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I just read on Rosann Cash’s tweet about the death of Roger Nichols, the famous recording engineer and innovator. He was also known for having been in the atomic energy industry before working with music. The production quality he facilitated for Steely Dan especially is so distinctive that the music is often the standard by which people buy stereos, and has also been the standard bearer for new music hardware like the Compact Disc player, Super Audio CD, HDCD, Digital Audio Cassette, MP3 and (no doubt) more to come.
One exciting moment I enjoyed as a fan was seeing Steely Dan live with Roger Nichols mixing. He was introduced from the stage and gave the crowd a wave to acknowledge their applause. In a band with only two members, the person who kept all the takes and personell straight while maintaining sound quality and (presumably) a good atmosphere in the room was pretty important and the fans knew it too.
He’s one of the people the term “audiophile” was created for – a fan of sound quality and equipment more than music itself. Roger Nichols’ work will be appreciated for many years to come.
Roger Nichols is interviewed on the topic of “Deacon Blues” (toward the end of the clip):
To donate to the Roger Nichols Cancer Fund, please click here.
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The 2011 Major League Baseball season begins tomorrow! In celebration, enjoy Hulu’s presentation of one incredible baseball movie, Pride of the Yankees. The film version of Lou Gehrig’s short but brilliant life was a perennial on WPIX in New York, and is part of the lore that helps create the Yankees and their fans’ identity. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech is still unbelievable years later, but probably not that poignant or shocking to people who have friends or relatives or are suffering from a life-threatening illness.
As a Yankee fan during the 70s, Catfish Hunter was the man, and apparently, Bob Dylan liked him too.
It was backstage at the Peekskill Joan Baez show when I rolled up on Pete Seeger, but even more interesting, Jacques Levy, who co-wrote this baseball classic with Dylan. I realize meeting Pete Seeger and his resistance to my effort to get a “trade shot” of him and Joan Baez is good page in my story, trust me. But Jacque Levy co-wrote “Catfish,” one of Dylan’s most unique songs.
And of course Jim “Catfish” Hunter died of ALS like Lou Gehrig. In the great old movie, Irving Berlin’s song “Always” is a recurring theme to the love story between Lou and Ellie, and I’ve included Willie Nelson’s version below for your enjoyment. By the way thanks to Leigh Montville’s book The Big Bam and others for explaining the rift and importance of the hug Lou got from the Babe on the day he delivered his speech. They hadn’t spoken in years because the Babe and Lou’s wife…
If that wasn’t enough, I also recently read that John Lennon was a fan of “Pride of the Yankees.” The song included a line he took and wrote about in a letter to Yoko from the Bahamas. As the old man would say “you can look it up.”
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Amazon is first to the cloud
Jon Bon Jovi’s appreciation for album covers and touching the media seem incompatible with this system to say the least. As music enters “the cloud,” it will become completely virtual.
For months, we’ve been hearing about Google’s impending locker service, Apple’s purchase of Lala and other rumors around the idea of putting your music “in the cloud.” Today, Amazon shook the world like Muhammad Ali by DEBUTING their Cloud Music Player service.
“We are excited to introduce Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Cloud Player for Web, and Amazon Cloud Player for Android. Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the Cloud and play it on any Mac, PC, or Android device wherever they are.”
The idea of a cloud music service is that you store your music online instead of in an external hard drive in your house. This library is then accessible through mobile devices and the web as mentioned above in Amazon’s pitch to customers. By offering the technical capability of more memory in a discount deal on music will most definitely get people into the paid tier quickly.
My Willie Nelson files equal about 7 GB, but since I know the man is up for experimentation, I made his catalog the guinea pig. Willie will be my first artist in space. It will take about 33 hours to upload approximately 840 songs. My entire library would take almost three months of continuously uploading files to Amazon. But once it was up there, the convenience and security might eclipse any lack of sound quality.
The question will be, “What happens when you go through a tunnel or can’t connect to the net?” Kindle enables people to read books without an internet connection but song files seem too big to be stored locally on devices.
Amazon has once again proven to be the most effortless and speediest interface of the major companies, even with their announcement/launch of the service. No hype, no to and fro with tech blogs. That instills confidence in the system protecting our music. Meanwhile, the amount of data the company has accumulated already, and will further build about our listening habits is astonishing to consider.
And my Willie catalog is almost finished uploading.
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The amount of people and shows is too long to list, but the food is much more manageable – about one per day. It was mostly tex mex on the food front, with not many new places except the oldest place in town, the Hoffbrau. I had chicken and salad as often as possible, much to the dismay of my friends and often, the hosts too. I hit the Salt Lick. Maudie’s, Churra Grill, Maria’s, Green Mesquite, Guero’s, Magnolia and Nau’s are some of the famous places I stopped by over the six day stint in the Capital of Willie.
Jack White's revolutionary music truck
It’s so overwhelming, you have to focus. By concentrating on food and people, I had a good basis for networking and getting things done.
Two fantastic events I attended were the Chimera Music/Yoko Ono show and the premiere of Billy Bob’s Willie Nelson documentary, The King of Luck. Though I stayed off Sixth Street, the massive crowds and even the presence of Jay-Z and Kanye West at a closing night show held in a former power plant only attest to the growing importance of SXSW, and more than symbolically how it has swallowed Austin, Texas in the past twenty years.
The new Austin City Limits Theater
Everything is getting souped up, including the Austin City Limits studio, now housed in a new W hotel on Willie Nelson Boulevard (formerly 2nd St.). I took a brief look inside before the room was taken over by Lost Highway’s tenth anniversary show. I was happy to run into Dave Derrick but missed Robert Keen and his guitar player Rich Brotherton since I had to bail. Went up to the Continental at some point to hang with Aggie and Amber Digby was still on stage. Who knows where the week went. Like I said, I had these enchiladas…
One of the more interesting events on the business side was the Accelerator competition for technology entrepreneurs. Seeing presentations on companies like Next Big Sound, Roqbot and Rootmusic was informative about where music and data is headed. Roqbot, a virtual jukebox system for businesses seemed especially inspired, since it is an old and proven idea with the convenience and speed today’s mp3-based libraries and phones afford. How would the Fonz hit that jukebox?
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A star-studded audience turned out for SXSW’s closing night premiere of Billy Bob Thornton’s long-awaited Willie Nelson documentary, The King of Luck. The influential actor and director (as well as leader of the Boxmasters) has assembled a loving tribute that many of us on the inside of the Willie team will be really impressed with. Many of the characters around the man are pretty damn charismatic too, and Thornton includes them all in the film, which is the key difference between The King of Luck and American Masters or any other “standard” take on the man.
Introducing the film, Billy Bob mentioned that he tried to capture what about him inspires such loyalty among his cohorts. Coach Darrell Royal, a longtime friend of Willie’s, summed it up pretty accurately in the film, “he has a good memory for his friends.” Willie’s buddies are a constant presence in the film, from the triumvirate of baked actors (Woody, Luke and Owen) to fellow poets like Kinky, and supply great profiles of the man.
Willie’s fans will dig this film immensely for the up-close/personal performances, amazing archival footage (especially Faron Young at the Boar’s Nest Reunion and rarely seen footage of Bee taking off behind Willie in Vegas during “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”), stories, photos and many miles and smiles along the road. Kinky Friedman accurately describes Willie as a folk hero… his magical quality comes through in this film and the music is beautifully recorded and performed. It makes you feel like you are hanging out with Willie, down to earth but flying high at the same time.
We are especially lucky that Billy Bob captured Poodie Locke’s interview before he left us suddenly last May. Poodie was a mainstay of Willie shows and the story would be missing something without his presence.
