Whenever the band Phish plays on Halloween, they pretend to be another famous rock band and do an entire album by that band. This year, they did one of my all-time favorite records, "Exile on Main Street" by the Rolling Stones. It's a double album, 18 songs worth of blues boogie, and I was very curious to hear whether they pulled it off.
Friday morning, a relative who knows of my fixation with that record sent me a link to the show, but the link--as is so often the case--wasn't working. Of course I could have purchased the entire set for 99 cents a song from the LivePhish.com site, but the samples on that site are only 30 seconds long, and I wanted to try it out before committing with a credit card. So I did a little hunting on my own. Lala didn't have it. Imeem didn't have it. I couldn't find it on a Google search.
I used Grooveshark's playlist feature to arrange the songs from Phish's cover of "Exile" in order.
So I turned to old reliable Grooveshark. Sure enough, a search on "Phish Ventilator Blues" (one of the song names from "Exile") turned up a hit. From that result, I saw that the name in the "Album" column included the date, 2009/10/31. I ran another search, "Phish 2009/10/31" and there it was, the entire show. I took all the songs from "Exile" and arranged them in order on my playlist, and soon I was enjoying the band's faithfulness to the original recording, down to the horn parts and backup gospel singers, mixed with some very extended jam sections. The bit between "Ventilator Blues" and "Just Want to See His Face" is miraculous.
One of my complaints about Phish is that they often sound too perfect and clean, especially the singing. But in this particular case, it was great because Phish obviously studied the lyrics very carefully, and I could finally understand whole lyrical sections ("there's fever in the forecast now") that I've never been able to figure out despite hundreds of listens. (Mick mumbles, and he's buried pretty deeply in the mix on the original.)
I have no idea whether the recording was posted with the permission of the band. Probably not. But the beauty of Grooveshark is that users post the content themselves, in a similar fashion to YouTube, so you're not reliant on content owners.
Correction 2:22 p.m. PDT, Nov. 13: This post mischaracterized how Grooveshark gets content. All content on Grooveshark is uploaded by users. Grooveshark says it complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and pays appropriate royalties for live and other types of recordings.
Yesterday's New York Times story about Starbucks losing credibility among music fans has attracted a lot of commentary. The gist of the story: Starbucks went too mainstream by stocking artists like Alicia Keys and James Blunt, so its customers figure they might as well shop at Wal-Mart, which stocks the same CDs at lower prices. The record industry, which once looked to Starbucks as a potential savior, is having second thoughts.
The best music I ever heard from Starbucks was a compilation of the Rolling Stones' favorite songs.
(Credit: Amazon.com)Why is anybody surprised? Look at their history in the coffee business. Espresso used to be a niche product that was hard to produce properly and varied widely in quality. Starbucks' great triumph was turning it into a assembly line product (push-button espresso machines!) with much better margins (sugar and milk!), then packaging it in a non-threatening imitation of cafe culture. The ambience in Starbucks has always been carefully calculated to soothe and comfort rather than challenge or provoke. And I have it on good authority that one big key to their success was getting Pepsi to distribute their bottled coffee drinks to convenience stores nationwide. It was only a matter of time before their music, like their beverages, aimed squarely for the lowest common denominator.
Go to a true Seattle coffee house and you might not feel as comfortable with the black-painted walls and ugly art and urban-weirdo clients. But the coffee will almost certainly be stronger, and you'll probably hear more interesting music as well--personally, I have Seattle baristas to thank for introducing me to '70s soul act MFSB, Seattle dance combo United State of Electronica (yes, "State"), and Yann Tiersen's beautiful soundtrack to the movie Amelie. The best music I ever heard from Starbucks was a compilation of the Rolling Stones' favorite songs--a solid set, but nothing too surprising or new.
I hate the whole experience of arena rock shows today: the security staff who assume you're a criminal, the overpriced food and drink, the "down in front" screamers who always seem to be seated behind me (it's a $100 rock concert, not your daughter's piano recital). Consequently, I don't go to many big shows--one or two a year.
So I was a little surprised when I first encountered the "fan club" charge when the Stones rolled through Seattle's Key Arena in October 2005. The ticket prices were painful enough--$200+ for floor seats--but that's what scalpers were getting (more, actually), and Mick was a student at the London School of Economics at one time, so he surely understands supply and demand.
But the $100 fan club membership felt like an added insult. I understand that longtime Rolling Stones fans who joined the club eons ago might have a right to better tickets than the unwashed masses. And the ticket-buying process honored these fans by giving early access to anybody who'd joined before the tour was announced. But then there was second tier of sales--anybody could become a one-year member of the club for "only" $100, and they'd get second crack. Public ticket sales were saved for last. In other words, if you wanted any chance at halfway decent seats, you have to pay the extra $100--it was like a ticket to buy a ticket. (They threw in some other stuff like access to online video of past shows, but I doubt anybody would have paid more than a couple bucks for these privileges.)
The Police also used the fan club charge for their reunion tour this year. They haven't been an active band in 23 years, so there's really no "fairness" involved, although members of the individual members' fan clubs did get an early shot. (And they actually gave first crack to people who'd previously joined a Best Buy frequent buyers' club--so much for the fans.) At least with the Police, in addition to assuring me seats (bad seats--the good ones were all gone by the time the "new fan" tickets went on sale), I got a $5 poster and the right to peruse online message boards where I could read decidedly mixed reviews of the show.
Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about fans scamming these fan clubs by selling the codes used for purchases on Craigslist and eBay. I'm not sorry. This kind of trading exposes fan club memberships for what they really are--a sleazy way to hide the true cost of tickets. Perhaps once the "fairness" argument's been debunked, artists and promoters will have to display the true ticket price. (Yeah, right. And maybe they'll get rid of all those "service fees" as well.)
For the record, the Stones were way better than I expected them to be--both loose and tight, and Mick Jagger's amazing even at his advanced age, although they played better setlists on other nights. The Police were surprisingly underrehearsed, but I appreciated the risks they were willing to take with their new arrangements of the hits we've all heard a million times, and their unwillingness to use backing tracks or extra musicians. Neither show gave me as much musicial fun as my iPod, which cost less than two tickets.
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