume that most psychologists would have severe issues with the Fratellis’ handling of the situation, I can only assume that there was a reason that Sloth was bound in chains and not merely left on a pile of pillows in front of the television. Can a modest one-family home in the Pacific Northwest be an ideal place for such a man?

Forget what happened to One-Eyed Willie’s ship. Forget any other adventures that the gang might have had searching for hidden treasure or holy relics. Forget the legal battle over the jewels. This is what I always wanted to see next: The continuing adventures of Sloth and Chunk. Let’s suppose that the Cohens (Chunk’s family) were so grateful to Chunk for saving their son that they decided to honor his wishes and try to find a way to house this creature somehow. I think that they were biting off more than they could chew.

I don’t want to see a sequel; I want to see a spin-off sitcom. Entitled Hey You Guys!!!,” (Sloth’s quaint version of a war cry from the movie) this show about the hilarious adventures of the Cohens, that rotund Jewish family from Oregon, and the loveable, but clumsy and potentially deadly Sloth, promises to be hilarious, surreal, disturbing, and often just plain gross.

The first episode entitled “Sloth Loves Chunk,” would show Sloth trying to assimilate to his new life. As Chunk is getting ready to go to school, Sloth begins to panic at the thought of being left behind. After several attempts to calm him, including an apparently ineffective dose of horse tranquilizers in his Ovaltine, it is decided that Sloth should accompany Chunk to school. At school, Sloth sees the torments that Chunk is exposed to on a daily basis, mostly from a gang of bullies who ridicule him for his weight. In the end, Sloth comforts Chunk, reminding him that he knows what it is like to be shunned and scorned. Chunk embraces Sloth and tells him that the bullying doesn’t bother him since he knows that he has one true friend. The episode ends happily when Sloth makes the bullies understand the error of their ways, appealing to their previously dormant senses of decency and sympathy with his simple and direct language along with a series of punishing, bone-crushing blows.

I already can imagine other hilarious episodes, like “Sloth goes to Shul,” which would play off of the cultural differences of this odd couple (Sloth is Italian, right?). It would begin with a lengthy scene in which Chunk tries in vain to get a yarmulke to stay on Sloth’s pointy head in preparation to go to synagogue for the Purim service. The episode would, of course, end with Sloth suffering from sensory overload by the loud noises of the groggers during the service, resulting in a tantrum which destroys most of the pews and inflicts some disfiguring, but not life threatening,  injuries to a couple of Rabbis. Coming to his senses, the shocked and remorseful Sloth shrugs, looks at the camera and quietly says “uh ohhhhh.”

Director Richard Donner and Exec. Producer Steven Spielberg
Neither of these men would approve of this spin-off

 I am currently at work on the teleplay for a “very special episode” entitled “Sloth in Heat.” In this episode, Sloth begins to exhibit odd behavior of an amorous nature, cornering Chunk’s mother in the kitchen and licking her face repeatedly. After being felled by a taser and a tranquilizer dart, Mrs. Cohen has a sit down with Sloth during which it is discovered that Ma Frattelli never told Sloth about “the birds and the bees” and thus he never learned the meaning of these strange feelings that laid dormant inside of him. Chunk decides that it will be his job to find Sloth a girlfriend, and sits down with Sloth to write a classified ad to put in the Daily Astorian. However, while Chunk is lost in thought, trying to come up with a euphemism for “hideous,” the twisted hormone-tweaked goliath sneaks off to force his violent, mutated lust at the grandmother, who lives upstairs. Oblivious to this, Chunk finishes the letter and begins to read it to his mother. Then, Sloth, now a man of the world, reenters, coming down the stairs wearing silk pajamas and smoking a Nat Sherman in a diamond studded cigarette holder (the bloody scene and its aftermath of pulverized internal organs splattered on the wall and caked with fist-sized globs of green, puss-like, freak jism is not shown; it is a family show after all). Chuck and his mother share a confused look before Chunk’s sister enters screaming “Mommy, Mommy! There’s something wrong with Bubbe!!!”

“Uh ohhhh!”

Uh, yeah. They’ll probably never make that show.

Spanking the Reese’s Monkey: Sexual Subtext in 1980s Commercials

This thing weighed a fucking ton

When I was a kid, my dad bought one of the earliest VHS recorders, a groovy new toy for a young lawyer and his new family. In a short period of time, we had accumulated an extensive collection of tapes. As this was around the late seventies to the early eighties, the market for home video purchasing was not yet being exploited, so most of our collection had been taped off of television. My parents would tape movies and mini-series for themselves (anyone remember The Thornbirds?) and animated specials for me and my brother.

There were a few classics like It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and The Bugs Bunny Road-Runner Movie, but there were also some others such as The Berenstain Bears Christmas Tree, and the ponderously assembled Bugs Bunny Howl-Oween Special, that did not become perennial favorites. Still, I held on to some of these, not because Raggedy Ann and Andy's Halloween special aged particularly well, but because of the commercials.

More often than not, my dad would avoid taping the commercials, but he couldn’t always be bothered to hang around and watch the Cat in the Hat with his finger hovering over the pause button just so we would not have to later be subjected to the worst that Madison Avenue had to offer. Consequently, though I could give two shits less about the specials, I held on to these tapes because of the hilariously dated ads for candies and kids’ cereals, board games that no one remembers, and with a political ad for Joe Lieberman’s failed 1980 congressional run thrown in as a bonus.

Emmanuel Lewis will kick your ass

Some of these commercials featured child actors at the beginnings of their careers: a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial featuring a pre-Webster Emmanuel Lewis, a Jell-O commercial with a young Corey Feldman, for example. Some were just amusing for their production values or their ludicrous conceits, like the McDonalds ad which tried to pass off the Big Mac as a seven course meal just because it had two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese… well you know how it goes. Another thing I get from watching these is it makes me marvel at the disappearance of the jingle (for those too young to remember, it used to be the norm that trained musicians and composers would write songs for commercials which were designed to get stuck in your head).

My favorite of all time was the ad for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It featured a young blonde man eating an over sized piece of chocolate, strutting down the street to the tunes of the day as played on that brand-spankin’ new invention, the Walkman. Coming in the opposite direction is a girl, also wearing headphones, who is inexplicably eating peanut butter out of the jar. The pair collide and, in a moment that would make Freud blush, the young man’s chocolate plunges into the young woman’s peanut butter. They bicker for a bit before discovering how pleasing the combination is, as a strange old man appears and hovers behind them holding up a packet of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the mass-produced version of the fruits of their tryst.

Am I insane for thinking that the sexual subtext was probably deliberate? After all, it is not as though the young woman plunged her chocolate into his peanut butter. I imagine that the agency involved would try to maintain the innocuousness of their campaign. However, I don’t think it takes a person with a particularly dirty mind (though, yes, I am one) to see right through that. It’s just so blatant. It’s almost as if they are saying “You got your penis in my vagina!” “You got your vagina all over my penis!”

A few years ago, I stumbled upon this earlier version of the ad, apparently broadcast in the 1970s. I could riff on this, but I won’t. With the subtext of the 1980s version pretty much well established, this iteration makes me throw up a bit in my mouth.

I guess I have nothing more to say on this… Oh, my lost innocence…

WWWX and the Fucker: An Ode to a Classic Lost Gag Tape

“WWWX gives Gary, Indiana what it fucking deserves.”

If that doesn’t ring a bell, you’re just… well probably just about everybody.

It was a bit from a gag-reel that circulated around radio stations in the early eighties. A lot of tapes like this went around. Some were on-air mishaps captured for posterity. Some were un-aired outtakes from pre-recorded shows that the radio personality had hoped would be destroyed. Many, though, were gag tapes of bogus radio shows or commercials put together for fun by guys in the business. Being able to hear these as a kid was one of the benefits of having a family member in broadcasting.

Held together with scotch tape, it still makes me laugh 30 years later.

Shortly after the legendary Boston radio station WRKO switched from music to a talk radio format, my dad took on a weekend slot hosting a law oriented call-in show. Since his slot was on Saturday afternoons, I often would go to the station with him. One of my favorite childhood memories was being able to run around an empty radio station (most of the staff had the weekends off), playing in unused studios pretending to host my own show Sometimes I would just hanging out in the offices surrounded by photos of RKO luminaries of the day such as David Brudnoy, Jerry Williams and Gene Burns.

Then there were the tapes that dad would bring home. There was the WRKO holiday tape featuring a mock broadcast with the on-air talent poking fun at their own personas with risqué commercials thrown in. One memorable segment featured the cantankerous Jerry Williams hosting a call-in show devoted to romantic advice, telling a listener in an uncharacteristically soothing voice to “drop that jerk and move on… Thanks for calling.” (This bit would have been hysterical to people who remember Jerry Williams) Another standout bit had a film noir-ish narrator telling of a late night encounter and (unprotected) sex with a woman who, as it turned out, was married to a man who was being released from prison that very day. “By then, I’d sobered up enough to get a good look at her,” the narrator tells us before the punch-line reveals the bit to be an advertisement: “Was I having a Maalox moment.”

Other tapes that dad brought home included the notorious “Casey Kasem’s Bad Day,” (that was how it was labeled on my tape, but I have seen it with other titles) a profanity-laced tirade captured during a taping of American Top 40 (before hearing that tape, it never occurred to me that radio shows could be pre-recorded). It’s easy to find now on YouTube, but to hear it back in the 80s, you had to know someone who knew someone.

My favorite, though, was the WWWX tape. The introduction alone made me laugh my ass off when the sonorous “voice-of-God” announcer proclaimed that “WWWX gives Gary, Indiana what it fucking deserves.” After this, the entire bit was the frothing, psychotic disc jockey, known only as “the Fucker,” unleashing torrents of obscenity between songs by the likes of Raspberries, Alice Cooper, and the Stones.

I never did find out the source of that tape. As far as I know, there has never been a WWWX in Gary, Indiana. I think I heard, at some point, that the tape was made as a joke (and obviously unaired) by some guys at a station in nearby Chicago. From there it circulated from radio station to radio station, as these tapes did, being heard by radio guys who would play it for friends, never really going public.

But then, none of these tapes were really meant to be heard by the public. “Casey Kasem’s Bad Day” was the exception to the rule. This probably had to do with the fact that there was more public interest in hearing the beloved radio personality losing his shit than hearing some unknown smart-assed jock ranting and offering promotional giveaways such as a “two gallon can of warm semen that Johnny Dildo left in here a few minutes ago.” (Between these tapes and the George Carlin records he gave me, how could my dad have been surprised that I would have ended up with the filthiest mouth of any kid in the fifth grade?)

Then again, nobody really cares about Casey Kasem anymore either, and his bad day has become as played out as the Jerky Boys. WWWX and the fucker, however, has remained blissfully obscure, too unknown even for cult status. Nothing more than a secret handshake for aging radio guys, an in-joke which is fading from memory as quickly as radio itself is.

But it made me roar as a kid, even when I didn’t know what half of it meant. This type of material has never disappeared. I hardly need to remind anyone that parodies of radio shows, TV shows, and movies are ubiquitous on sites like YouTube, and most people with a computer have the ability to make these, and with decent production values to boot. Give me an hour and I could make something as puerile and nasty as WWWX and have it up on the web. Or course, it would probably get buried in the avalanche of DIY humor and no one would hear it. But back then, grown men (and I do mean “men” as it is mostly overgrown boys who would find this stupid shit funny), who were true professionals, would use state of the art broadcasting and recording equipment to make dick jokes. And then other grown men, also trusted professionals in that field, would play it for their friends and giggle. And that is even funnier to me than the tapes themselves.

Calling Off the Bootleg Hunt

Why Wolfgang's Vault is an Affront to Collectors

It seems that every day I get an email from Wolfgang’s Vault advertising classic live concert recordings that have newly been made available for streaming on their site.  They inform me of newly offered recordings by classic rockers like the Kinks, Bruce Springsteen, and Traffic, adding that they threw in some old jazz, and uploaded shows by a couple of artists who have recently died. It would be easy to refer to these emails as spam, but the volume of material that keeps coming out is impressive. The Vault, which focuses mostly on music of the sixties and seventies and also sells collectibles from these shows and artists, is a treasure trove, one-stop shopping  for nostalgic baby boomers.

Established in 2003 when businessman Bill Sagan bought the archives of the late, legendary impresario  Bill Graham, Wolfgang’s Vault (named for Graham’s childhood nickname when he was growing up in Germany) began as a site for selling the rock memorabilia obtained in the purchase. Finding that much of what was in the vaults were privately made concert recordings, the site began allowing the free streaming of old concerts, making some available for paid download. As recordings became more and more the focal point of the website, Sagan and his organization obtained more collections (such as the tapes from the King Biscuit Flower Hour, the legendary radio concert series), making more and more high quality recordings available.

Years before, most of these recordings have been sold as bootleg albums and CDs and have also circulated freely in trading circles. However, distancing themselves from the “bootleg” stigma, Wolfgang’s Vault has projected an image of respectability. A 2005 article in the Wall Street Journal, portrayed Sagan as equal parts businessman and fanatic, meticulously combing through the catalog of live recordings, obtaining permissions and creating revenue-sharing deals. However, the site and his efforts have not been free of controversy, and he was sued in 2006 by a number of the bands whose material he was streaming on the site.

I have not been able to find details about the subsequent settlements, but I can only speculate that Wolfgang’s Vault ultimately offered more favorable terms to the copyright owners on the songs who ultimately found it best to join Sagan rather than fight him. And who can blame them? In a time when record company earnings had plummeted due to peer-to-peer file sharing, it makes perfect sense to open up new revenue streams based on “previously unavailable” material.

As a music fan who is quite simpatico with the boomers in terms of musical taste, one might think that I would be enthralled every time I receive one of these missives from Wolfgang’s Vault. In fact, I’m just annoyed (and not just because it fills up my inbox).

This is not so say that many of the recordings they have aren’t great. They are. In fact, many recordings featured on that website have been in my collection for years, and they definitely are worth listening to. That’s the thing though: Why should I get excited about the ability to listen in shoddy quality streaming audio to recordings that I already have in better sounding formats?

I am aware that a lot of these are new to more casual music listeners who haven’t spent years hunting down bootleg recordings. I also admit that I probably sound like a jerk for even the vaguest insinuation that only an elite set of hardcore geeks should have access to them, or that the poor sound quality on the website would never be acceptable to people who truly care about music.

I don’t mean to say these things. On the other hand, I don’t mean not to say them either. I don’t mean to sound elitist, and I acknowledge that this sort of pretentiousness is hard to swallow particularly when coming from someone who sits alone in darkened rooms listening to records, but given the amount of time and money that I and so many other have spent obtaining these recordings throughout the years, can you blame me for feeling, at the very least, a little bit ambivalent about these recordings these being made a little too easily available?

_________________________

My first boot. A cheap cassette dub of this CD.

I remember buying my first bootleg when I was 17. On an early summer day in Northampton, Massachusetts, I stumbled across a guy selling cassettes out of the back of his car. Not elegantly packaged, there was no cover art except for a handwritten cassette insert (actually, a xeroxed copy) with the most basic information about the recording (who, where, when) and a track listing. Little attention was paid to quality. They were dubbed onto normal bias Maxell UR 90s (as opposed to the high bias XLII-S cassettes that I used myself and were held in high esteem in bootleg trading circles), but they were documents that I would not be able to get a regular record store.

The tape I bought that day was a concert by The Who from Amsterdam in 1969 featuring a (more or less) complete performance of Tommy. I had never heard this before (a complete live performance of Tommy by the original band was not made officially available until the Live at the Isle of Wight album was released a couple of years later.) It was imperfect, to say the least. The sound quality, while a soundboard recording, was not that of an official release, but for the first time, I realized that I was not limited to official releases to satisfy my obsessive collecting urges. Moreover, I liked the idea that these were complete shows, not recordings culled from several dates, then edited and overdubbed in the studio to ensure that the product was consistent with the image and sound that the band wanted to put across. These were what the band sounded like onstage at that time, on that night, warts and all. At the same time, part of the appeal of bootleg collecting was finding something that was rarified, something not available through normal channels.

In college, I bought my first bootleg CD, Tales from the Who, a less than complete but otherwise excellent document of The Who’s concert in Philadelphia on their 1973 Quadrophenia tour. Going to school in Boston, I found several places where I could get my fixes, mostly in places around Harvard Square: Mystery Train, Second Coming Records. Sometimes pickings were slim. At Mystery Train, they just had a little box at the counter in which they kept the bootlegs, and they weren’t cheap either. Still, I made some nice acquisitions during my undergraduate years.

After moving to New York, I used to cruise through shops in the Village like Subterranean, Generation Records, Rockit Scientist Records, and Bleecker Street Records, looking through their bins for a bunch of little holy grails: The complete Beach Boys’ Smile Sessions, rough session tapes of the Traveling Wilburys, outtakes and live material from the short-lived supergroup, Blind Faith. I got used to getting home and finding out that I paid $25 for a stinker, but separating the wheat from the chaff was part of it. It was all about finding the rare gem. I also got used to occasionally seeing the stores almost completely emptied of stock after being raided by the Feds.

I will not lie and try to say that bragging rights were not at least a small part of the joy of acquisition, however, I will defend myself in saying that I never hoarded. I was always willing and eager to make copies for friends, particularly after I got my first CD burner. In fact, turning people onto to recordings that they would otherwise never hear was as much fun for me as was hearing them myself, almost.

Another thing that happened when I got my first burner was that I began trading.

When I started trading, it was still mostly being done by mail, but with contacts being made online. At first I had my list of recordings (along with ratings of quality, and my personal rules of trading) which I would send to prospects via email. Eventually, I had my list hosted online and found that I was being approached by traders who had found items on my list that they coveted.

I found that every trader had different rules, with some being more stringent than others.  Many rules were technical, such as what kind of discs to use (I had a problem with Memorex discs at that time), what kind of mailers to use (fiber cushioned mailers were generally frowned upon since they would explode with lint and dust when opened), and ensuring that files were “lossless” (meaning having ever been encoded to MP3 or any other source that resulted in signal loss after being decompressed).  Mainly, though, at the core of it was being honest with one another and supportive of the artists, being sure not to do any trading of officially released material. Furthermore, we always supported the artists by purchasing their official releases and going to their concerts. When I started trading, it was nice to no longer be dependent on bootleggers for my live music fixes, and to know that I was no longer putting money into the wrong people’s pockets. I would occasionally still buy bootlegs, but was comforted in the knowledge that I was taking the hit for my fellow traders, and I would be able to provide the material to other real fans free of charge. In trading lingo, this would be referred to as a “liberated bootleg.” Perhaps it was an “honor amongst thieves” mentality, but we argued that what we were doing was not unethical (Illegal is a whole other thing) and that we engaged in trading because we were true fans.

Memorex discs did not work with my players.
They would usually end up being used as coasters

Trading was almost as much fun as cruising through dusty record store in the Village or Harvard Square. True, there was less effort put into the search, and looking through someone’s list online provided a less tactile type of thrill, but I was blown away by the sheer amount of material that was available. The thrill of getting a padded envelope filled with 6, 8, or sometimes even 12 discs (almost invariably even numbers , as the CD sleeves were double sided) almost made up for the decrease of the joy of the search. I would spend the next week or so listening through to all of the discs, checking them for glitches, rating the performances, and yes, actually enjoying them. I would create artwork for the jewelcases (spending extra time to make particularly elegant packages for exceptional recordings that I knew I would give to friends), put them on the shelf, and move on, revisiting favorites from time to time.

When I got a high-speed internet connection, I found a number of torrent sites (sites which use Bittorrent software to make downloading faster by having a group of hosts upload and download from one another simultaneously)  from which I could obtain lossless. Most of these sites arose out of the old snail-mail trading communities.

The wealth of material available was staggering, and the ease of downloading made me grab things that I would not have otherwise searched out. In fact, it was not long before I found that I was searching less and less for things. I found myself getting to a place where I would see what was newly uploaded and would grab whatever seemed relatively interesting. I became quickly overwhelmed. It was not long before I found myself compulsively downloading things and not listening to them. The idea of wading through my download folder was too exhausting, with the constant additions making it even more daunting a task.

Still, many of the recordings were still of great quality. Often times a show would be posted on a site, only to have other collectors posting their versions of the same concert but from different recording sources, allowing the best version to emerge at the top. Often a better quality recording would emerge of a show that I had obtained year prior and allow me to listen to it with a fresh set of ears. It was enough to get me back to chipping away at the download folder now and again.

That’s the way it’s gone for the last few years. I do feel like I’ve slacked off a bit. When I think back to a decade ago, I am amazed at the amount of work I used to put into finding and hearing music, combing Greenwich Village record stores that carried bootleg vinyl and CDs, usually paying around 25 dollars for a single disc. Even when I did more trading than buying, it was a time consuming process involving sending CDR copies of recordings by mail, fostering relationships with traders, keeping databases of what I had sent out and what I expected back, how long it took for someone to get back to me, who were good traders and who ended up fucking me in the end. Of course, this was my early twenties. This was still at a time when I was known to camp out on the street for concert tickets. I was young. I had time and money (I am not sure why I don’t seem to have either of those anymore). I was as committed a fan as any an artist could hope for.

I still collect. The only bootlegs I actually buy tend to be old vinyl discs of particular historical value.  But even when downloading them, I try not to let them merely languish on a hard drive like many people I know. I still burn them to CD, and though at some point along the way, I did cease to making jewel case art, I continue to make ornate labels printed on the discs to give to friends. Of course, I do this in spite of the fact that I know that when I give these away, the recipients are generally ripping the discs to iTunes and then burying them at the bottom of a drawer or simply throwing them away. Still, it’s a way for me to keeping up some level of effort and engagement while trying to keep it somewhat tactile.

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I suppose the existence of something like Wolfgang’s Vault shouldn’t bother me. After all, with the torrent sites, it is almost just as easy to get lossless recordings of shows as it is to stream them on the Vault. Perhaps that’s the problem, that the days of the hunt are largely gone. As someone who used to search for these recordings, sometimes overpay for them, and sometimes cajole hoarding traders for them when they would rather sit on them, I cannot help but feel that they have been devalued. And this is admittedly a difficult feat, considering that many of them have been free for years. However, with a website that provides one-stop shopping, taking away all the work, and instantly delivers sonically inferior versions of these recordings, it not hard to see how the value has gone below merely “free” and is now merely “common.”

I understand that the same can, and will be said about recorded music in general. I am one of those people who have long argued that the shift from records, tapes, and CDs to digital downloads and ultimately streaming audio has had a hugely detrimental effect on music fandom and engagement. Legitimate releases have similarly suffered from that shift to intangible formats of decreased quality, which I believe has led, to a great extent, to less deep engagement with individual works being replaced by more superficial listening to a myriad of recordings (I am not arguing that the in depth listening experience has disappeared, particularly not within the group of people who identify themselves as rabid music fans, but I do assert that that kind of listening experience is not as much the norm as it was when tangible music formats dominated). Sites like Spotify allow listeners to stream official releases with the same ease as one can listen to boots on Wolfgang’s Vault.

The reason that Wolfgang’s Vault bothers me more than sites like Spotify, though, is that in the past the people that collected bootleg recordings were like a little club, a community of enthusiastic music fans. Sure, most of the people in the club were geeky, socially awkward fetishists, but we were also informed and engaged. We were constantly exploring, hunting for that holy grail, that unobtainable gem. We were unified by a view that what we got out of music was related to what we put into it. By streaming them, they take quality away from the recordings, but more, they take away half the fun, the joy of the search, the excitement of finding something rare.

Sure, we are still out there, still trying to find the best version of a given show, still trying to find the show that is still lurking in a private collection or warehouse, but for me there is a hint of bitterness that the most casual fan can stream that Who show from Philly in ’73 that I found in a little box in a dank little basement store on Newbury Street. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that music should be exclusive, but I still feel like someone kicked the clubhouse door open and started flooding the place with people who didn’t pay their dues.

All This and World War II (Get It?)

Another entry into the “What Could Possibly Go Right?” file.

In 1976, a 20^th Century Fox released a film called All This and World War II. A collage of World War II footage owned by Fox, it combined newsreel footage, snippets of the studio’s classic movies from that era, and propaganda films or the age. All of this was set to the songs by the Beatles performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with such luminaries as Leo Sayer, David Essex, Frankie Laine, and the Bee Gees.
Again, this was called All This and World War II. (You know, like as in “…and world war, too.”)

Needless to say, the movie was savaged by critics, met with disgust by the public, and was only in theatres for a matter of weeks. It has never been issued on VHS or DVD. You cannot see it on Netflix. 20^th Century Fox does not want you to see this movie.

Ludicrous concept aside, it is not well made. The editing is choppy and the juxtapositions between the images and the songs are more often than not, seemingly haphazard. The whole movie feels like a YouTube video put together by a 14 year old Beatlemaniac as an extra credit project for history class. Still, there is an almost adorable naiveté to the project. It is completely un-ironic , with an apparent lack of awareness that anyone could find this concept to be less than brilliant, much less completely offensive. In fact, the only irony is that someone thought that this was a good idea.

The soundtrack, however, did have some success. It spawned a few hit singles and, according to blurbs on Amazon.com, the CD reissue delighted a small group of zealots who grew up on the album. According to the liner notes of the soundtrack album, All This and World War II began as a dream by Russ Regan, the president of 20^th Century Records. This seemingly belies the assertion made by some that the filmmakers had originally intended to use the actual Beatles recordings for the movie, as in retrospect, it seems as though the movie was merely an ad for the soundtrack album.

This one will give your kids Peter Gabriel
nightmares

While the movie is a splendidly, ludicrously misguided mess, one can see how the album on its own could have seemed like a sound business decision. It was, after all, lushly recorded set of familiar and beloved songs performed by some of the biggest artists of the day. The double album was elegantly packaged with a gatefold sleeve with slip case, accompanied by a booklet loaded with lyrics and beautiful (if sometimes off-putting) illustrations. While Frankie Laine (who delivers an oddly earnest version of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”) and Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons were past their peaks in term of popularity, the presence of Bryan Ferry, Elton John, Jeff Lynne, Peter Gabriel, Rod Stewart, and Peter Gabriel lent some credence to the project. Unfortunately, it never feels like they are any more than guest artists, lending their voices for the day.

In fact, the album is really the work of Lou Reizner, the mastermind behind the orchestral production of The Who’s Tommy in 1972 (which was either a travesty or a work of genius, depending on who you ask).  Once again, he sought to re-imagine rock music on a larger, more heroic scale. Instead, the orchestra weighed down the arrangements, providing bombast without grandeur.

The sad thing is that some of these versions could have been good with better arrangements and recordings. Ike and Tina’s earlier cover of “Come Together” is far superior to Tina’s solo version featured here. Rod Stewart’s version of “Get Back” finds him in fine form, but with a stilted and poorly mixed backing track, it merely makes one wonder how great it would have been if it had been recorded with Faces. Peter Gabriel’s version of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which was apparently his earliest released solo recording, is actually interesting as his vocals textures subtly vary throughout the song, but with an uninspired backing track, it does not soar (an interpretation by Genesis might have been life-changing). Also, one has to wonder when listening to the Bee Gees’ cover of “Golden Slumbers” why some of their trademark harmonies weren’t added to the arrangement. It was another one of many missed opportunities.

Still, searching for quality in a project like this should be aside the point. Even when divorced from the bizarre concept that ostensibly led to its creation, the album was a pretty bad idea. It was not too long after this album came out when people realized that it is probably smart to avoid covering the Beatles (probably right around the time of Robert Stigwood’s film of Sgt. Pepper featuring Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees and Aerosmith). One would have to be pretty audacious to think one could do better that the Fab Four.

Still, anything worth doing is worth doing outrageously. If the references to World War II that made the movie so hilariously appalling were present on the album, it would have survived as a cult curiosity. Sadly, with most of the album merely being bombastic without being absurd, it simply is too much cheese and not enough camp. 

This is not to say that there are not some fantastically bad tracks here that almost save this album. Italian singer-songwriter Richard Cocciante’s cover of “Michelle” devolves so quickly from melodrama to hilarious histrionics that it is almost worth the price of admission. The version of “You Never Give Me Your Money” credited to Wil Malone (who did the arrangements and conducted the orchestra) and Reizner himself, is a wonderful example of why some producers should not try to be performers as well. The vocoder effect used on this track makes this one of the most embarrassingly comical on the whole album.

In the end, the results are bad, but not ludicrous, and as I have said in the past (see Empire Jazz), if you are going to do something so misguided, it must be laughably horrible or inexplicably brilliant. Anything in the middle is a failure. Still, there is plenty to hate here and there are more than a couple of choice cuts to irritate your friends with. And that’s kind of a good thing, I guess.