One weekend, two events, a truckload of vitriol
Two of the year’s most high-profile music celebrations are unfolding this weekend and that can mean only one thing: accusations, and lots of them.
Grievance is, after all, the common currency that binds Saturday’s perennially contentious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions and the concurrent ritual of vinyl fetishization known as Record Store Day.
“Too old, too white, too rich” — a T-shirt-worthy sneer uttered by a former member of the Rock Hall’s nominating committee — is the all-purpose dismissal of the former event that has proven the hardest to shake.
Though Jann Wenner, chairman of the Rock Hall Foundation and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, has talked about making a “conscious effort” to diversify the 41person committee, its membership reportedly includes just six women and only seven people of colour.
Mind you, that criticism tends to obscure the genuinely oddball array of inductees who’ll be honoured at Cleveland’s Public Hall: Ringo Starr, Green Day, Bill Withers, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, the “5” Royales, Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, Lou Reed and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
That perceived haphazardness has sustained a vigorous community of detractors who, with cranky vigilance, annually monitor the list for perceived snubs: everyone from Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and the Cure to the Smiths, Nine Inch Nails and the Monkees.
Which brings us to the weekend’s other big music event, routinely credited with both birthing and poisoning the vinyl revival, Record Store Day.
Intended to support independent music stores, its burgeoning success is a dependable wellspring of verbal abuse. Here are two of our favourite examples:
“An excuse for major labels to dump a year’s worth of back catalogue reissues and A-ha picture discs on unsuspecting shops.” That’s one Nathaniel Cramp in the Guardian.
“RSD makes it financially viable and often lucrative to release projects that would otherwise be ignored or ridiculed”: Gord Dufresne, proprietor of B.C.’s Deranged Records, to Exclaim.ca.
That divisive reaction has also stirred two particularly memorable and opposing impulses.
One: instead of pressing up several hundred copies of a special single for Record Store Day, U.K. indie labels Sonic Cathedral and Howling Owl plan to release “one copy a day for a whole year via selected shops and Recordstoredayisdying.com to make some sort of point about how every day should be record store day.”
Two: a new chart for vinyl albums and singles has just launched in the U.K.
Act of passion or mercantile manoeuvre? Bring on the vitriol. Vinyl countdown: Released 23 years ago, Roger Waters’ third solo album — still his last non-opera studio recording — is getting the deluxe reissue treatment, including on vinyl.
Out July 24, Amusing Ourselves to Death has been remastered for CD, Blu-ray audio (in a 5.1 surround remix) and as a double-LP pressed on extra-heavy 200-gram vinyl.
Seems the Rolling Stones are having a problem with their zipper. The planned multi-format reissue of the band’s Sticky Fingers is being delayed by two weeks because the handmade zipper on the cover of the deluxe vinyl version and the “super deluxe” CD edition is “taking a bit longer to manufacture.” The new release date in Canada and the U.S. is June 9.
In their heyday, they were the kind of band that could split friends into opposing camps, but come May 12, Styx will return in a big way to the format on which they first prospered.
The A&M Albums 1975-1984 will box up the live Caught in the Act along with seven studio LPs, each on 180-gram vinyl. The collection begins with Equinox and runs through Kilroy Was Here, home of the infamous “Mr. Roboto” and the final album before the classic lineup broke up. Retro/active: Don Henley’s first solo album in 15 years is almost ready to go, bonus tracks and all.
Set for release this fall after the Eagles’ summer tour wraps up, Cass County — named after his East Texas stomping grounds — “sort of has a country flavour,” he told online charity network Chideo. “Some of it could be called Americana,” he says, adding wryly, “a new category they came up with a few years ago.”
Henley says he’s completed 17 tracks and wants to record a couple more, after which “we’ll start the culling process. I’m told that now you put out a regular album and then you put out a deluxe version that has extra songs on it, so I’ve got plenty of extra songs for the deluxe version.”
“An ABBA reunion is more likely than us getting back together.” That retroactive falsehood was uttered by keyboardist Magne Furuholmen a mere five years ago as A-ha (“Take on Me,” “The Sun Always Shines on TV”) bid the music world farewell.
It didn’t take. The Norwegian band’s 10th studio album, Cast in Steel, is due in September.
Hard to believe that a) Rickie Lee Jones is 60 and b) she hasn’t released an album of all new original material in 12 years.
That’ll finally change on June 23 when The Other Side of Desire, financed by fans’ pledges, arrives on CD, vinyl and in download form.
Jones, whose music is inextricably linked to L.A., has relocated to New Orleans, because, she writes on her website, “Here in New Orleans, the city shares everything with me. Its people, its peace, its crazy dance. But most of all I live between the sound of the river boat and the sound of the train, and somehow that connects me to everywhere I have ever been . . .”