The B52’s, London Roundhouse

It was on a hot and very sweaty summer night in London’s trendy Camden and a packed audience of all ages and types gathered at the re-opened Roundhouse. They were all there to see that perennial party band, still together for over 30 years, the B52’s. It was ridiculously hot with many people standing and sweating profusely, but this didn’t diminish the anticipation of the crowd one bit. This became evident before the band even came out with many of them singing along vociferously to Talking Head’s ‘Psycho Killer’ when played by the club’s DJ. Then the lights went down and the words “Hello London, we’re the B52’s” was greeted by a loud roar as the band walked out onto the stage.

Touring to promote their first album in 16 years Funplex, the B52’s showed the sell-out crowd they still have the ability to turn out superbly crafted pop songs. The line up of Fred Schneider, Cindy Wilson, Kate Pierson and Keith Strickland have proved over the years they are masters of the art of catchy, pop songwriting and they treated the crowd to all of their hits and more in their uniquely frivolous and eccentric manner. The B52’s have crafted and honed their electro-beat, new wave, dance sound over 30 years and it’s still impossible to categorise.

Backed up by three backing musicians, the B52’s were in fine form. The soaring harmonies of Wilson and Pierson sounded as good as ever, while the wonderfully camp interjections of Schneider made sure everybody in the audience had a smile on their face for the duration. Along with the more humorous and wacky songs like ‘Private Idaho’ and ‘Party Out Of Bounds,’ with ‘Give Me Back My Man’ and current single ‘Juliet Of The Spirits,’ the B52’s proved they can also do serious and soulful. Their set consisted of the obligatory songs from the current album such as ‘Funplex’ and ‘Pump,’ interspersed with many of the old favourites like ‘Strobe Light,’ and ‘Mesopotamia.’

Judging by the enthusiastic reaction to the older material, it was obvious that the audience consisted of many of their older, long-term fans but there was also a surprising amount of young fans, many of whom were perched up high on their father’s shoulders. To the audience’s delight, the hits came thick and fast with Wilson and Pierson’s sixties style dance routines, Schneider’s deadpan but camp delivery and Strickland’s choppy and distorted ‘rock style’ guitar. What with their wild and wacky image it’s easy to overlook, but make no mistake, these guys are all excellent musicians in their own right.

The harmonies of the two ladies are as good as you’ll find anywhere in popular music, whereas one time drummer Strickland now stands at the front of the stage, giving us all the classic ‘rock’ guitar style poses. Schneider isn’t as animated as he used to be but the B52’s wouldn’t be the same without his perfectly timed ‘camp as they come’ vocals.

To the crowd’s delight, they inevitably get to their most well loved song ‘Love Shack.’ It is one of those songs that always gets everybody dancing at parties and wedding receptions. Where everybody from the youngest children to the oldest grannies knows the words and the Roundhouse crowd were no different. “The whole shack shimmied” barks Schneider and the crowd sing along as one. Personally, I was surprised they didn’t save ‘Love Shack’ for the encore but the crowd didn’t seem to care.

We eventually got two encores. ‘Rock Lobster’ which was the first B52’s song I ever heard as a teenager in 1980 and ‘Planet Claire’ with it’s 1960’s secret agent movie vibe. The sweat soaked crowd were on their last legs by then. The Roundhouse management obviously thought that the English summer wasn’t long enough to justify installing air conditioning, but many were ready to feint at the end. This wasn’t enough, however, to stop most of the crowd from leaving with large grins on their faces. It left many of us feeling that the world is a more fun place with the B52’s in it.

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The Invictas are back

There seems to be a trend in the music industry where once-popular sixties acts are reuniting, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Herman’s Hermits being only two which are currently touring. A lesser-known but just-as-good group which reformed recently is The Invictas. With their garage band sound still relatively intact, the four original members and two new musicians toured in 2005 and 2006, delighting rock music fans of all ages.

It all started during 1960 in Rochester, New York when Herb Gross heard a group of older teens practicing rock music instrumentals in the basement of the house next door. He and a few local friends decided they should form a group of their own. After doing a bit of brainstorming with school friends, they named the band after Buic’s car called the Invicta. A local college bar, Tiny’s Bengel Inn, was looking for a house band and hired Herb’s group. As they perfected their sound and changed a few band members along the way, The Invictas began playing gigs at colleges up and down the east coast and even in Canada.

The Invictas’ provocative single hit song, The Hump, was inspired by a couple of dancers in front of the stage at Tiny’s who were “humping,” as they called it, to the music. Herb thought the idea was so interesting that he wrote lyrics and the tune in one week. A record producer from Buffalo, Steve Brodie, heard the song and asked the band about recording it. Since the band members were accustomed to live performances and playing The Hump in the studio made the song sound uninspired, Herb invited 30 friends, bought several cases of beer, and The Hump was recorded. In fact, their first album, Invictas A Go-Go, was completed in one weekend and released on the Sahara Records label.

Radio stations were rather prudish in 1966, refusing to play the hump because of it’s title and suggestive lyrics. The record was even banned in Boston, a fact which the band members still treasure. After hundreds of fans flooded radio stations with requests, the record was allowed on the air. It went to number one in Miami and made the top one hundred in America during August of 1966. In Rochester, some record stores were reporting that The Hump was even out-selling The Beatles. The Invictas also appeared on some local TV shows and played at the Watkins Glen Race Track. It was around that time when the band started driving a 1955 Cadillac hearse on stage as a promotional gimmick. The members, aping the British groups popular at that time, wore English riding boots, turtlenecks, fur jackets, and grew their hair long. They also played with famous acts as The Young Rascals, Gene Pitney, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, The Shirelles, and Otis Reading. Later, they opened for The Beach Boys.

The invictas became so popular that they required police escorts, had their own fan club, and attracted plenty of eager female fans. Girls waited for them on their front lawns and called them on the phone at all hours of the night. Bass player, Jim Kohler, came home late one evening to find that some groupies had actually broken into his apartment and prepared a meal for him. Herb was once chased by a crowd of girls across a street and into a department store, where he hid in a ladies’ changing room. Their hearse, which sported gold racing stripes and the band’s name in bold yellow lettering on the doors, proved to be unreliable, breaking down often on the way to gigs. Then the Vietnam war caused the band to break up.

The Invictas did reunite in 1980 for a festival tent gig. Then again in 1995, they played another gig, recording Long Tall Shorty and The Hump 95. Throughout the years, Herb had established his own advertising agency and was earning a substantial income. While he visited Invictas member Dave Hickey, Dave’s wife Marilyn suggested they go to a blues club called The Dinosaur and see a group named The Mary Haitz Band. Mary heard that the two Invictas members were there and asked them to play a number. Dave declined but Herb performed Long Tall Shorty. The crowd became excited and called out for him to play The Hump. Herb, having a Blues Brothers moment, realized that he had to get the band back together one more time.

The Invictas toured in 2005, launching their ’60s’ tour at a bar called the California Brew Haus. The members enjoyed the experience and crowd reaction at various venues so much that they toured again the next summer and recorded The Skip ‘N Go Naked tour live CD, named after a popular Tiny’s Bengel Inn drink made with gin, beer, and lemonade. Herb also found a 1984 model cadillac hearse for sale in Oklahoma City and had his friend Dan Parsons customize it to look like the original Invictas vehicle. The ’60s tour covered the northeast states and parts of Ontario while the Skip ‘n Go Naked tour happened in upstate New York. The Invictas played various northeast U. S. gigs in 2007 as well. Though the band lost money, they all plan to continue rocking into their retirement years.

For more information regarding The Invictas, and to download a free song called Red, White, Blue, and True, go to the www.theinvictas.com website. On this site is some band merchandise, including their 2 CDs and Banned In Boston, a DVD of them playing live. Herb also wrote Rock Till Ya Drop, a coffee table book about his group, featuring many photos of the band and their gear.

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Ananda Sukarlan is an Indonesian composer and pianist living in Spain. This is an article he wrote for a magazine which has been published a few years ago in Spanish. We are very proud to have the original in English which has never been published anywhere, so this is an exclusive writing for ManuelMarino.com. Read his Blog and visit Jakarta New Year Concert page (he is the founder and director). Also, you can listen to some of his music compositions on YouTube.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

“It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the
Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.” — (Pierre Boulez)

“I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate
and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this
public world to one of private performance and electronic media.“ – (Milton
Babbitt)

“What happened there is (…) the biggest artwork of all times. That spirits
achieve in a single act what we in music cannot dream of, that people rehearse
ten years long like mad, totally fanatical for a concert and then die.
This is the biggest artwork that exists at all in the whole universe…
I couldn’t match it.” (K. Stockhausen, on the 9/11 attack ) . — All quotes
are from The New York Times.

Those three composers are supposedly “great” composers of the 20th century. Their piano works (in fact, ALL their works) were written “for the future” in the 1950s and 60s, when they were (and still are) a tough nut to crack for both the pianist and the audience. Now, if they were indeed “great”, as Chopin or Bach undoubtedly were, why are their works still not in the repertory of most pianists or other instrumentalists ? And why don’t we members of humanity, no matter how “retarded” we are according to those “great” artists, respect them now as we respect Schumann or even their contemporaries such as Shostakovich or Stravinsky ? When is the “future” they were talking about ? Is 2007 not “future” enough for those works created half a century ago?

The answer is simple. Boulez, Babbitt and Stockhausen are (or were) “great”, because they rely on, and receive huge government subsidies and were leaders of a very small but controlling establishment consisting of academics, critics and art politicians. They are “great” according to their colleagues in this group, but not according to musicians and the public. In fact, their “avantgarde” music is mostly written against musicians and the public. It even goes so far as calling the 9/11 event “the greatest artwork” (see Stockhausen’s quote above) , not only creating a work against people, but even more, killing (how can one be more against people ?) them all, “artists” and audience.

In other words, they write music to gain, and only to gain, government subsidy. What Walt Whitman said, that “Para tener grandes poetas, es necesario además grandes audiencias” is not valid anymore for this kind of “art”. In principle, government subsidies are supposed to be given to marginal artistic activities, and the more “minority oriented” that art is, the more it deserves subsidy ; this subsidy has enabled those artists to stay in their ivory towers without making any contributions at all to the public. Which is alright if one doesn’t think of the amount of taxpayers’ money that is used to subsidize those “artistic” works.

Let’s take one example: the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique) who was built by Pierre Boulez in Paris. It was kitted out with equipment to Boulez’s own specification to compose music for the future. IRCAM also swallowed 80% of the national subsidy for contemporary music of France. It was built at a cost of 90 million francs and thereafter at a cost of 15 million a year to the French taxpayer for its concerts, staff and upkeep. It happened that in 1969 Boulez got Georges Pompidou to build for him a huge high tech underground bunker , beside the site of what was to become the Pompidou Centre. Now, in 2007, shall we look back and reflect on how many masterpieces have been created out of this building ? What I mean by masterpieces are works that the general public recognise as such, like Britten’s War Requiem, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms or, coming from the other continent, Copland’s Third Symphony. I don’t have to answer this question.

When I was living in Holland in the 1990s I had several encounters with “ex”avant-garde turned real composers, such as Toru Takemitsu, John Adams or Louis Andriessen. And it was in Holland that I met for the first time my amazing Spanish composer friends Jesus Rueda or David del Puerto (both winners of Premio Nacional de Musica, in 2004 and 2005 respectively). At that time, they were in a “transitional” period after getting out from the heavy influence of their avantgarde teacher, Paco Guerrero. All of them realized then, that our older colleagues had achieved their goals to “impress” the public by presenting them with uncommunicative works, and certainly they have gained a lot by doing that, but that we the younger generations have to pay for it. There have been composers at every corner of the street ever since, given that avantgarde music was designed to give jobs to many who could not compose in the sense of writing “traditional” music. Good or bad quality is not the criteria anymore. But there are simply not enough subsidy for all of them , whose works sound more or less the same.

Fortunately we are in a state of transition to a more audience-friendly kind of music. The avantgardists had achieved in emptying the concert halls, and now we will have to work harder to gain them back and convince them that the word “contemporary” is not equal to “avantgarde” ; on the contrary, “avantgarde” was a thing very much in the past, and not con (“with”) temporary (our time) anymore.

This situation reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s story, about an Emperor who is very fond of clothes. One day came 2 tailors, saying that they can make very special clothes that only good people can see. Naturally the emperor cannot see those clothes, but afraid of being called a bad person, he praises the beauty of the clothes. And if the emperor can see it, everybody in the whole country should do as well. Until comes a very young kid, much too young to be called a bad person, during the festive celebration of those clothes , shouting innocently, “Look, the Emperor is naked!”

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He said me: It’s countless hours, in fact I could count it as months, I’ve put into this industry for very low results in the end. This is my first attempt at writing articles and I hope people gets the point across that this art is reserved to an elite and that you must obey to some fixed rules to get into their circle. I hope to help people understand what are those traps and guide them to avoid those.

Julien, your voice can be heard now, thanks to ManuelMarino.com!

Recording Music Industry

Lately I’ve questioned myself why was there so much newcomers in the music industry that didn’t grab my attention. Soul less recordings, heavy thumping bass, yells and screams is all I hear these days. Where is the hear candy? You know that kind of song you listen once and you’re not sure you like until you give it more listens. The kind of lyric that hooks you and makes you want to change something about you, or even the world. The strange feeling of nostalgia, of fear or faith. That is all gone since the music industry is now all about money and none about feelings.

What people want these days are instant rewards, premature orgasms while what we need from the music industry is more like a long term relationship. Don’t get me wrong; I understand why people want it that way, but there’s one kind of songs that’ll eventually fade in history while the other one will be there to stay. I think music needs a second chance, a change in the way of thinking, a split for newcomers that don’t want to fit in the prefabricated mold that today’s industry is.

Most contemporary musicians want to have the right “recipe” for success. The recipe that would get their songs top the charts and generate a buzz. They want the special ingredient that would get them out of normal life and throw them right into the elitist artist world. And that is understandable since the industry demands it. Instant success stories are heard all over the newspapers but from experience I know that most of those stories are forgotten shortly after. And if they are not, maybe they should.

What’s sad is that the music that doesn’t fit the standards gets pushed on the midnight playlist on Tuesdays, or worst, not played at all. So the infamous Verse Chorus Verse type of song is filling the entire rush hour playlist. Miss “Perfect Body” and Mr. “Perfect Voice” are all over the radio stations. We’ve come to an era where the beauty of the singer is more important than the beauty of the song. And that’s where it must stop. Sure an anti-charismatic singer won’t attract much audience at first, but fans listen to the music more than looks at the eyes, do they?

I really don’t care what the band looks like. They could be just “okay” but if what they do is pure genius, nobody will notice. What people will notice after some time is the music, the real reason why the band existed in the first place. Since when does a rock star need to be a supermodel to sell tickets? What we want is presence not nude skin.

Maybe I’m wrong a little bit though, since so much people are going to Justin’s or Britney’ shows. As they say “sex sells” and this can’t be truer. A lot of artists are betting on this to make their stash bigger. Think Janet Jackson at the superbowl. Publicity, marketing and word of mouth are what is important now, no matter what you do to get it. Good or bad, talk about it, heh? That’s what they want… And it works! What’s sure though is that good rock music has left its place to rap, screaming rock and pop music this decade and I can only hope it will be back for the next.

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Music Biz

I’m, first of all, a passionate for music. My passion for music before I can recall it, and grew with the fact that I had the luck to have older brother and sisters whose music collection was wide enough to feed my music interests. Also since a little kid I was interested in technology, and started programming at the age of four. Being nowadays a music lover and also a musician, and at the same time graduated and working as a Computer Science Engineer, I feel myself lucky to have some ground bases to analyse the state of music business.

The music business is in a chaotic state. The record industry is declining, and is throwing the guilt of it to what they like to call “piracy” – the unauthorised downloading of music. While they blame it, the truth is music market is falling, whos to blame? The fault is from the music industry itself. Doug Morris, Universal Music CEO, recently admitted he knows nothing about the music industry of nowadays. They decided to sue their customers by suing music fans that do unauthorised downloads instead of suing those who really make money out of copyrighted works, and restricting their clients’ rights with technologies like DRM.

It is surely true that it’s hard to find a completely fair way of compensating musicians while promoting the access to culture, but there are efforts to design market models that work – at least better than the actual one. The biggest problem is that the music industry – defined by the four major labels – doesn’t get it. The music market has changed, music, musicians and music lovers adapted themselves to new trends and technologies, but the music industry decided to ignore all the signs, refusing to see the big elephant in the room, and kept doing business in an obsolete way.

The proof that they simply don’t understand what’s going on is right in front of everyone wanting to see it, when we get news that Elton John wants the Internet shut’ed down, or when countries try to impose Internet Services Providers to filter illegal downloads, even if that’s technicly impossible to do and the music industry does political pressure to make the countries change their laws.

They spend tons of money implementing DRM systems, and others sell the rights that were restricted to listeners back, making money from what they first took, even if it’s known that DRM systems cause sales losses, music artists and fans are against such systems and new businesses are arising just by the fact that they don’t adopt DRM technologies, radio stations create petitions against DRM. Now, it’s too late for them – but what’s going to happen to the music market?

Well, we’re also seeing a lot of emergent business models. First of all, we have to realize that while CD sales are decreasing, music consumption is rising twice as fast. Also, if you open your eyes and start considering the music business as everything around music and not just music sales, then you’ll see that, for instance, in North America, the music business will total $26.5 billion in 2011, growing at an average annual rate of 2.8% from $23.1 billion in 2006. Recorded music revenues will still declining as declining CD sales cancel out the sharp gains in digital sales. Music publishing and live music will grow. Norway has a party that wants to free file sharing and sampling, shorten the commercial copyright and ban DRM.

The number of web services for bands is wildly growing. Artists have now the means of making money while giving music for free, for instance. Musicians are finding new ways of doing their work by themselves, even if sometimes things aren’t simple. While there’s no formula on how to create the perfect record label, there are some labels and distributors that understand nowadays music market and know how to do business in it.

The future is smiling at us – we just have to let obsolete formulas and vices die.

Of course, new issues to be solved will appear. New fights have to be fought and won, or we’ll end like citizens of a dystopian world.

But soon enough it is going to be a great time to live – as a musician, a music lover or even a technologist.

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