Went to see John Hiatt at the Metro last Tuesday night. As previously lamented here that meant I had to miss Lucinda Williams who was a few blocks up the road at the State. It was a difficult choice but I chose the ability to get up the front and rock out at the Metro over having to sit and clap politely at the State. I haven't seen any big reviews of Lu but I can't possibly imagine it was anything less than sublime. So there can hardly be a higher compliment to JH to say I didn't regret missing Lu at all. It was a real greatest hits show, pulling out all the favourites (although alas not MY personal favourite 'Icy Blue Heart") and most everyone around me seemed to know all the words to all of them. I was in my preferred spot on the rail, front row centre. The vocal was a bit low up there (I always choose proximity over audio fidelity) as you'd expect but the band sounded great. It was a fantastic night.

I really wish I could leave it there but then dear old Bruce Elder had to go drop this pile in The Age/SMH and I am forced -- positively FORCED, I say -- to conduct a good old fashioned fisking. On one level it's just the usual tossed off nonsense, but on another whenever women have their existence in a public space so casually written off -- and our newspapers of record chuck it up as their official record of events -- we have a real problem.

Usual tossed off nonsense first! Bruce has a lot on his plate. He has to review books and music. He has to sniff out the pros and cons of various Southern Highland B&Bs so Fairfax readers can plan their long weekends. He is BUSY, y'all. So it's unreasonable to expect him to have a decent grasp of the canon of every act he gets paid to see. But then if you act like you do, you risk looking a fool.

John Hiatt plays music for blokes. He writes, sings and plays about those things that certain blokes relate to: electric guitars (no accident that the opening song was Perfectly Good Guitar and that for most of the 90-minute performance the band configuration was three guitars, bass and drums); the awfulness of being a male eager to escape the boredom of small-town life (Damn this Town), cars (Detroit Made and Drive South) and, when he occasionally gets around to love, it's the kind of tough love that blokes have to deal with - like the unexpected departure of his "baby" in Crossing Muddy Waters where he describes the event as "She let out this morning / Like a rusty shot in a hollow sky". Great imagery, but not exactly a sweet lament for lost love.

Jesus where to start. "Perfectly Good Guitar" is a tongue in cheek response to the habit of certain 60s/70s rock stars to smashing their guitars. Only blokes may note and wryly comment on this cultural artefact! Um, OK, whatevs.

"No coincidence the band configuration was guitars, bass and drums." Indeed it's not a coincidence since he was playing rootsy rock music and this is a common, indeed ubiquitous, rock configuration. Here's the most recent live stuff of Lucinda Williams' I can find from SXSW this year AND OH MY GOD ITS NO COINCIDENCE SHE HAS GUITARS AND DRUMS IN HER BAND. That's what rock musicians (and blues and country) do, why do I even need to say this?

"Damn This Town" is, like, not at all what he describes except in the most superficial way. Indeed the "damn this town" refrain refers to wanting to you leave your town (a peculiarly male life experience? SIGH.) but there's a line at the end "I'm 58 years old, still live at home like a kid/Damn this town/Damn this town" tips some of us off to a bit of irony happening. Maybe only "literate chicks" listen to the last verse of a song.

OK, "Detroit Made" is basically just about cars, I'll give him that one.

But "Drive South"? "Drive South"?????????

"Drive South" is a song about automobiles in the same way "Leaving on a Jet Plane" is a song about aeronautics.

And then there's "Crossing Muddy Water." It's not expected or compulsory to know the background but this song is actually about the mid-80s suicide of his first wife. So, yeah. Now you don't need to know that but even coming to the song as a blank slate I cannot fathom a moral adult listening to it and coming away with the idea it was some kind of masculine posturing or jesus I don't even know what he's talking about. The sensibilities of a person who DOESN'T think this is a (bitter)sweet lament for lost love is to be forever questioned. I mean, LISTEN TO IT. (written lyrics)

"When he occasionally gets around to love" OHHAhahahhahahahahHAHA. Bruce, all his songs are about love. Here's the setlist cadged from a roadie after the show by my friends Rory and Jane. LET'S TAKE A LOOK!

With YouTubes so you can check my work.

Perfectly Good Guitar -not love
Detroit Made - not love
Crossing Muddy Waters - LOVE
Drive South - love
Cry Love - duh it's right there in the name, LOVE
Paper Thin -- love
Real Fine Love - love
Thing Called Love- love
Feels Like Rain - love
Slow Turning - love
Tennessee Plates - Elvis, bank robberies and grand theft auto ... because of LOVE, well OK maybe more LUST
Memphis in the Meantime - needing to get out of Nashville because everyone knows blokes hate country music
Have a Little Faith In Me- love
Riding with the King - What does this song mean? Well ever since Eric Clapton and BB King covered it it means John Hiatt gets a sweeeeet royalty cheque every year. HA HA.

I trust we don't need to dwell on this further.

Now we move from the stupid and worthless to the offensive and dangerous.

There are women in the audience but most of them are accompanied by their blokes, who sport a beer in one hand, jeans sliding down over a sagging middle-aged spread and hair that is either in short supply or turning grey.

Bruce, the Margaret Mead of Fairfax, has lit on the startling sociological insight that in our society a large percentage, even a majority, of people go to social events with opposite sex partners. (you may speculate on the projection going on in his description of the men, I am above that) I didn't do a head count; I didn't know the data would be required later to prove my existence. It would not surprise me if the demos skewed male, however I did a statistical analysis (oh, yes I did) of the "likes" and comments on the last 5 posts on the official John Hiatt Facebook page and came up with a slight majority 52%-48% of people who appear to present as female.

Perhaps Bruce is basing this extraordinary claim on some personal experience. Perhaps he knows a woman who was there under sufferance with her husband to pay him back for that one time he sat through an episode of Grey's Anatomy with her. But I have anecdotes too. Next to me front row centre were a woman I didn't know who was with her I presume male partner and knew all the words and was right into it. To my left were three women I knew, none of whom were there "with their blokes." Two are long standing Hiatt fanatics and one was not really familiar with him but left a convert. I could also tell you about standing in the long queue for the ladies loo with a bunch of women gushing to each other and counting out decades of their life's milestone by John Hiatt songs.

This is tossed off rubbish too. He's phoning it in, as they say. But as I said above there are serious cultural undercurrents to a man being able to assert so blithely the invisibility of women's experience, and to take for granted they are merely passive supporters to their men's actions. Heaven forbid they could be there as a mutual pleasure.

As above this idea John Hiatt's music is blokey blokeness for blokes is utterly laughable. If you said the same about, say, Bruce Springsteen or Steve Earle or - in particular - Justin Townes Earle I think you would be wrong but you'd have a much more arguable case than John Effing Hiatt whose stock in trade is in fact love songs that border on the soppy but which can just stay the right side of that tightrope which is why he is such a bloody ace songwriter. (I suppose actually if you are one side of a tightrope you fall off, but I can't be bothered to tighten up my similes just for goddamn fracking Bruce Elder.)

It's so WRONG that it is HILARIOUS he quotes "Well I never went to college babe / I did not have the luck / Rolled out of Indiana in the back of a pickup truck" to support his thesis of John Hiatt, Poet Laureate of Dude Nation while ignoring THE WHOLE REST OF THE SONG.

Then out of nowhere
and from nothing
You came into my life
I'd seen an angel or two before
But I'd never asked one to be my wife

Well now the babies are all sleeping
And the twilight's givin' in
She looks like you, he looks like her
And we all look a little like him
Well maybe it's just the little thing
The way I feel tonight
A little joy
A little peace
And a whole lotta light.

Fuck yeah, what a brute! I mean, really.

Returning to "Drive South" here's vid of JH doing it which I choose of the various other versions on YouTube because it has audience shots so you can see the women brazenly existing right there. Although it is at a Borders bookshop so perhaps they just dropped in to pick up The Rules revised edn and their ladybrains were ambushed by the wholly unfamiliar sounds of a form of transport being used as a symbol for freedom and renewal.

And here's noted woman Suzy Bogguss doing a version of the same song, which was so transgressive of societal norms that it got to Number 2 on the US country chart. (Oh early 90s music videos, don't go changing.)

By the way the only vee-hick-al refered to specifically in "Drive South" is "this Chevy van." This is a Chevy van. CHICK MAGNET OR WUT??

Another non-bloke who didn't get the memo is Bonnie Raitt whose biggest career hit was JH's hymn to masculinist posturing ode to romantic love between mature equals "Thing Called Love." Here's Bonnie, with Dennis Quaid a ha ha.

Eh, now I'm tired of dealing with this shit. I rest my case.

You know, it's funny. Back in the day Garth Brooks was the Anti-Christ to every right-thinking traditional country fan, forever ruining our twangy paradise with his riffs lifted straight from Journey and his Aerosmith covers.

But you listen to Garth Brooks now ... man, Garth Brooks is the reincarnation of Lefty Freakin' Frizzell compared to what tops the Country charts in 2011.

In any event this is one of the songs (the Double Live version, which I assume is recorded in Denver since that gets a stadium-wide holler when he says the word) I keep permanently on my iPhone and like to blast out walking through city streets every so often.

Nice johdpurs, cowboy.

I did the BBC's How Musical Are You? test which confirms what I (and everyone who has tried to teach me music from the Year 2 teacher who wouldn't let me join the choir onwards) knew anyway; I love it but really, really, really suck at it. PITCH SCMITCH!

"We may be tone deaf, but we have the music." I think Leonard Cohen said that.

So Rogue's Gallery - Hal Wilner's star-studded sea shanties thing - at the Sydney festival is getting bagged from all quarters (lots of unhappy commenters there) which I can't say surprises me. The whole event had "underwhelming" written all over it from the start.

I did mildly enjoy the Leonard Cohen tribute a few years back, a Wilner and friends love-in along the same lines, but the concept does lend itself to self-indulgence and complacency. I thought this event offered all the pitfalls of Came So Far for Beauty (acts not learning the songs, lack of rehearsal etc) but with the added variables of uncertainty about outside acoustics, the weather and ambient noise of one of the country's busiest commuter and tourist hubs. The Opera House forecourt should be left to Australian Idol finales and triathlon finishing lines.

Despite Marianne Faithfull being singled out for a shellacking I'm still very excited about her solo show, it's hard to judge whether I would've felt so hostile to her performance. i don't really mind divas getting drunk and slurring out of tune, really, in fact I quite like it. I'll be sure to let you know Wednesday night.

Thanks to @rubysquee for bringing this to my attention. A 70s Charlie Rich biography!!

I can't disagree a public library should quietly cull it from their 2009 collection but I'd hope they'd at least sell it for 50c so I could buy it .... And then frame every single page.

Here's some latter day Charlie, playing out his jazzbo streak which honestly fit more easily than the awkward pseudo Elvis rockabilly thing of the 60s. Pictures and Paintings is a great album you should consider adding to your collection, and if you already have: play it again tonight! Although my favourite song is really probably "Rolling With the Flow."

Pictures and Paintings

I try to avoid cute kid viral YouTubes -- watching. sharing or blogging -- but come one, I have to post this one.

So after the intial bafflement I got over the eMusic plan changes and was going to hang around, and make a conscious effort to channel the higher per track payments to labels/artists I wanted to support. But then a bigger problem came down the pipe: "in the near future" access to eMusic will be blocked entirely for users outside the USA. Canada, UK and EU. Entirely! Certain labels/albums are already unavailable on a country by country basis. This is a familiar message:

But this change would exclude us entirely.

And so eMusic joins Amazon MP3, Rhapsody, Napster, Lala, Spotify and countless other digital download and streaming services off-limits to us. Now, eMusic do say that exisiting customers will be "grandfathered in" (see FAQ) although of course that's what they said about my current subscription plan, which they just changed. And the grandfathering actually annoys me more, because it suggests the geographic restrictions are not enforceable law, but a voluntary policy decision in deference to their new BFFs at Sony, and future majors they hope to land. If you are doing something illegal and are a company, you don't say "oh well, "in the near future" we will stop doing illegal stuff but people already doing illegal stuff can keep on doing it."

I can go to Amazon.com right now and buy any CD I want and ship it here. But I cannot buy the same album in digital form from the Amazon MP3 Store. How does this make any sort of sense?

I have questions about it logged with customer service, i doubt I'll get a decent answer. Googling the issue of geographic distribution doesn't bring much helpful up.

So now I'm thinking I will just quit eMusic altogether because of it even though I would be grandfathered in, the whole thing leaves such a bitter taste in my mouth. It is no different than DRM to me, right now. What was the point of being so visionary and courageous over DRM for so long, only to capitualte in 2009 with rubbish like this? Should've slapped DRM on the tracks back in '02 and you could've had Sony then.

I see that Sony Australia has its own digital download store, called with a rather hilarious lack of irony bandit.fm. There are some positives about it at first glance, I can actually use it on a Mac, no-DRM MP3s and 320kps (although I'm fine with lower bitrates.) The content appears to be more than Sony stuff, the Blue Note label is there and that's owned by EMI. The artist and genre pages are attractively presented and easy to navigate.

However. I put in the last 10 or so albums I dl'd from eMusic and they had none of them. They had a few of the artists, but not the same albums. I conclude they have no independent labels at all. If someone did an album for Chess it's there because the Chess catalogue is now owned by Universal, but later, say, Alligator recordings by same artist are absent. They are more expensive than iTunes on some albums, and iTunes has a much bigger selection. And for a couple of them I know for a fact I can go to JB Hi Fi today and buy the hard copy cheaper.

Is this where Sony is hoping to channel my money by excluding me from eMusic? Tell 'em they're dreaming.

I have never seen Blues Brothers.

Segue:

Here is my latest 8tracks, a semi-late Friday night and RIP Koko eight songs which clocks in at just over 30 minutes. There are a few mournful eMusic references tucked away in the lyrics too. ;-(

Hat tip to Phineas for tweeting this, and then going the extra mile to hassle me in real time about actually clicking on the link he tweeted.

Total Eclipse of the Heart, the Literal Video Version:

Also, Lonnie Johnson is really amazing and I never knew!! Boo @ me. You'll be wanting the Complete Folkways Recordings.

Jumping off what Lang Mack was saying in comments. I have never been one to feel too deeply about the "underappreciated" tag. I mean, for my favourite "underappreciated" artists no appreciation is enough. Also it might be intense selfishness, but I care about what I like and do not care so much about what other people do/not like. Folks like Dylan, Springsteen etc are common comparisons because they are such uber A-List.

Via the eMusic radio show, I heard the awesomely named Lucille Bogan's (aka Bessie Jackson) "Shave 'Em Dry" which somewhat stopped me whatever long weekend pottering I was doing at the time. Of course sexual references are everywhere in this pre-war stuff, no shock there but ... yoiks. Naturally it was not officially released and I couldn't google up corroboration for the claim in the comments at 17 Dots that its the first F word on record but its 1935 so it seems plausible. I was shocked, shocked I say. So shocked, I immediately downloaded the three alternate versions they have on eMu.

NSFW, NSF kiddies and NSF anyone who doesn't want to hear some vintage backroom jook joint 3am pr0n. Although it's very scratchy so you have to listen close, very close, to pick up the most scandalous parts. Maybe you have to listen to it very loud on repeat. *cough*

Shorter Bloke Who Prob Got His Ticket For Free: Eric Clapton should tailor his show much more to people who don't really like him much.

Props to my Twitter peep who suggests George just stick to Blueshammer.

More Konzert zum Amtsantritt von Obama. Bettye Lavette and Jon Bon Jovi. Fair Dinkum.

I had cause to look at Lucinda Williams' official site just now to check a discographical detail and noticed that the "coverflow" display features a photo I took and put here. I suppose I have right click saved a lot of Lost Highway photos over the years so I will magnanimously call it even. ;-)

Happy birthday for a couple days ago.

Leonard Cohen ticket buying expedition FAIL.

I think all my problems with the term "world music" -- I use it as a category left because it is annoyingly convenient, but note the scare quotes -- can be summed up with the fact Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu won "Best World Music Album" at the ARIA's last night.

But he's ...? Um, but it's ... ! So, why ... ? Er, what? (Archie Roach was also nominated.) He was also nom'd for Best Album so it was a safe sop to give him something else which everyone thinks he deserves for it, but O RLY WTF.

I'm also annoyed because I bought a ticket to see Gurrumul at the Opera House and thought it was late October, but I stumbled over the ticket on the weekend and it was ... last Friday. I then proceeded to an anguished Mendoza! moment. Fug.

The latest innertubes sensation! Started here, went a million places, Phineas sent it to me and now I give it to you:

"Jesus is My Friend" by Sonseed. Quite ... something.

The "Search for Sonseed" entries are worth a rainy Tuesday gander.

Paul Cashmere asks re: iTunes, "If it doesn`t work for Estelle or AC/DC or The Beatles or Kid Rock, then who is it working for?"

A: Um, consumers?

Let's ignore the questionable correlation=causation assumptions underlying the whole thing and the extrapolation way beyond the evidence (is it too obvious to point out that what applies to The Beatles applies to ... well, practically no one else?) Cashmere doesn't mention this section from the WSJ article: "This year, Kid Rock ... has had a massive radio hit with "All Summer Long." Ah yes, commercial, mainstream radio. Nothing at all corrupt or restrictive about that method of promoting music!

And AC/DC's new album which won't be on iTunes? Exclusive to WalMart in the USA. This is a paradigm-busting improvement, how? And who benefits?

Look, clearly there are issues with all the new methods of digital delivery and their impacts on artists and labels and whoever else are many and complex. And by nature I am an album buyer. But am I really supposed to feel sorry for the major labels because they've been outmaneuvered by another big company doing a better job at giving people what they want? Uh huh. The model is going to change again no doubt, but if it changes to what the labels are pushing, I really can't imagine it's people like me who will win.

Went to the Art Gallery of NSW today. The Biennale is on and one of the exhibitions is a phone which, according to the notice, Yoko Ono will call at random times. And you can talk to her. This is my niece Snow Pea workshopping such a scenario but it was silent while we were there. I did a Google but could find no reports of anyone actually speaking to her.

Erm, the only thing remotely Ono related in my collection is Dylan's potted bio of her from a Theme Time episode.

13 Yoko Ono.mp3