My record entries below are 1-10, new releases in 2002; 11-20 are archival/reissues. Following the albums are year-end comments. For a complete list (w/blurbs) of my entire top 100 of 2002 feel free to email me privately at fmills123@yahoo.com and I'll be glad to send the entire 35,000 word document. -- FM
The Year In Rock
It was a fantastic year to be a lover of music and a collector of same. I can’t recall a year in which I found more tunes to make my paws sweat (or palms hairy, take your pick). This was true both on the new release front and in the archival divisions, too. Stuff going on in the music biz fascinated me as well, in equal measures thrilling and appalling.
So anyway, someone who says that the quality of music out there has declined and that is why the record biz is in such dire straits, well, that pinhead ain’t been looking for music in the right places. Granted, the actual crap – which is always with us, let’s face it – is monumentally crappier. But the biz has been performing a tight-wire act for some time now; it’s just that in 2002, folks realized there was no safety net down below. Besides, who says you have to consume crap, right? Who says you have to listen to bad radio when there are plenty of thriving noncommercial community radio stations (hint: donate to ‘em at pledge time), not to mention an insane number of Webcasters? No, like I said, anybody who tries to claim this was a lame year clearly has been walking around with his head in a duffel-sack. Or listening to the Clear Channel, haw-haw-haw!
Now, I’m as bone-weary of the mainstream rock and pop pap as Tom Petty, but the bulk of college-radio’s indie-rock staples are just as formulaic and uninspiring in their identikit grovelings too. I mean, c’mon. OK Go? Fine by me – go, now! Interpol? Call the feds! Royksopp? Saps… Nor do I have much truck with all the sad-sack populist hipsters who constantly weigh in on what’s wrong with the music biz – you know, the folks who counter the R.I.A.A.’s whining about piracy and CD burning with their own tiresome mantras about high CD prices and shitty tunes. Wake up, folks: for every overpriced $19.98 piece-of-crap CD released this year, there were probably 20 great discs – not all of them indies, either -- that came in under the twelve-buck mark. Sure, you may have to drag your lazy ass away from your X-Box long enough to do some online hunting. You might even have to put down that latte for a few minutes and – gasp! – drive across town to paw through a record store’s bins. But remember that line from The Big Chill, about growing up an’ shit? It applies to being a music lover, too: Nobody every said it was gonna be easy. I think back to an old episode of I.R.S.’ Cutting Edge when R.E.M.’s Peter Buck was talking about some of the great underground music of the day. At one point he looked directly into the camera and (roughly paraphrased) said, “It’s your duty as Americans to go out and find this stuff.” Thanks, Pete.
2002: SEND IN THE CLOWNS: Boy, what a crazy year this has been in the music world, huh! How crazy was it? Glad you asked. Crazy enough that the one of the year’s most cynical albums, Tom Petty’s The Last DJ, was also one of the most sentimental releases. Crazy enough that one the darkest, Steve Earle’s Jerusalem, turned out to be one of the most optimistic. Crazy enough that one of the most serious, Beck’s Sea Change, was simultaneously one of the funniest -- albeit unintentionally so: dude, get a grip, like, love fucking hurts, okay? Crazy enough that….
(1) One of the most anticipated archival releases, Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975 The Rolling Thunder Revue, was almost upstaged at year’s end by a genuine bootleg on the Japanese Main Stream label. As riveting and spiffy-sounding as the official Zimmy ‘leg was (that freebie DVD single wasn’t unwelcome either), the cumbersomely-titled After 37 Years, Bring It All Back To Newport had the curious effect of feeling both contemporary and ancient, and with a distinct double-whiff of historical significance, too. A moderately good-sounding audience recording of Dylan’s August 3, 2002 concert at the Apple & Eve Newport Folk Festival (in Newport, RI), it found The Bard returning to the scene of the crime some three-decades-plus hence, this time plugged-in and gunning for blood from the git-go with a set that, unlike other concerts from his 2002 tour, focused almost exclusively on songs he penned during the ‘60s (only a handful of tracks from Love & Theft were performed). Attired in tall white Stetson and sporting a freaky long beard/wig look the man plowed into his folkrock era-heavy set with a bile-spewing vengeance. Seems that no matter how much longer Dylan may live, he’s determined to get the last laugh.
(2) One of the most backstory-heavy, labored-over and thematically intense albums, Springsteen’s The Rising, didn’t completely liberate its audience as intended (from the daunting psychic baggage of 9/11) until its songs were given a chance to spread their wings live. Which, with Boss tunes, is always the correct context. While we all know music takes on new meaning, texture and flavor in concert, there was something absolutely spontaneous and celebratory about Rising material performed on the 2002 tour, particularly when sequenced in with some of Springsteen’s best older numbers. If you don’t believe me, try this simple test. Pull out your Bruce recs and program this actual (partial) concert sequence in the privacy of your own home: The Rising/ Lonesome Day/ The Ties That Bind/ Candy's Room/ Night/Empty Sky/ You're Missing/ Waitin' on a Sunny Day. If that doesn’t make you feel better about a whole lot of things – 9/11 included – you need professional help.
(3) As long as I’ve brought up Earle, Springsteen and 9/11, among the various other rock community stabs at dealing with our national tragedy, some of the most high-profile ones (both Neil Young’s occasionally turgid and lyrically awkward “Let’s Roll” and Tori Amos’ excruciating/embarrassing full-length parable of navel-gazing travelogue, Scarlet’s Walk, come to mind) wound up being the least memorable. Yet those given to flying way under the industry radar (for example, The Residents’ oddly vulnerable Demons Dance Alone and Legendary Pink Dots’ provocative All The King’s Men) wound up being the most affecting tomes, with Sleater-Kinney’s awesome One Beat perhaps the most skillful juggling of grief and outrage heard anywhere. The three ladies performed like champs, with the finesse of seasoned tunesmiths thrice their group age; they even were frequently heard tying together a few generational loose ends by covering Springsteen in concert. And let us not forget the mighty Sonic Youth, whose expansive and hypnotic Murray Street, while not intended as a 9/11 record per se but as part of a larger Manhattan trilogy, offered a much-needed warm bath, a tall glass of milk and a plate of cookies.
(4) In a year where we finally reconciled ourselves to the fact that, given George Harrison’s death in late ’01, there really, no really, there ain’t gonna be no Beatles reunion – we received not one but two reunions. Okay, technically, Back In The U.S. Live 2002 is a Paul McCartney tour rec, but damn, its Fab Four-heavy, career-spanning setlist sure brings a smile to my face, and it plays like the Live Beatles Album We Never Thought We’d Hear. And leave it to jambanders Phish to do the deed even prouder: Live Phish 13: 10.31.94 included the entire friggin’ White Album performed onstage, song-by-song, in the proper running order. Now THAT (along with similar Phish treatments of The Who’s Quadrophenia, Talking Heads’ Remain In Light and Velvet Underground’s Loaded on three of its other live archival releases) is entertainment!
(5) With 2002 being the most un-funky year in recent memory (pissed-off snipers, drunk airline pilots, horny priests, a right-wing monkey-not-funky as president and, um, Michael Jackson’s nose), it was pretty damn ironic that it was also a year in which some of the funkiest music in years was either created or resurrected. Whether or not there was something happening on the musical astral plane this year is hard to say, but it can’t be mere coincidence that we had labels like NYC’s Soul Fire, Britain’s Jazz Man and Brooklyn’s Daptone digging into the funk ‘n’ soul vaults as well as serving up likeminded contemporary artists (Lee Fields, Sharon Jones, Sugarman 3, etc.) as well. Shoot, even ‘70s legends The Jimmy Castor Bunch got a well-timed anthologizing courtesy RCA’s 16 Slabs Of Funk. And George Clinton & the P-Funk All-Stars toured like muh-fuhs… The mothership touched down in Mama Africa as well, courtesy Antibalas’ Fela-centric Talkatif, while a superb afro-rock compilation, sensibly titled Afro-Rock Volume One, helped expand upon the context from which Fela himself emerged. And both veteran funk-fiend D.J. Shadow (The Private Press) and upstart RJD2 (Deadringer) delivered the sampladelic goods; Shadow even made a trip all by his lonesome to Texas where he dug deep into the Lone Star vaults and came up with an ace 2-CD funk artifact from the ‘70s, Mickey and the Soul Generation’s Iron Leg. Something’s going on around here, without a doubt, but you don’t know what it is, do ya, Massa Jones?
(5) More than a few of us noticed that the one of the year’s most anticipated reissues, the remastered, expanded-to-two-discs version of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (okay, okay, so that expanded Pavement rec was pretty spiffy, too!), was joined in the stores by one of the most unexpected but altogether brilliant pieces of music journalism, too. Writer Ashley Kahn’s A Love Supreme: The Story Of John Coltrane’s Signature Album has everything you’d want from a great book: detail, drama, insight, insiderdom, passion, purity. Coming at the topic not from a dry jazz scholar’s point of view but as a true music obsessive who wants it all – the tunes as well as the tales – Kahn spun a riveting story. Even better: there’s already a soundtrack – remastered, expanded, etc. -- to go with that story. Here’s hoping Hollywood never gets ahold of it.
GOING OUT WITH A BANG: If 2002 represented the rockisback! zeitgeist, rock deaths made a big comeback this year, too. The Who’s John Entwistle, of course, expired in a Vegas hotel room after an evening of hookers and blow after he conveniently forgot that he was supposed to be on heart medication. Alice In Chains’ erstwhile vocalist Layne Staley and the Ramones’ founding bassist Dee Dee Ramone joined the choir invisible, at ages 34 and 50 respectively, after indulging in too much chemical fun, although what was infinitely more entertaining was watching all the usual media suspects trotting out all the usual hand-wringing clichés: immensely talented musicians, loved by fans and friends, crippled by psychic pain, “the tortured artist effect,” blah-blah-blah. Bah. Spare me the memorials. When some so-called “tortured artist” holes up in room for that last hot shot, in his egomania he betrays his fans and loved ones and surrenders the right to be remembered in anything other than strict clinical terms – just another dead fucking junkie, after all.
STRUMMER, R.I.P.: By contrast, the immediate and widespread reaction to Clash/Mescaleros mainman Joe Strummer’s untimely, unglamorous and, aside from a lifetime of smoking, un-chemical demise (a heart attack, at age 50) was heartfelt and ultimately well-positioned, with genuinely moving testimony arriving from pundits who came of age during the Clash’s tenure as “the only band that matters.” I was privileged enough to have interviewed Strummer twice, and in person he was as feisty and droll as I’d imagined he would be, setting my fanboy ass straight on a number of matters. At one point he good-naturedly derailed me, as I wandered too deeply into old-news territory, with a succinct, “Don’t you want to know when the Clash are going to get back together?” And in a weird, admittedly morbid and perverse, sense, Strummer’s death is perfect. No doubt Joe himself, sitting up on high somewhere this very moment, is chuckling over the ludicrously middle-class nature of the circumstances surrounding his demise, this irascible, uncompromising punk firebrand decidedly not going out in a classic blaze of rock death glory. No fiery auto crash. No messy blood-and-syringe overdose. No onstage electrocution. “Bit of a cosmic giggle ‘ere, innit?” Strummer remarks, as he passes Joey Ramone a heavenly spliff.
ZEVON, R.I.P. – NOT JUST YET:
Strummer’s death, fascinatingly, caught journalists way off guard and without the safety net of a “ready room” (one of several code names for where newspapers maintain extensive files of pre-mortem celeb obituaries). Perhaps that’s why the media treatment rang all the truer. In the case of Warren Zevon, we have an even more fascinating scenario: The obits and memorials are actually being published prior to the wolfman’s passage into the great gig in the sky. This seems perfect (and yeah, morbid and perverse) too; everyone has fantasies about being a fly on the wall at their own funeral in order to see what folks say about them. Zevon, of all people, is getting to live out that fantasy – and God bless ‘im for that, too.
PAY TO PLAY VERSION 6.0: In an egregious demonstration of how not to behave ethically, a heretofore obscure music website, NYRock.com, attempted to dismantle the division between advertising and editorial, ultimately setting off a firestorm on music-related Internet newsgroups (including a well-known mailing list of label publicists). NYRock.com instituted the following rule regarding reviews of independent bands’ or labels’ products: “We have a $20 CD-review policy for all submissions from unsigned and independent-label bands. If you’d like the CDs reviewed, please send payment….” Cough up an additional $10 and your photo can run with the review too. At first NYRock.com tried to justify its actions by citing the high cost of maintaining a commercial venture (gee, you’d think they’d try to sell, oh, advertising…). Later, the site’s sole fulltime employee, the enticingly anonymous Sandi Boerum (she appears nowhere on the masthead, which lists positions such as “publisher” and “editor” but no actual names to go with them) lamely defended the reviews policy by sniffing, “NYRock.com is not the only publication to charge for reviews.” Please name names, Sandi, but meanwhile, didn’t your mother tell you as a kid that two wrongs don’t make a right? Or that just because Buffi and Traci go leaping off cliffs doesn’t mean you have to do it too?
If anyone is interested in reading more about this feel free to get in touch. You can view an editorial I wrote about the matter in the Detroit Metro Times (www.metrotimes.com , go to Music Section and scroll down to the article). Bottom line, and I quote from myself: I’m deeply troubled on three fronts. One, that tiny labels and unknown bands, desperate for any press, will buy into this bill of goods. Secondly, that other publications, Web-based or print, may follow suit if this business model proves profitable. And finally, that if the line between “real” journalism and the kind a NYRock.com-type practices increasingly becomes blurred, anything I write, as a member of an ethically-suspect profession, will automatically have less credibility. Fascinatingly, Boerum came out of the woodwork after I wrote the thing, whining of mean and abusive treatment on my part, despite having repeatedly ignored my requests for an interview beforehand. But what Boerum and other folks like her – I’m sure you know the type, people who arrived late to the party and suddenly decided, particularly with the advent of the Internet, that they could hitch a free and even profitable ride to the rock ‘n’ roll mule train – don’t get and never will get is that there’s something just a little bit sacred about this thing we call music, and you have to respect that sacred ground by behaving with at least a modicum of ethical responsibility. I know that mainstream newspaper journalists treat their craft in that regard, so why shouldn’t those of us in the music end of journalism do likewise? Read on….
PAY TO PLAY VERSION 6.0.5: In 2002 I accomplished my goal of publishing 300 record reviews. The tally would have been higher but I have a 2-year old. Of those reviews, more than a third were of CDs and LPs I bought -- as opposed to being assigned by some editor desperate to suck up to publicists or sell a few more label ads off my blood, sweat and tears.
As a writer, though, since I received the same 1,850 promos and saw the same publicists’ pitches as everyone else did this year, it became quite a jolly little diversion for me to open up music mags and pick out all those tidy little 250-word judgment calls that, in the final estimation, amounted to little more than back-scratching and favor-returning. In that regard, not every lesson we learned from Saint Lester Bangs and all the other pioneering roccrits of yore were necessarily good lessons. Sometimes, it’s not prudent for journalists to be so deep in the pockets of the music biz that you can’t see – or more important, talk about -- what’s really going on, but for all the lint in your eyes. I know, I know – we’re addicted to those promos, those guest list privileges, those drink tickets, the occasional junket, and of course that backstage access to the stars. But whoever said that rock writing had to turn into just another wing of the least credible (ethically speaking) career path, celebrity journalism?
HOPE I SELL OUT BEFORE I GET OLD, PT.1: In 2002 everything was for sale, from personal dignity (halloo, Ozzy!) to Pete Townshend’s back catalog. I shan’t meditate unduly on whether Ol’ Behind Blue Eyes should/should not license the Who’s back catalog to every Tom, Dick, Harry, auto manufacturer or prime-time network television drama, and besides, a million Moby songs used in commercials and films can’t be wrong, right? Pity about that Clash song, though. Strummer and Jones approved, for a reported fee in the neighborhood of $500,000, the 45-day use by Jaguar of “London Calling.” This caused no shortage of gritted teeth and mutterings of “sell-out!” among Clash hardliners. Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss, quoted in a Chicago Tribune article about rock music and advertising, summed up many fans’ feelings by saying, “It takes something I looked up to, that I used as my gauge, and wipes away my respect for everything the Clash did because they were so against the thing they are now representing in that ad.” Strummer managed a semi-justification in an interview with Salon, pointing out that they’d never sold out to beer companies and how after enough time has elapsed, why shouldn’t an artist make some scratch – particularly since the Clash didn’t make that much money first time around.
HOPE I SELL OUT BEFORE I GET OLD, PT. 2: Frito-Lay’s biggest fan, Tom Waits, set things straight in an October letter to The Nation when he wrote, “Songs carry emotional information and some transport us back to a poignant time, place or event in our lives. It's no wonder a corporation would want to hitch a ride on the spell these songs cast and encourage you to buy soft drinks, underwear or automobiles while you're in the trance…Remember, when you sell your songs for commercials, you are selling your audience as well.” Chimed in John Densmore, who presumably is a bit more well-off monetarily than Waits, in a superb essay for Rolling Stone outlining why The Doors’ music is not available for licensing (despite Ray Manzarek’s urgings otherwise), “The bottom line is that our songs have a higher purpose, like keeping the integrity of their original meaning for our fans… Robby [Krieger] hit a home run [saying], ‘When I heard from one fan that our songs saved him from committing suicide, I realized that’s it – we can’t sell off these songs.’” Of course, folks who cite Moby’s successful song-licensing strategy as proof that the rantings of Densmore and Waits are just hippy-dreamer old-fogeyisms are convenient overlooking one fact: Most folks initially encountered Moby via his shilling for the man, not after they’d endlessly scrutinized, cherished and made love to his Play album. Think about it: years from now, when people hear the name Dirty Vegas, they’re gonna think of watching that slinkysexycool Mitsubishi Eclipse ad with the hot chick doing her pop-and-lock routine – not their first kiss at the high-school prom.
BEST TREND: Record labels have been serving up new releases that frequently include, for a limited time, cool add-ons such as bonus tracks and bonus discs (including DVDs), elaborate packaging, links to websites where you can stream or download exclusive content, etc.
WORST TREND: Issuing the add-on packages months after the CD’s initial release, i.e., forcing hard-core fans to buy the damn thing more than once! Oh well, that’s what God created used CD stores for… or CD burners.
BURNING FOR YOU, PT. 1: Remember the slogan “Home Taping Is Killing Music”? It held currency until everyone figured out that the people most likely to make cassette copies of their LPs or compile mix tapes were also the most devoted album-buying consumers. Not having learned from the past, the labels’ latest bogeymen are CD burners and Internet file-swapping. By treating music fans like criminals while ratcheting up CD prices and hatching such user-unfriendly schemes as “crippled” copy-protected discs, the industry has created a deeply adversarial relationship. It doesn’t help that it dispatches its loyal minions to willfully dispense disinformation (as anyone who’s kept up with RIAA headmistress Hilary Rosen’s frequent spin doctoring, in what appears to be her willing venue of choice, USA Today, knows) and that the general public swallows the propaganda hook, line and sinker while the rest of us are left saying to ourselves, “Do they really think we’re that stupid?”
BURNING FOR YOU, PT. 2: Talk about music-industry spin-doctoring: In a recent issue of CMJ New Music Report V2 Records VP Of Sales Jim Kelly held forth at length (and unchallenged) as he discussed the oncoming snowball effect of file sharing and CD burning upon the artistic community. After a somewhat facile analysis of how commerce and art are interrelated, he summarized with the statement, “People with families are suffering because of your greed.” That’s quite leap of logic. As Samuel L. Jackson might put it, allow me to retort: No, Jim, artists and their kids are not starving because Joe Fratboy is out there utilizing this year’s version of Napster. It’s because the music industry bases its moves on unlimited profit, damn the torpedoes, and some of the collateral damage inflicted when those torpedoes go off is upon, unfortunately, “suffering” artists not privy to multi-million-dollar recording contracts. True, record sales are way, way down in the industry. But genuine music lovers will always seek out new tunes and new artists; that’s how we get our fixes, after all. And in general, people behave honestly as long as they feel they’re getting a fair shake; it’s just that the aforementioned adversarial relationship is so teeth-baring that it’s gonna take more than just damage control to draw consumers back into the house. All those free DVD and secret website access keys are a nice touch, I’ll admit. Now if the labels would just put as much time and energy into artist development as they do limited-edition packaging and value add-ons, we might start getting somewhere.
BURNING FOR YOU, PT.3: Veteran singer-songwriter Janis Ian took an insightful look at all this in a lengthy essay on music-biz matters for the June issue of Performing Songwriter. After it subsequently spread like wildfire across the Internet, she posted an even more incisive followup piece on her website (www.janisian.com) that read, in part, “Do I believe downloading is not harming the music industry? Yes, absolutely. Do I think consumers, once the industry starts making product they want to buy, will still buy even though they can download? Yes. Water is free, but a lot of us drink bottled water because it tastes better. You can get coffee at the office, but you're likely to go to Starbucks or the local espresso place, because it tastes better. When record companies start making CDs that offer consumers a reason to buy them, we will buy them. The songs may be free on line, but the CDs will taste better.”
BURNING FOR YOU, PT. 4: Meanwhile, yours truly, stuck at home with cabin fever couldn’t help but, as Keith Moon might put it, fiddling about. By now everyone knows how the record industry has been quietly releasing copy-protected discs into the marketplace, primarily in Europe but increasingly in the states, too. Apparently some Einstein realized that the reason CDs were finding their way onto the Internet before they were released commercially was because somebody in the pipeline was – duh – leaking ‘em. Naturally that ethics-challenged demographic, music journalists, came under suspicion; since all we do is sit around all day, smoke weed and listen to records (and, oh yeah, occasionally earn a full time living at writing about the damn things), it’s logical to assume that we spend all our discretionary hours uploading shit to the Web. Now, all those “polite” letters from publicists accompanying review CDs suggesting that it would be bad karma for me to, like post tunes I didn’t even ask for in the first place to the Internet wasn’t enough; labels started sending out copy-protected promotional review copies! (Dreamworks went old-school and serviced reviewers with cassettes of the new Swizz Beatz joint, G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories, but it wasn’t like I was even gonna listen to that garbage in the first place, so I ran off 5000 copies with my dubbing deck, mocked up a cool j-card using clip art from the Web – minus the parental advisory -- and made a killing down at the local flea market selling the tapes to homeboys.)
So I received copy-protected discs of Butch (ex-Marvelous 3) Walker’s Left of Self*Centered (Arista) and Good Charlotte’s The Young & The Hopeless (Epic). Each had a sticker affixed that read, in part, “This CD is protected against unauthorized copying… will not play on computers…” Egad! Duly piqued but stifling the urge to call up the label publicists and tell them, “Gee, I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t write about your artists because my office’s primary listening device is my PC,” I started fiddling around with the old stereo. In practically no time I was able to burn analog CDR copies of both discs on my Phillips home audio (non-computer) burner. Then it was a simple matter to play the CDRs on my computer (and, if I’d wanted to waste the blank discs, burn additional copies with the PC’s burner), rip MP3s and email ‘em to my friend Scott, an audio/video tech whiz, in San Francisco. Scott reports that the MP3s sound just fine to his ears, analog source or no analog source, and he might even go buy a copy of Butch’s album. Before you ask, no, I didn’t offer to burn him a copy. That would be wrong. (Incidentally, as long as we’re talking analog, don’t all those music-subscription sites the record industry is frantically test-marketing seem just a tad, um, restrictive when it comes to the number of MP3s your sub allows you to download and burn versus the number of tracks you only listen to in a streaming format such as RealAudio? Guess what, any monkey with a patch cord can record -- onto tape, or onto disc if you have a home audio burner -- a stream, and in all honesty, it’ll sound fine for casual listening unless you’re a hopeless stereophile geek.) Oh, and speaking of the actual music, well, the Walker disc is medium-common-denominator pop/rock, while Good Charlotte is abysmal bubblegum punk. So much for them. I think I’ve already traded ‘em in.
And as an interesting postscript, Yep Roc sent out advances of Paul Weller’s Illumination, due early ’03, that were copy-protected. Touch & Go did likewise with the new Calexico, Feast Of Wire. On principle I was gonna refuse to review the discs – you listening out there, labels? – since I have better things to do with my time, and the 1,850+ promos I get annually, than to haul the stereo system down to the basement where my new office (and computer) is. Yep Roc wisely came through with a finished stock copy, however. Happy to report it’s not copy-protected and I shall proceed with the Wellercentric verbiage posthaste. We’ll see what happens with the Calexico release when stock copies surface.
BURNING FOR YOU, PT. 5: Back in the outside world while everyone was off to Mordor with Gandalf and Frodo battling the RIAA and its minions of evil, a previously unnoticed file-sharing network known as Soulseek (www.slsk.org ) was, like other players in the post-Napster milieu, back home at the Shire, quietly accumulating a grassroots base of users and acolytes. This time, however, there’s a twist. Accurately noting, as have the major labels with their forays into subscription services (MusicNet, Pressplay, etc.), that people might actually cough up money to get reliable and consistent access to downloadable music, Soulseek began offering what it euphemistically calls “download privileges” to its users. If you make at least a $5 “donation” to Soulseek, that will allow you, for the next 30 days, to be bumped to the front of any online queue that forms when multiple users are trying to snag the same music; in other words, the folks who sign up for the Soulseek “golden circle” get first dibs at the tunes ahead of the rest of us poor schnooks still clinging to the it’s-so-nineties notion that music should be free. Ain’t capitalism grand?
MUSIC HEADLINE OF THE YEAR: “37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster.” Okay, so that appeared on the front page of the April 11-17 issue of The Onion. But with great satire often comes shiny kernels of reality, too. (Let’s face it, every YLT show probably has at least 37 rec shop geeks in the audience.) And the accompanying photos of the “dead” clerks were spot-on (call it the “Elvis Costello syndrome,” physical appearances-wise), particularly since of them was the granddaddy of all record clerks, Mr. Lenny Kaye. “As of press time,” wrote The Onion of the tragedy, “police and emergency workers were still sifting through the wreckage for copies of Magnet, heated debates over the definition of emo, and other signs of record-store-clerk life.”
ROCK CRITIC OF THE YEAR: Hyon Kim, a 40-year old Seattle man also known as “The Sleater-Kinney Masturbator.” Seems the randy lad had been a bit too obvious when he went about “walking the dog” at Seattle concerts, reportedly rubbing up against female patrons in the process (makes sense). So a local reporter and club security watched him during a September Sleater-Kinney show and nabbed him while he was busily polishing his hot rock. Kim was charged with indecent exposure and assault. The question that arises, of course, is what would have happened to Kim if this had been at a Donnas concert, given that the lithesome lasses practically incite audience dudes to “stay up” all night with them? (I almost used this news clip as my “Wanker Of The Year” entry, but that would be way too obvious…)
BOOK OF THE YEAR: 2002 yielded the proverbial bumper crop of rock ‘n’ roll books. One remarkable connecting thread among the best of them: an intimate, you-are-there tenor. Thus we got behind-the-scenes peeks at the Grateful Dead (A Long Strange Trip, by longtime Dead publicist Dennis McNally), The Germs (Lexicon Devil, by Brendan Mullen, former operator of L.A. punk mecca The Masque), Lynyrd Skynyrd (Lynyrd Skynyrd, by band security chief Gene Odom), Tim Buckley (Blue Melody, by the late singer’s guitarist Lee Underwood), Keith Moon (Keith Moon, by Dougal Butler, Moonie’s personal assistant) – even a reissue of On the Road With Bob Dylan, journalist Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s celebrated backstage account of Dylan’s 1975 “Rolling Thunder Revue” tour.
It was journalist Jimmy McDonough’s outrageous and massively detailed 800-page marathon Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (Random House), however, that put you between the sheets with author and subject. 300 interviews – including 50 hours spent grilling Young -- spread across eight years yielded the most comprehensive accounting to date of the rocker. In particular, the creative peaks of the mid ‘70s and early ‘90s are exhaustively chronicled; the book’s only downside is that the timeline comes to a close in ’98. Young attempted, for mysterious reasons, to shut down the project, leaving McDonough having to file suit to see the book through to publication. Yet McDonough himself, in an interview I conducted with him, is the first to admit that for all his blood, sweat and tears, his subject remained elusive in spirit. By way of example, he pointed to Young’s modus operandi in assembling his long-delayed Archives box set as indicative of the man’s mercurial personality. “[The Archives will appear] if the dream catcher doesn’t fall off the rearview mirror and if the moon is in the seventh house and if Yoda blinks his eye twice!” said McDonough, laughing. “There is no rhyme or reason! And I’m sure if Mr. Young were standing here he’d hit me in the head with [his guitar] Old Black for saying that. But believe me, whatever happens will happen when it happens and not earlier than when it happens. Nobody really has a clue right now. Not even [official Young archivist] Joel Bernstein. The phone call may come tomorrow: ‘Hey Joel, it’s Neil– we gotta get this out, what’s the problem?’ Yeah, right.” McDonough also hastened to add, however, that he wouldn’t trade those eight years of research for anything in the world, saying, “Sure, there were rocky patches. Let’s face it, chaos surrounds the guy. But I still had the greatest adventure of my life and he let me do it!”
DVD OF THE YEAR: 2002 wasn’t quite The Year That Music DVDs Broke. There were some superb offerings, of course, from the special edition version of Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary on The Band, The Last Waltz, and the digital debut of the Channel 4 TV (Britain) Miles Davis doc The Miles Davis Story, to the 5.1 sound transfer of Neil Young’s live-in-’78 film Rust Never Sleeps and the combined DVD-CD package chronicling the Cowboy Junkies’ 2001 tour, Open Road. Not to mention the ultimate treatment of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, which added an entire second disc of wonderful supplemental material. But the DVD industry continues to overlook scores of classic concerts, docs and video anthologies, consigning them to VHS (or worse, Beta) limbo. Small wonder that the bootleggers have been transferring to DVD boatloads of rare material. Just two recent examples: Ladies And Gentlemen… The Rolling Stones, the Stones ’72 American trek; and Eat the Document, filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker’s look at Dylan’s legendary ’66 tour.
Pennebaker was also behind the lens for the hippie rock festival film Monterey Pop. That documentary, from 1968, of the ‘67 gathering-of-tribes is now out as a three-DVD box set. The Complete Monterey Pop Festival (Criterion Collection) is pricey, around 75 bucks, but dig what you get: (1) the original film with a new digital transfer overseen by Pennebaker, plus a 5.1 audio mix courtesy noted engineer Eddie Kramer and assorted interviews, trailers and bonus material; (2) both Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis At Monterey, the complete sets (also in 5.1) from Hendrix and Redding; and (3) “The Outtake Performances,” a whopping two hours’ worth of film not seen in the original, tunes by The Who, The Mamas and The Papas, Byrds, Laura Nyro, Buffalo Springfield, Tiny Tim (1) and others. Just viewing the Hendrix set – guitar burning and all -- is enough to set your neck-hairs on end. Sound across all three discs is outstanding, and the menus are cleanly designed for easy navigation. A 64-page booklet crammed with color photos plus three essays (by Barney Hoskyns, Michael Lydon and Armond White) about the festival and the film rounds out the box set. Monterey Pop has always been a key festival film, holding its own against the likes of Woodstock and Message To Love: Isle of Wight Festival. In its new triple-DVD incarnation, it most likely stands as the definitive one. You can practically smell the patchouli.
STUPID HUMAN TRICKS PT. 1: Sometime during the middle of 2002 it looked as if, thanks to legislation that was to impose a new schedule of federal copyright royalty fees upon broadcasters, small-time, mom-and-pops Webcasters – without a doubt, the true face of alternative programming – would have to shut down, unable to come up with the thousands of dollars that would be required under the law. (Even worse: the fees would be retroactive to 1998, upping the ante even higher.) No matter that the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel based its calculations – which came in initially at 14-hundredths of a cent per song per listener, later half that amount – on figures most noncommercial broadcasters, web-based or terrestrial agreed were flawed and inflated. (A number of Net radio stations did in fact shut down in anticipation of the crash.) Luckily, on Nov. 15, Congress approved a deal and passed the amended Small Webcaster Act of 2002. This followed lengthy and very vocal appeals from the broadcast and music community, a rare instance of grassroots democracy in action. Essentially, small Webcasters who take in less than $1 million in revenue each year – basically, just about everyone not tied to a commercial terrestrial station – were given a break on the digital-performance royalties that would have otherwise crippled them and shut them down.
Gee, once in a while the good guys DO win!
STUPID HUMAN TRICKS PT. 2: Or do they? The “Peer To Peer Privacy Prevention Act” is slated to come up sometime soon in ’03. Instigated by legislative flacks of the RIAA, it reportedly will give record labels the right to hack into individuals’ computers to ferret out copyright violations, i.e., unauthorized downloaded music that was obtained by using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Don’t laugh – the industry has already shut steamrolled over Napster and many of its ilk; private individuals, already seeing an erosion of privacy and personal rights under the name of anti-terrorism legislation, may be next. (Hint: If you use the Windows Media software to play music on your computer, read all the fine print in the user’s end agreement, plus any similar text that arrives with updates from Microsoft. You may get a rude surprise.) Get those firewalls and virus protections fired up, folks.
THE LETTER THAT SPIN WON’T PUBLISH: Gee, Spin, thanks a lot for all the hip reading in your February issue -- the one with cover stars Sum 41 acting, you know, all punk rock ‘n’ stuff. I mean, it was fascinating to learn how those lads’ lads in Sum like to get wasted, do obnoxious things and talk about chicks’ tits. And a hard-hitting Q&a with diva-in-training Kelly Osbourne – that hasn’t been done since the January issue of Seventeen! Your Audioslave feature was kinda by the numbers, too – practically the same one a zillion other rock mags have run. I realize Chuck Klosterman penned the piece, but if you brought him on board as Senior Writer in order to Lester Bangs-ize the magazine you seriously need to consider getting your boy wonder fucked up before his interviews – have him go boozing with Sum 41, maybe? – because his shit’s wearing thin. Fargo Rock City, the airless Spin editorial room ain’t. I did have high hopes for the porn article on SuicideGirls.com – good stroke material is always welcome at my doublewide – but dammit, it was just more sistahs-are-doin’-it-for-themselves self-empowerment p.c. blather. Gene Simmons Tongue (or even Penthouse) wouldn’t have dropped that ball! Come to think of it, Punk Planet ran an extensive feature on SuicideGirls.com a few issues back. Are your writers coming up with this stuff all by their lonesome, or is there a single editor we can blame on the content nosedive? I’m thinking that things maybe seemed a little grim for ya after Alan “I Like To Be Interviewed By VH1” Light split to hatch his own mag. But you went through some no-lookee/no-touchee dark days back when Guce, Jr. was in charge, and you bounced back from that. You guys are professionals, right? Who’s running the Spin ship?
And am I just getting senile, or has your reviews section in the back shrunk in direct proportion to the increase in celeb-watch crap in the front? I mean, c’mon – eleven friggin’ new release reviews in a music magazine?!? Who hid the Spin mission statement? Who stole the ding-dong soul? But back to the Sum 41 cover. You couldn’t even get that right, could you, Spin? Yes, yes, yes – I knew the minute I saw it on the Bi-Lo newsstand that it was supposed to be a nod to that cream pie-splattered first Damned album sleeve from ’77. (It would have been funnier if you’d done Eddie & The Hot Rods, but that’s just me.) So who was the rocket scientist in charge of approving the photo that was used? ‘Cos if Sum’s Jay McCaslin is s’posed to be playing Captain Sensible, he forgot to put on his goofy “punk” shades – oh, wait, I forgot, he’s the resident doe-eyed, spiky-haired heart-throb of the group. (Gotta shift copies of your mag to the T.R.L. crowd, eh?) And I hasten to point out, as was pointed out to me by a fellow scribe, that as recently as last year Alternative Press had the same fucking idea: the June A.P. cover featured Blink-182 and Green Day all creamed- and punked-up, Damned-LP style. Are there any original ideas being floated at Spin meetings? Speaking of Alternative Press, I’d rag on you, Spin, some more, for your Readers Poll 2002 (Strokes, White Stripes, Weezer and Gwen Stefani, good; Creed, Britney, Christina, Avril, Pink, bad – now that’s some serious out-of-the-box thinking by your readers!), except someone just handed me a copy of the new A.P. Christ almighty, Good Charlotte practically sweeps the A.P. Readers Poll. Weren’t those same readers into like, Korn and Marilyn Manson five minutes ago? Actually, isn’t A.P. the mag that used to cover the Flaming Lips, Robyn Hitchcock and Fugazi until it hitched its wagon to the Lollapaloser bandwagon, then to the rap-metal bandwagon, and now… Sigh. To paraphrase the New York Dolls, I’m having a personality crisis just thinking about all this. It must be hell, being a Spin or A.P. writer, sitting around in your most private moments, realizing that the folks who are gonna read your stuff comprise a teenage wasteland of mooks, mouth-breathers and morons.
Spin, I know I’m kinda shooting ducks in a barrel here. You’ve sucked for some time, and besides, given the appalling state of mainstream rock journalism right now, criticizing you and your ilk is sooo 1990s. That said, a lot of us remember when you were a credible fount of information and opinion, before you sacrificed your core aesthetic (read: taking pride in being ahead of the curve) at the altar of lifestyle advertising. I’m not sure if kids these days even realize they’re being pandered to – maybe they’re too busy hanging out at Hot Topic and soaking up Xbox and Nintendo radiation, I dunno – but someone needs to point it out to them. But it doesn’t speak well of you, Spin, when one of your own contributors (who shall remain anonymous because he wants to keep his job) emails me and confides, “Okay, you’re right. I’m not even defensive about this anymore. I’m writing for idiots. And I mean that in both senses of the word ‘for’ – readers and editors. They’re floundering here and are desperate – you’ve noticed how much the magazine has shrunk, haven’t you? All the ads are going to the Maxim clones. But I dunno, the pay is still okay here, and the resume looks good, relatively speaking. Hey, you want to finally get that zine we were talking about going?” Indeed I do. Where’s Creem when we need it the most? I hear some good rumors, though… Love, Fred.
I WANT MY VH1 CLASSIC: You know, fuck MTV and the increasingly dire VH1. I want my goddam VH1 Classic. Switch on that channel and you can see everything from super-rare clips of ‘60s and ‘70s bands (many of the clips are from overseas sources) to all those guilty-pleasure video classics from the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Granted, there’s an oversampling of silly haircut groups from the fabulous dawn of the MTV era, but hey, one man’s “Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo is another man’s “Mexican Radio” by Wall Of Voodoo. Plus, I have a certain weakness for that Pet Shop Boys-Dusty Springfield duet…
BOOTLEGS? WE DON’T NEED NO STEENKIN’ BOOTLEGS!: Let’s be clear about our terminology: any self-respecting, anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive “music lover” knows that bootlegs are unauthorized concert recordings and/or unreleased studio material compiled and issued clandestinely by shadowy record labels not associated with the actual artist. And as fascinating as all those mix-up juxtapositions that flooded the clubs and download sites this year are (such as Freelance Hellraiser’s “Stroke Of Genius” which married Christina Aguilera to The Strokes), to call them “bootlegs” is to sully the venerable name of the old guard. I mean, the term “bootleg” was copyrighted (figuratively speaking) as far back as Dylan’s Great White Wonder and the Stones’ Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be, so all you deejay mooks, I’m sorry, but you can’t have it. We got there first.
BEYOND THE VALLEY OF FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE: As long as we’re talking bootlegs, however, a it turns out, bands have begun getting savvy along with the fans, too; perhaps it started in the early ‘90s when the Grateful Dead tapped into a huge market by issuing live recordings on disc as part of its best-selling Dick’s Picks series. Then a couple of years ago Pearl Jam picked up the ball by releasing almost every show from the Binaural tour on CD. Ditto Phish, who by the end of 2002 had reached Volume 16 in its Live Phish series. And say what you will about The Who’s post-Entwistle tour this year: by not only releasing every show from its 2002 North American tour but directing all profits of The Who’s Live 2002 Encore Series to various charities of its choice, the band provided an admirable service to both fans and community. Other groups did the deed online via various strategies, either by tacitly approving of fans’ live file-swapping activities or by posting a wealth of free live downloads on their official sites. Gee, groups who actually think about what their fanbase – the folks who pay their bills – wants! Who’d a thunk it?
WMN N RCK: Nobody blinked an eye when Vanity Fair turned the cover for its annual Music Issue into a veritable babes-in-arms solidarity session. Maybe it was because Gwen, J.Lo, Sheryl, Eve, Debbie Harry, et al actually fit the assigned billing – “music” – or possibly because there was some serious cheekiness afoot with Barry White appearing on the same cover with the nine luscious ladies, ostensibly as their pimp daddy. But of course, it was intended to be ironic, and it was funny as hell to boot. Not so the cheerless, Photoshopped cover of Rolling Stone’s “Women In Rock” issue. It came as no surprise when, in late November, an open letter to Rolling Stone about the matter was posted on veteran grrrl-rocker Joan Jett’s website (www.joanjett.com ). Penned by Maya Price, a musician friend of Jett’s, the missive took to task the once-relevant rock-culture barometer, likening the “WIR” issue to a T&a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. You could practically hear tooth fillings rattle from coast to coast, so earnest was the collective nodding of the heads of music lovers. Wrote Price, seething at the inclusion of the pop-lite likes of Shakira, Britney and Avril Lavigne under the banner “Rock,” “By R.S. standards, Rock is no longer a style of music but a trendy costume to be whipped up by expensive stylists. If the issue had been called ‘Some Cute Girls with Top 10 Records out Right Now,’… I would have no beef with it. [But] corny as it may sound, ROCK is something which is still meaningful and even sacred to some of us.” Later, after I expressed my appreciation to Price for calling things like a lot of us saw ‘em, Price wrote me back, saying, “Apparently my sentiments are shared so widely that this thing grew wings and got around on its own. I have gotten so much positive feedback… I know ‘touching’ is a strange word to describe what either of us had to say, but you really can't imagine how powerfully moving it is when people really GET IT.”
TELEVISION DRAMA OF THE YEAR (PT.1): Hands down, it was The Bruce Springsteen Show. Look, there he is, The Boss, up at the crack of dawn on July 30, appearing on NBC’s Today, which broadcasts The E Street Band live from the Asbury Park Convention Center. During the day both MSNBC and CNN air their own Springsteen reports, and – whoops, there’s the guy again, chatting about The Rising with Ted Koppel for ABC’s Nightline and Nightline: Up Close. The Koppel interview continues the following night, and by Thursday and Friday Bruce has marched his E Streeters over to CBS to do couple of tunes on The Late Show With David Letterman. See Bruce. See Dave. See Bruce kibitz with Dave! What, no time that afternoon to drop in and say howdy to Oprah, too, Bruce? (If it was good enough for Bono….) As Eric Alterman, who wrote the ’99 Boss book It Ain’t No Sin to be Glad You’re Alive, quipped in The Nation, “I half expected him to duet with Elmo or Big Bird over breakfast.” Later, Bruce would be the subject of MTV2’s new Kurt Loder-hosted interview show “The Table” on August 20, while the E Streeters would open the MTV Video Music Awards on August 29 and appear as the musical guest on the October 5 season premiere of “Saturday Night Live.”
But, matters of new-release promotion aside (and as Tom Petty has rightly noted in interviews this year, there just ain’t no sure thing even for old superstars anymore, given the calcification of commercial radio, so it only makes sense to avail oneself of other media outlets), it’s always a treat to see Bruce on the tube. On December 11 he closed out his year with one helluva bang and a holler. Appearing on the Conan O’Brien show, he and the E Streeters, along with members of Conan’s house band (which, as you know, is headed up by Bruce’s drummer, mighty Max Weinberg), burned down the NBC studios with a you-hadda-be-there version of “Kitty’s Back” – nearly 10 minutes’ worth, horns and all, pure fratrock-cum-jazzcat jive par excellence. (Now I know what Steve Van Zandt meant when, during an interview I conducted with him this year, he pointed out that all the guys in the band share the same frat and pop and garage roots, that its in their DNA, and that they can swing on command.) Live TV just don’t get no better than this folks – and then they launch into “Merry Christmas, Baby” which ended with Bruce running through the crowd and tossing out Xmas candy. Merry Christmas, baby, indeed.
TELEVISION DRAMA OF THE YEAR (PT.2): Technically, I’m fudging a bit here; I saw this spot in early January, but since that’s when I’m writing this, the judges have said they’ll allow it….Sweet dreams are made of this. Following a cursory intro of the band from the late-night talk show host, they’re off with a vengeance -- pumping bass figure, four-to-the-floor drum pattern, pounding ivories and a “Street Fighting Man”-like clarion call of guitars. The vocalist grabs the mic, gestures dramatically, and opens his mouth wide. The song is “Sister Surround” and it’s the key track from Behind The Music, the third longplayer from Sweden’s The Soundtrack Of Our Lives. TSOOL deploys an impressive front line. To the right is one guitarist, strutting and stomping, his matted blonde shag ‘do, scruffy facial hair and surly pout making him resemble Kurt Cobain. Beside him, the baby-faced Bobby Gillespie-look-alike bassist aims his axe skyward, as if lobbing mortar rounds in the direction of Dave. Across the way, next to the keyboard player, is the other guitarist, and while he bears an uncanny resemblance to the Stooges’ James Williamson, he’s got a Pete Townshend thing seriously happening, right down to his Union Jack jacket and his windmills on a vintage Gibson SG. And at stage center is the bearded bear of a lead singer – bizarrely, a dead ringer for Brian Wilson during the bathrobes-and-therapy days – who is doling out rock star poses in equal measures of irony and charisma. Like his bandmates, he’s working this coveted Letterman shot for all its worth. “Sister Surround,” with its Stones/Who/Sex Pistols muscularity -- all insistent riffing, fist-thrusting rhythms and insidious “doo-de-doo-doo” backing vocals -- is memorable enough on album, a natural radio add in a just world. Performed live, however, with the added visual punch outlined above, it elevates SOOL to near-iconic status. No way can a rock fan view this 3 ½ minute display of punk-fueled vim and classic-rock vigor and not get chicken skin. SOOL gleefully and unselfconsciously kick out the jams like teens holed in the garage discovering their nascent powers. It’s a purer-than-pure rock ‘n’ roll moment.
WANKER OF THE YEAR: It was pretty close, I’ll admit. Ryan “Cryin’” Adams (or Ryan “Rhymin’ Ryman” Adams, take your pick) almost nabbed the award for all the fights he picked, ranging from his verbal war with Magnet (where I toil as one of the editors – Adams called out one of our writers, Corey Dubrowa, for interviewing friends and former band members) to his on-stage blow-up at the Ryman Auditorium (after some joker hollered out for a Bryan Adams cover, Mr. Petulant demanded that the paying customer be removed from the room) to his diatribe against White Stripes’ Jack White (supposedly a one-time “friend” of Adams – gee, with friends like that…) in the British press. But then professional Jerry Lawler published his autobiography and we learned that he and Adams got together and staged all the antics, so… I digress.
While some have called it a public meltdown of W. Axl Rose’s that rivals those of Mariah or Jacko, the concert no-shows of Rose and the subsequent collapse of the Guns N’ Roses Chinese Democracy pre-tour could all be likened, perhaps, to the tour that Diana Ross mounted in 2000 with her “Supremes” only to shut it down prematurely due to poor ticket sales. Seems that Gunners dates weren’t even yielding half-full arenas, so a miffed, image-paranoid Axl decided to take his ball and go home. Not that he demonstrated any behavior along the way – other than not knowing his own lyrics and demonstrating a rather, uhh, unique grooming style for the tour – that could be construed as off the wall. Not to mention – STOP PRESS: On December 30, La Diva herself, Miss Ross, was picked up for DUI in Tucson, Arizona, the same fine southwestern ‘burg that I called home for 10 years until returning home to NC in 2001. Coincidence? I think NOT. No word on whether Axl, clearly in need of some extensive r&r (electroshock wouldn’t hurt too, along with a barber) will be “vacationing” at Canyon Ranch, the Tucson-based fat farm (aka rehab center) where Ross bunked all last May. But he should. At any rate, with that, my little droogies, we have the perfect note upon which to end this wonderful, wacky, crazy year. Axl, lose the braids, dude. Ryan, grow the fuck up. Jesse Helms, don’t let the door hit you in the ass when you leave the Senate…. Wait, how’d Helms get into this rant?… And get well soon, Diana, but take good care. As we all know, you just can’t hurry love.