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=> GENERAL DISCUSSION => Topic started by: chaz on August 10, 2004, 10:43:00 am
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So is anyone making the trip to New York for this this weekend? I'm going and I can't wait for the show....also I really could use a little trip out of town right about now.
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I've got a bunch of weekend things going on other weekends...I'd LOVE to go, but it's just not good timing for me. What a lineup, and $20. Friggin' A. Have a great time; it's gotta be a great show. Look for The Shazam.
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I would REALLY love to see Iggy and the Stooges. Was almost set to go until Arthur Kane died, I think I'm going to the beach instead. I'm dying to hear how Iggy will be though.
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I was planning on making the trip until I realized I have another commitment I can't bail out of.
What a line up!
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I am going as well. I love NYC and all those bands are gonna rock. I cant imagine hearing the Electric Prunes and the Romantics live!! Plus it seems to be supporting something really cool (not just Dunkin Donuts)
you just gotta love Silvie.
i'll be heading up Friday night.
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Last night on MTV2 there was a little steven special highlighting bands he digs...it also showcased the bands that made it to the finals of his battle of the bands in NYC a few weeks back. My old band entered the DC contest but didn't win....we got robbed! I would have loved a chance to share the stage with the Stooges.
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FYI - Not sure about the DC area, but 103.1 in Annapolis broadcasts Little Steven's Underground Garage on Sunday nights. Their signal isn't the greatest but you can probably get it some places.
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It's on 94.7 in DC.
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August 11, 2004
Little Steven's Big Crusade
By BEN SISARIOThe New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/arts/music/11stev.html)
To hear Steven Van Zandt tell it, he had no choice. He had simply wanted to do a two-hour radio show, no big deal, on which he could play some of the garage rock he loves and have some fun. But when he pitched the idea to syndicators, what they told him forced him to turn his hobby into a crusade.
"They said, 'Stevie, baby, we love you,' " he said, his eyes wide in mock disbelief, "but we cannot get rock 'n' roll on the radio anymore.' "
Big pause.
"And it was like, aaarrrggghh," he said, his voice suddenly booming, his body shifting stiffly like a big machine making a 180-degree turn. "You just said that to the wrong guy at the wrong time. You telling me my whole life is a" - Mr. Van Zandt used an expletive then - "lie? That the 30 years that rock 'n' roll has informed our society was just a big" - he used the expletive again - "waste of time? Is that what you're telling me?"
It was a sudden coming together of the various personae who reside inside Mr. Van Zandt: the head-wrapped rock star known as Little Steven who plays with Bruce Springsteen; the political activist who spent much of the 80's campaigning against apartheid and for human rights around the world; and Silvio Dante, the gangster Mr. Van Zandt plays on "The Sopranos" on HBO, who, lovable though he might be, is no one you want to see angry.
"That was the beginning of the war," he said in an interview in his office near the Javits Center in Manhattan. "The revolution began that day."
For more than two years now Mr. Van Zandt has been waging his garage-rock war. He began with his radio show, "Little Steven's Underground Garage," for which he is host and programmer. When syndicators showed no interest, Mr. Van Zandt decided to distribute it himself; he employs a small staff for the purpose, and the show, which had its premiere on April 7, 2002, now plays on 136 stations around the country. He is also is the executive producer of three channels on Sirius satellite radio, including a garage rock channel.
Mr. Van Zandt's self-styled crusade moves to a new level this weekend with a full-blown outdoor rock festival that is an unexpected highlight of the concert season. On Saturday from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Randalls Island, more than 40 bands will blast and grunt and groove their way across the stage, playing various interpretations of garage rock - loud and uncomplicated musings expressed with the help of guitars, drums and little else - in a spectacle that will mix the godfathers of the genre with the very latest descendants.
Called Little Steven's International Underground Garage Festival, it will feature Iggy and the Stooges, the Strokes, the New York Dolls, Bo Diddley, Big Star, the Pretty Things, the Raveonettes, the Dictators, the Electric Prunes, the Mooney Suzuki, the Woggles, the Lyres, the Star Spangles, the Gore Gore Girls, Nancy Sinatra, the Creation and many others. The headliners will play full sets, but most bands will play just a few songs. For Mr. Van Zandt, who at 53 still wears the loose, brightly colored garb that earned him the nickname Miami Steve, the radio show and the festival - which he hopes to make an annual event - represent a revival of rough, honest, beautiful garage rock as a musical form and a redemption from restrictive radio formats that rely on familiarity and market testing.
"How could our culture have gotten to the point where we have a format for everything except rock 'n' roll?" he asked, hunched over a purple desk in his studio, in front of an enormous mantle painted in psychedelic colors. Around him on all sides were ceiling-high shelves of CD's and books.
"The classic rock stations are eliminating a lot of the 60's stuff - you don't hear many album cuts from the first seven Rolling Stones albums, or first five Beatles albums, or the first three Who albums, or the Kinks," he said, speaking in a slow, measured, almost scholarly tone. "That's what I call the renaissance."
What's more, he said, when he began to plan the radio show, there was a worthwhile movement of new music that was not getting enough attention from radio and from record labels. "Everyone was ignoring this contemporary garage-rock movement, which was to my ears a possible rebirth of rock 'n' roll, nothing less. So why weren't any record labels signing it?"
But since then, the labels have begun to sign it. In the past few years a wave of new bands has come along with obvious ties to classic garage rock: the Strokes, the Hives, the White Stripes, the Mooney Suzuki, the Raveonettes, the Datsuns and others play stripped-down rock 'n' roll with a passion that has attracted huge audiences.
Mr. Van Zandt is not modest in claiming some responsibility for this revival, but he cannot claim it all. The genre of garage rock has been in near-constant state of revival and reinvention almost since it began; the style was codified in the 1972 compilation album "Nuggets," and throughout the 70's, 80's and 90's various rock movements from punk to new wave to riot grrrl have updated and toyed with the form. As it will be seen at Saturday's concert, there is little to unify the many bands other than loud, short songs.
The Mooney Suzuki, formed in New York in 1997, has worked to expand its sound beyond the usual narrow parameters of garage rock. Its new album, "Alive and Amplified," to be released on Columbia on Aug. 24, was made with the pop production team the Matrix. Sammy James Jr., the band's singer, said the genre's long history makes a clear definition impossible.
"When people say garage rock revival, it's, like, the 80's had a garage rock revival, are you talking about that?" Mr. James said. "The 90's had a garage rock revival, are you talking about that? There's a whole generation now that is likely to identify garage music just with a certain kind of haircut."
Phil May, the singer of the Pretty Things, who in 1968 recorded the album "S.F. Sorrow," which is generally considered to be the first rock opera, preferred to think of it merely as a sound or a method.
"I don't think it is a style," he said in a telephone interview from London. "It's somebody playing guitar - not great, but it is a guitar sound, and it is not generated by digital software. It's people onstage, and there's a whole bunch of people who don't really know that experience."
Mr. James said, "Garage simply means amateur music."
In New York, Mr. Van Zandt's radio show is heard Sunday nights at 10 on the classic rock station WAXQ (104.3 FM), which was one of the first stations to run it. Bob Buchmann, the station's program director, said that at first he did not think it was the best idea.
"Steven told me he wanted to break the mold by doing a two-hour weekly radio show devoted to garage rock," he said. "And even I said, 'Are you sure you really wouldn't want to do only an hour?' "
But considering Mr. Van Zandt's following in New York and New Jersey, Mr. Buchmann signed on for the show and said that since it began, the station's Sunday night ratings have doubled.
Not all stations have been such an easy sell, and Mr. Van Zandt said he had traveled around the country to meet with radio executives and advertisers. Mr. Van Zandt's office sells national advertising time for the show, to sponsors like Dunkin' Donuts and Pepsi; local stations add their own commercials. In addition to the radio show Dunkin' Donuts has sponsored this weekend's festival and a nationwide battle of the bands, which in its finals at Irving Plaza in Manhattan last month contributed two acts to the festival lineup, Muck and the Mires, from Worcester, Mass., and the Blackouts, from Champaign, Ill. (They tied.)
But Mr. Van Zandt said that even with corporate underwriting, he supports the show himself and has never broken even with it. It is simply a cause that he cannot give up.
"Maybe it's a sense of injustice," he said. "That was certainly a motivating factor in the 80's when I was engaged in politics. It bothered me that nobody was talking about South Africa. Why isn't anybody talking about this? Why can't I go to the library and find anything about it?"
He added: "Why isn't there any rock 'n' roll radio? That doesn't seem right. It's a gap. Let me fill that gap."
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August 11, 2004
Cruel Fate Can't Prevent a New York Dolls Reunion
By BEN SISARIOThe New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/11/arts/music/11david.html)
There will be plenty of reunions and revivals at Little Steven's International Underground Garage Festival on Saturday, but few will be as hotly anticipated, or as bittersweet, as the New York Dolls'.
A few months ago the three surviving members of the group, whose raw sound and outrageous style kick-started the punk and glam movements in the 70's, played at the Meltdown Festival in London, in their first performances as the Dolls in almost 30 years. The singer David Johansen, the guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and the bassist Arthur Kane, known as Killer, played two sold-out shows at the Royal Festival Hall in June when Mr. Kane fell ill with what he thought was the flu. He found out hours before he died on July 13 that he had leukemia. He was 55.
In an interview Mr. Johansen - who is also known for his hard-partying alter ego Buster Poindexter - said the band would soldier on with a replacement bassist for the few gigs it has lined up. But after that, he said, the band's future is up in the air.
"We don't have any long-term plans or anything," he said. "We're honoring our commitments, and that's as far as we have any idea about. We've never had any kind of Maoist five-year plan anyway, nor have I with anything I've done. Everything I've done I've just fallen into."
Wearing dark sunglasses and a loose white shirt, Mr. Johansen was wistful and philosophical when discussing his group's reunion, a subject that for most bands is a concrete business proposition. "Most bands are commercial enterprises," he said. "But I'm not in one of those bands."
When speaking of Mr. Kane, he turned spiritual, using words like "Upanishadic" - the relation of humanity to the universe - and struggling to find a meaning in his sudden demise.
"In a cosmic sense the reunion was something that he really wanted," Mr. Johansen said. "Whatever his disease was, he was holding it in abeyance until he achieved that. If there's anything good about it, it's that."
As for himself, Mr. Johansen said that he was enjoying the reunion immensely, but that for him it was not a return to the past.
"I've been around the block a couple of times, and the guy I am now is the guy I like to be," he said. "That era is an element of who I am now. I'm doing it as a kind of devotion, some kind of quasi-religious experience for myself, a ceremony. Otherwise I can't do it."
"You try things on in life," he added. "You wear them for a while, and you see what's next."
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Here's some tentative set times for Saturday. A full hour from the Stooges!
From www.littlesteven.com/news.html (http://www.littlesteven.com/news.html)
Opening will be Davie Allan and the Arrows at 10:30AM
The order of the bands up until 4PM is still being worked out and will be posted here next week.
From 4PM on the headliners (Pete Best Band, Nancy Sinatra, Bo Diddley, D4, Raveonettes, Romantics, Big Star, Mooney Suzuki, Dictators) will be playing 15-30 minute sets.
The Pretty Things are set to go on at 7:10PM and play a 35 minute set.
The Dolls go on at 7:45PM and play a 45 minute set.
The Strokes go on at 8:30 and play a full hour-long set.
Iggy and the Stooges go on at 9:30 and play a full hour-long set.
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yeah, bring your galoshes. I REALLY want to go to this, but with 5 inches of rain (total from today until friday night)possibly falling in NYC, i dont really know.
my "place to stay" in Brooklyn is out, so its hotel, motel, muddy Randall's Island?
we'll see, but i may eat my $20 tickets
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Yeah yesterday i read 30% chance of rain in ny on saturday...now it says 60%...but then some places say just a "chance" of showers late in the day on Sat. Oh well...i'm going...I'm just hoping for the best. At worst it'll be a rainy weekend away in NY with some of my best friends and that ain't half bad.
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Originally posted by chaz:
At worst it'll be a rainy weekend away in NY with some of my best friends and that ain't half bad.
and that's damn good....some of my best times have been in similar conditions. Have fun, and be sure to catch Big Star and the Fleshtones, if you get a chance...
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And The Chocolate Watchband, The Chesterfield Kings, The High Dials and The Flaming Sideburns.
I want to go so badly! Now with the weather, I'm not feeling quite as bad about it.
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Weather.com now post only a 10% chance of rain in NY on Saturday!!!
Caesars, Stooges, Big Star, Choc Watch Band, High Dials..........
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Originally posted by chaz:
Weather.com now post only a 10% chance of rain in NY on Saturday!!!
Caesars, Stooges, Big Star, Choc Watch Band, High Dials..........
yeah, Saturday looks ok, its the 4 inches of rain on Friday that concerns me!
have you eve been to Randalls Island? that place will be a huge mud puddle. ehhhhhhh, I'll probably still go.
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Weather wasn't too much of a factor other than them rushing some of the bands along a little bit more than they would have. It drizzled ever so slightly during The Strokes and The Stooges but not enough to matter. Here's my very quick breakdown.
Bands I missed that I wanted to see - Caesars, High Dials and The Cynics, but I've seen Cynics prolly 6 or 7 times, seen the Ceasars and will see the High Dials in a few weeks at Black Cat.
Biggest dissapointment of the day - Big Star. They sounded terrible I thought and I just felt embarressed for them. Also Kim Fowley as MC. What and idiot that guy is.
Best of the 60's era bands (sans stooges) - The Creation. Their sound held up the best. Choc. Watch Band, Electric Prunes etc were ok but forgettable. Good to hear them play some of their hits though.
Best contemporary band - D4. These guys were very good. I'm gonna get their stuff. I missed most of Mooney Suzuki but understand they were quite good.
Bo Diddly was good and received a very warm welcome from the crowd. Good to see such a living legend perform.
OK....now to the highlights....
The Dictators were great...the first great band of the day. Handsome Dick Manatoba is larger than life and New Yorkers just love him. And the NY Dolls were surprisingly great. Sounded great and David and Sylvain seemed tickled to be up there playing. They dedicated "You Can't Put your Arms Around a Memory" to Arthur Kane and it was really quite touching....I saw one old guy crying a little during that one. The Dolls were very good though.
The Strokes were actually very good. I'd never seen them before and they were probably the tightest band of the day and their live sound went over very well in the outdoor venue. The singer is a bit of an ass though, but I thought the music was quite good just the same.
Last but not least...The Stooges. Iggy is still just an electrifying performer. They totally brought the house down....they were so good. If you've never seen Iggy live do what you have to do to make it happen. The guy is a freak of nature and the band sounded great. Mike Watt fills in for the departed Dave Alexander and he was simply great. The guy totally abuses his bass and he was really into it. Ron Ashton pretty much stood still but sounded great. Iggy is truly the king of Rock and Roll....an amazing performer indeed. They played about 45 minutes. I wish they'd played longer but I left happy.
OK that's it for now...I had a great time hanging with friends I hadn't seen in a while and overall just a great time checking out the bands. I don't really like the festival thing too much though. If not for the Stooges I never would have gone and it's unlikely I'll ever do another one again....but you never know...
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i would write a review as well, but we chickened out at the LAST minute (sat morning) and didnt even go, even though we had tickets.
I went to see Prince instead, and i HIGHLY doubt that festival was better than that.
I'll definitely go next year.
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Yeah I heard Prince was great...the guys I went up to NY with both went on thursday night. I saw him on the Purple Rain tour waaaayyyy back when and it was fantastic.
Personally though, I'd take a NY Dolls and Stooges reunion over Prince any day.
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Shame about the Big Star set... i've always wanted to see Alex, Jody and superstar Posies replacements Ken and Jon do their thing. But, the reality is that the Big Star records were amazing performances done in a studio with a wide range of musical styles. And the once a year performances with little rehearsal of the material is probably going to sound a bit ragged.
I'd love to see the Creation!!!! Is the orginial guitarist who played with a violin bow in the current lineup? He was actually considered as a fifth member of the Who. Now that would have been quite a sound...
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Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
Is the orginial guitarist who played with a violin bow in the current lineup?
Yup he was there...something Phillips is his name I think. The only original member I'm sure wasn't there is the singer..think he's dead. He did the whole bow thing though. The Creation were the heaviest sounding of the nostalgia acts by far.
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Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
Shame about the Big Star set... i've always wanted to see Alex, Jody and superstar Posies replacements Ken and Jon do their thing. But, the reality is that the Big Star records were amazing performances done in a studio with a wide range of musical styles. And the once a year performances with little rehearsal of the material is probably going to sound a bit ragged.
I would have LOVED to see that as well. My question is, of the several (but few) shows this reformed band has put on over the last coupla years, have any been rumored to be really good? Or is it always 'not so great' and a bit too rough?
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August 16, 2004
MUSIC REVIEW (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/arts/music/16gara.html) | LITTLE STEVEN'S UNDERGROUND GARAGE FESTIVAL
More Acts Than Attitude at Garage Fest
By KELEFA SANNEH, The New York Times
On Saturday at Randalls Island lots of performers talked about Hurricane Charley, sounding either nervous or cautiously optimistic. But Julian Casablancas, the leader of the Strokes, was the only one with the gall to taunt the storm. "I don't see any flippin' hurricane," he sneered, more or less, before telling slightly damp fans, "You're not horny enough," and slithering through yet another oily, petulant song.
The event was Little Steven's Underground Garage Festival, a 12-hour celebration of rock 'n' roll nostalgia, headlined by Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Nearly four dozen bands squeezed onto a single stage, many playing no more than a single song, which meant that the celebration sometimes seemed more like a stunt. You couldn't help but wonder whether Steven Van Zandt had organized the concert in hopes of breaking some obscure world record.
Certainly the 16,000 resilient concertgoers who filled the front third of the field (the concert was nowhere near sold out) often seemed more like bystanders than fans, although only Mr. Casablancas had the bad manners to point this out. "It's not loud enough," he declared, after yet another faint smattering of applause. When that didn't work, he tried flattery. "You're pretty good lookin'," he added, emphasizing the "pretty." "I'm a shallow guy."
If nothing else, the festival was a tribute to the unstoppability of Mr. Van Zandt, a longtime Bruce Springsteen guitarist who also acts on "The Sopranos" and serves as host of "Little Steven's Underground Garage," a syndicated radio show. Somehow he persuaded a doughnut company to underwrite a big, unwieldy concert of garage rock, a genre devoted , as he once wrote, to rock 'n' roll's essence: "Attitude, anger, angst, anxiety, frustration, bravado, guitars, fuzztones and Farfisa organs."
Too bad, then, that many of the bands on the bill - some old, many just old at heart - ignored the first six to concentrate on the last three. The first two or three or eight hours were mainly given over to interchangeable revival acts that seemed content to bash out a few fuzzy chords and march offstage, displaying neither attitude nor anxiety nor any of the other attributes Mr. Van Zandt wrote about.
There were competent but boring sets from the Fuzztones and the Chesterfield Kings (who were introduced by Mr. Springsteen) and the Mooney Suzuki and the Woggles and (yikes!) the Pete Best band and dozens more.
There were exceptions of course. (With this many bands, how could there not be?) The Shazam, a decade-old group from Nashville, played a couple of ridiculous - but memorable - songs that mimicked the sugary bombast of mainstream 1970's rock. The great British mod band Creation exhumed "Making Time," a riotous hit from 1966. And Nancy Sinatra performed the day's most deliciously weird set, singing the ballad "Let Me Kiss You" (written for her by Morrissey) as well as the cryptic and fragmented "Momma's Boy" (written for her by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore) before she finally got around to those walking boots.
By evening, as things got darker and wetter, the big names took over. Bo Diddley's invigorating set included the only rapping heard all day. The New York Dolls - mourning the death last month of their bassist, Arthur Kane - were every bit as loud and rude and ragged as they were supposed to be. And Iggy Pop and the Stooges (joined by the bassist Mike Watt) charged through faster but cleaner versions of songs from the Stooges' classic first two albums: he has sandblasted his back catalog, stripping the songs of everything except savage joy.
Still, thank goodness for the Strokes, who have figured out ways to smuggle ambivalent poses and feelings into seemingly simple songs; their set hinted at something much more complicated than joy. The songs from "Room on Fire," the disappointing second Strokes album, sounded much wilder and more unstable onstage than on the CD. "Reptilia" sounded particularly good, an accusatory love song ("You're not trying hard enough") pockmarked with sudden guitar cutouts.
Even better, Mr. Casblancas's between-song monologues helped puncture the day's single-mindedly celebratory attitude. Baiting the fans, mocking the organizers, messing with the cameramen, he provided a welcome infusions of bad vibrations. When nearly four dozen bands get together in a park, who says it has to be a celebration? Who says it can't be a fight, instead?
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I've always enjoyed the Live at Columbia Big Star reunion album, with the Posies guys from a few years back, but a lot of people seem not to like it much.
There was also a bootleg floating around (remember the Kiss the Stone label?) called "Pick Some Posies and Let's Play", but I've never heard it. I think it was the same basic set as Columbia but with a few more songs like Big Black Car.
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Thanks for the reports!
Hey Seth, what about next Summer, a Seth's Underground Garage Festival in the Woods? Same basic idea but with a whole lot less bands.