With a new EP in the offing, YAK share its lead track, the psych-tinged ‘Am I A Good Man’, as an early preview.
The EP itself, entitled ‘Atlas Complex’, arrives on November 1st via Virgin EMI / Third Man Records, to coincide with the start of a UK tour for the trio.
“‘Atlas Complex’ was recorded between Nashville [at Jack White’s Third Man Records] and South London at the beginning of this summer,” says frontman Oli Burslem. “The ‘atlas complex’ is centred around an idea of losing all sense of everything. It’s a state of mind in which a person believes that the world is on their shoulders and they’re unable to deal with what they perceive as endless problems and uncertainty.”
Am I A Good Man · Yak November tour COME SEE US. THERE WON’T BE ANY OTHER SHOWS FOR A WHILE
Leeds outfit Dead Naked Hippies return with a punchy new blinder in ‘Eyes Wide’, released last Friday.
Produced by Grammy and BRIT Award-nominated Tom Dalgety (Pixies, Royal Blood), and the follow-up to ‘Young Male Rage’, the track is a coming-of-age anthem.
‘Eyes Wide’ opens with stark guitar stabs before frontwoman Lucy Jowett takes centre stage with a bold, confident & striking vocal. The track builds into a huge chorus, culminating in the hook “With eyes wide, I am not blind.” It’s a huge statement of intent from the Leeds based band, showing they are ready to take arms.
“‘Eyes Wide’ is for the outsiders,” explains frontwoman Lucy Jowett, “the pieces that don’t quite fit the puzzle, those growing up & growing wiser but not by societal norms or expectation, instead blossoming in their own beautiful way. For those making their own shapes, decisions, perspectives, words and waves in their own time and seeing the world through their own eyes. 26 years in and I’m not the person the child or the teenage me thought I would be, or should be by expectation. No shame. ‘Eyes Wide’ is a celebration of it.”
Norwegian indie punks Sløtface have shared a song about their own pollution worries in new single ‘Sink or Swim’. Frontperson Haley Shea explains:
“[‘Sink or Swim‘ is] about the desperation that comes when I think about climate change. It’s supposed to be an honest description of how I’m definitely not doing enough to stop it, and how it feels so massive and difficult, but at the same time it in part comes down to lots of small and every-day choices.”
It’s surely a creeping worry in the backs of the minds of all conscientious people in the world, and Sløtface brilliantly capture the overwhelming feeling you get when you let those thoughts free to run rampant in your mind. Shea worries about plastic filling up oceans, it being “too warm for October”, and her grandchildren dying – and her delivery comes with earnest discomfort, as if she’s sick with the thoughts. The usually effervescent band hold back their boisterousness to add gravitas to these notions, but their sparking electricity is still sending mini musical shockwaves beneath, adding a pointedness to the fury and desperation. They maintain this crackling balance right up until the end when the floodgates truly open with the cathartic statement: “it’s not politics, it’s sink or swim.”
Appropriately, a video for ‘Sink or Swim’ highlighting these issues, Please support your local and global environmental initiatives & charities
The Band are reissuing their 1969 self-titled sophomore album to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its release. A super deluxe limited edition version of The Band is slated to arrive November 15th.
The reissue will feature a new stereo mix of the album that engineer Bob Clearmountain made from the original analog masters, as well as classic photos, the group’s previously unreleased 1969 “Live At Woodstock” performance, Classic Albums: The Band documentary, and thirteen bonus tracks.
Exclusively for the boxed set, Clearmountain has also created a new 5.1 surround mix for the album and bonus tracks, presented on Blu-ray with the new stereo, both in high resolution audio (96kHz/24bit). All the new audio mixes have been mastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering. The boxed set also includes an exclusive reproduction of The Band’s 1969 7-inch vinyl single for “Rag Mama Rag”/“The Unfaithful Servant” in their new stereo mixes and a hardbound book with an extensive new essay by author and music critic Anthony DeCurtis and classic photos by Elliott Landy. For the album’s new vinyl editions, Chris Bellman cut the vinyl lacquers for the album’s new stereo mix at 45 rpm at Bernie Grundman Mastering, expanding the album’s vinyl footprint from one LP to two.
The super deluxe reissue of The Band is cut at 45RPM and available on two 180-Gram LPs. Additionally, a reproduction of the Band’s 1969 7″ vinyl single for “Rag Mama Rag” with a B-side of “The Unfaithful Servant.” Listen to the alternate version of “Rag Mama Rag” .
All the Anniversary Edition releases were overseen by guitarist/songwriter Robbie Robertson and feature a new stereo mix by Bob Clearmountain from the original multi-track masters, similar to the 50th anniversary collections of last year’s Big Pink releases. The 50th Anniversary Edition’s CD, digital and boxed set configurations also include 13 outtakes, featuring six previously unreleased outtakes and alternate recordings from The Band sessions, The Band’s legendary Woodstock performance, which has never been officially released.
“Up On Cripple Creek” was the B side of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Robbie Robertson wrote this song and it appeared on The Band’s sophomore self-titled album.
The Band had rented Sammy Davis’s house turning the pool house into a recording studio, nailing baffles all along the outside wall and getting a great sound inside. The album was recorded there except “Up On Cripple Creek”, “Jemima Surrender” and “Whispering Pines” which was recorded at the Hit Factory studio in New York City.
The unusual sound that sounds like a jaw harp was achieved by Hudson with a wah-wah pedal on his clavinet. The song has a great Americana sound to it. Hard to believe this band was all Canadian except for the southern Levon Helm. Guitarist Robbie Robertson wrote this song, which tells a disjointed story about a mountain man and a girl named Bessie. We hear about a trip to the horse races, listening to Spike Jones, and how what really makes him happy is when she “dips her doughnut in my tea.”
Like many songs by The Band, it’s wide open for interpretation. Robertson claims he doesn’t even know what’s going on. “I don’t really write songs with anything other than just a storytelling sense,” he said when asked about the song in Goldmine (August, 1998). “You sit down and write the song, and usually when something happens, you just don’t even know where it came from, or why it came, or anything like that. That’s the best. You know, when something comes out of you that surprises you. And it was one of those. You know, I was just sitting down to see if I could think of anything, and that’s what came out. But it was a fun song to write.”
Drummer Levon Helm sang lead on this track, giving it a very folksy vibe.
The guy in this song is one of the many curious characters Robbie Robertson has conceived. “We’re not dealing with people at the top of the ladder,” he said. “We’re saying what about that house out there in the middle of that field? What does this guy think, with that one light on upstairs, and that truck parked out there? That’s who I’m curious about.”
Robertson is listed as the only songwriter on this track, which is something his bandmates disputed, as they claimed they helped write it. Songwriting credits going to Robertson was a great source of friction in The Band.
That funky sound on “Up On Cripple Creek” was created by keyboardist Garth Hudson, who played a Hohner Clavinet D6 through a Vox Wah Wah pedal.
In The Band’s 2000 Greatest Hits compilation, Levon Helm said, “It took a long time to seep into us. We cut it two or three times, but nobody really liked it. It wasn’t quite enough fun. Finally one night we just got hold of it, doubled up a couple of chorus and harmony parts, and that was it.” The B-side of the single was “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which became a hit for Joan Baez in 1971.
The Band performed this on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969. It was their only appearance on the show.
The Band was originally released on September 22nd, 1969. In short order, the Band appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, one of only two television appearances the group would ever make, and it had a hit single with “Up on Cripple Creek.” In addition, The Band appeared on the cover of Time magazine in January of 1970, the first North American group ever to do so.
The band’s last album was 2017’s Whiteout Conditions, also released on Collected Works/Concord. In a previous press release Carl Newman (who also produced the album) says In the Morse Code of Brake Lights is an accidental concept record.
“I was about two-thirds of the way through the record when I began to notice that lyrically so much of it was pointing toward car songs,” he said. “The opening track is ‘You’ll Need a Backseat Driver,’ and that was a metaphor that seemed to be running through other songs, too. Next to the love song, I feel like the car song is one of the most iconic kinds of songs in pop music, from Chuck Berry to the present. There was so much of that throughout it that I started thinking: ‘Oh, no, there’s too many references to cars on this record!’ And then I thought, ‘No, that’s good-people might think it’s a concept album.'”
Previously the band shared the album’s first single, “Falling Down the Stairs of Your Smile,”.
Then they shared another song from it, “The Surprise Knock,”. That was followed by a video for “Falling Down the Stairs of Your Smile” and another song from the album, “One Kind of Solomon.”
Happy release day to my pals in The New Pornographers! We’re on tour right now (tour dates below) and I want to send a special thank you and shout out to my sweetheart of a husband Colin Stewart who NOT ONLY sends me daily cat photos so I don’t miss the cat too much while I’m away, he ALSO did an amazing job mixing/recording The New Pornographers ‘In The Morse Code of Brake Lights’. A big thank you to everyone who worked on this record with us, and thanks everyone for listening!
In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights CD/LP is out this week on Collected Work/Concord
“Since their inception, the New Pornographers have often been labeled a “supergroup”. Since A.C. Newman’s voice and guitar has rarely hogged the spotlight, it’s been easy to overlook the fact that he’s very much the mastermind behind the Canadian indie rock band’s coherent, but transcendently harmonious, pop sound. As a co-producer, he’s always displayed a nearly Brian Wilson-level gift for melding the group’s dizzying arsenal of talents, from NekoCase’s clarion alto to Dan Bejar’s quirky change-of-pace songs. In The Morse Code Of The Brake Lights is the band’s second album without Bejar and original drummer Kurt Dahle. But whereas 2017’s Whiteout Conditions buzzed along in familiar New Pornos fashion, with a bright, fizzy krautrock vibe and an equitable mix of vocalists, Brake Lights is, at least by the group’s typical power-pop standards, a heavier, murkier affair, with Newman’s voice sitting front and center for much of its duration.”
Supergrass recently released a cover of The Police’s “Next To You” (the lead track on Outlandos d’Amour) and now here’s Juliana Hatfield covering the same song. It’s like when we got two asteroid/meteor movies in 1998! In Juliana’s case, it’s part of her upcoming Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police tribute album that’s out November 15th. “Their recording of it is so perfect in its imperfection,” Juliana tells Billboard. “It’s unpolished and raw. That whole album sounds like three guys bashing out a song in a room together. So I didn’t even want to attempt to do a rocking version of it like that. I don’t want it to be compared to the original. There’s no way I could come close. So I just went in a completely different direction and slowed down to half time
Nearly a year and a half after Juliana Hatfield released an album of Olivia Newton-John covers, she’s back with a set dedicated to another act that inspired her — Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, whose vibey cover of “Next to You” is premiering exclusively below “I still don’t know exactly what I’m mining with (the covers albums) — I’m sort of going back and exploring my formative years, I guess,” says Hatfield . “The Police and Olivia Newton-John were things that I loved when I was an adolescent and coming into myself and discovering music, and my own music. So I’m just exploring my past, I think, as I come more and more into myself — but it’s hard to answer why.”
The Blake Babies and Lemonheads alum did release an album of original songs, Weird, earlier this year, and she says the covers sets provide a bit of valuable creative respite. “Whenever I make an album of my own songs, at the end I feel so depleted,” Hatfield explains. “I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say and will never write another song. But I don’t want to stop making music. That’s when I go and start looking at other people’s stuff…so I can keep working. Recording covers is like a working vacation. It’s fun, and it also informs my own stuff afterwards.”
The Police, Hatfield says, were an adolescent fixation, attracting her with their blend of pop, punk and jazzy touches and helping introduce her to reggae. Choosing a dozen tracks to interpret was no easy feat; In fact, Hatfield says she could probably manage a second volume of Police material along the way. But for Sings the Police, due out November. 15th, she “just chose stuff that pleased me the most,” included hits and deeper cuts such as “Hungry For You,” “Canary in a Coal Mine,” “Hole in My Life,” “Murder by Numbers” and “Landlord.” “I went with stuff I thought sounded cool or that seemed relevant,” Hatfield explains. “Something like ‘Rehumanize Yourself’ seems very modern and current in its subject matter. ‘Canary in a Coalmine’ is so fun to sing and play. I was really just indulging my whims.
“Obviously I wanted to put my own stamp on them,” she continues, “but the structures and foundations are so solid that it’s fun and kind of easy to get inside them and mess around and remold them. Even if you dig into them and break them apart, they’re not gonna break. They bend real easy.”
“Next to You,” the first track from the Police’s 1978 debut album Outlandos d’Amour, presented a challenge for Hatfield, however. “It really was an intuitive reworking of that,” says Hatfield, who abandoned “an awful ’80s metal ballad” version of the song before settling on this version. “Their recording of it is so perfect in its imperfection. It’s unpolished and raw; That whole album sounds like three guys bashing out a song in a room together. So I didn’t even want to attempt to do a rocking version of it like that. I don’t want it to be compared to the original. There’s no way I could come close. So I just went in a completely different direction and slowed down to half time.”
Hatfield has had no feedback on the album yet from the Police camp (Newton-John full endorsed her album last year) and plans to continue the cover sets as a series between original albums. She’s currently on break from touring, which she’s using as an opportunity to do some songwriting before going back on the road in January. “When that tour is over I’ll start to think about recording something,” she says. “The Olivia Newton-John album definitely had an impact, so I’ll be interested to see what (the Police) album brings out of me now.”
The vintage analog recordings taken from a pair of the band’s 2018 sets at the Greek Theatre will be released November 29th. With plenty of time to have digested the band’s May-released I Am Easy to Find—and probably not nearly enough time to digest a socially unacceptable amount of sweet potatoes and turkey substitute The National are gearing up to share their latest recordings in the unconventional format of a live cassette this coming Black Friday. Featuring the band’s September 24th and 25th 2018 sets at LA’s Greek Theatre, Juicy Sonic Magic was recorded by producer/engineer Erik Flannigan, who used The Mike Millard Method, “[replicating] the vintage analog recording equipment the legendary taper used,” per a tweet from the band.
A David DuBois–directed doc short about “the most famous taper of all time” and his method, which prominently features The National and this particular performance, will arrive at an unspecified date shortly after JSM rouses us from our gravy-induced stupors.
Watch the trailer for the film below, and see the announcement tweet the band posted earlier this morning.
Juicy Sonic Sex Magik, er, Juicy Sonic Magic, is out November 29th for Record Store Day’s Black Friday event.
The Grateful Dead and a group of other rock bands of the times including the Jefferson Airplane, took a lease out on the old Carousel Ballroom on Market Street in San Francisco (formerly the El Patio) back in 1968 which only lasted for several short months. During that time however there were many great shows and dance/concerts that took place. Moby Grape: They could have been the biggest and best band in the world, some contended back in the ‘60s, but something happened. The series of bad luck, misfortunes and critical misfires that derailed most of their career.
It was a Saturday night 47 years ago on this day back in 1968 that Moby Grape, along with It’s a Beautiful Day and Sweet Rush finished up their two night engagement there at the Carousel Ballroom. Back in 1966, amid the ferment of San Francisco’s active music scene, five disparate musicians were brought together in a new band. Heavily laden with talent, the group cut a 1967 debut album, that is still ranked among the finest, most assured bows in rock history. Almost instantly, they were tabbed as the act to beat. Moby Grape’s name is synonymous among rock connoisseurs with tragedy, failure, unfulfilled promise, and chaos. The story of how what appeared to be rock’s Perfect Beast became a rolling catastrophe is one of the all-time cautionary tales in the annals of music and the music business.
Looking back at Moby Grape and wonders, “How could they fail?” Among performing units of their era, they were seemingly rivaled solely by their Los Angeles contemporaries Buffalo Springfield, whose glittering lineup included the mighty singer-songwriter-guitarist triumvirate of Neil Young, Stephen Stills, and Richie Furay.
Moby Grape trumped the Springfield’s three-pronged attack. All five members of the group sang, and they forged a deftly blended choral attack unique among bands of the day. All five musicians also wrote, with consistent brilliance and economy. Their three-guitar front line could blow any outfit unlucky enough to share a stage with them right off the boards, and their powerful rhythm section was unmatched by any on the Haight-Ashbury scene.
The seeds of the band’s disorder may have been sown in its founding. In late 1966, its five members were brought together by an ambitious manager seeking a new act to work, as major label A&R men began poking around for acts that were playing in San Francisco’s burgeoning rock ballroom scene. The magnetic linchpin of the new band was singer-songwriter-guitarist Skip Spence. The Canadian musician had served as the drummer for Jefferson Airplane and had played on the group’s debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.. However, feeling marginalized creatively in the Airplane, he abruptly quit the band for a sojourn in Mexico. On his return to the Bay Area, he linked up with the Airplane’s erstwhile manager to make a fresh start.
Spence’s band mates were all well-traveled journeyman rockers who landed in San Francisco to flex their considerable chops. One arrived with a Hollywood pedigree: singer-guitarist Peter Lewis was the son of movie star Loretta Young, and a veteran of the surf band the Cornells and his own outfit Peter and the Wolves. Bassist-vocalist Bob Mosley, a white soul man to the bone, had recorded with San Diego’s Misfits. Lead guitarist-singer Jerry Miller—who had served for a time in Texas band‘ Bobby Fuller Four—and drummer Don Stevenson had both performed in the Frantics, part of Seattle’s vibrant ’60s scene.
The resultant quintet, while it keyed off Spence’s formidable onstage energy, was the most cooperative unit imaginable, with each member contributing notable songs to the Moby Grape repertoire. Their layered singing and instrumental puissance immediately made them a force to be reckoned with in the SF ballrooms, and they were rewarded with a contract from Columbia Records in early 1967.
Helmed by staff producer David Rubinson, ‘Moby Grape’ could scarcely have been bettered as a debut album. Released at the height of the Summer of Love in June 1967, it was everything one could ask for in a rock record. Its songs were exciting and tightly constructed, blending elements of hard rock, blues, soul, folk, and country into its alternately stormy and lilting mix. The playing, sparked by Miller’s fiery guitar work, was equally focused, and eschewed the indulgences that would soon overwhelm rock record-makers. Plus the band’s massed harmonies presented a sound matched only by the Byrds‘ contemporaneous work.
The remainder of the band’s story can be told through a series of horrific bullet points. What brought down this almost impossibly gifted and commercially alluring group? Well, for starters there was…
On June 6th, 1967, Moby Grape celebrated the release of their self-titled album with a splashy party and performance at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom . Early the next morning, Miller, Spence, and Lewis were popped in Marin County after police discovered them cavorting with three underage girls. The three men were charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors, and Miller was also charged with possession of marijuana.
All charges were later dropped, but the incident could not have added any luster to Moby Grape’s rep in the eyes of the Columbia executives who had just spent a small fortune launching their brand-new act. And that launch would itself become problematic for the band, who were instantly the victims of…Moby Grape’s Avalon appearance was a record-company saturnalia of the first magnitude. Janis Joplin with her own star on the rise as a member of Big Brother & the Holding Company made a guest appearance with the group; orchid petals were dropped from the ceiling of the venue during the band’s set; and invitees were presented with a velvet-covered box that included press materials, glossy photos of the band, and copies of ‘Moby Grape”s first five singles.
That’s right: five singles. In their infinite wisdom, Columbia’s marketing executives had decided to issue 10 of the 13 tracks on ‘Moby Grape’ simultaneously on 45s with identical picture sleeves. If there was ever a tactic guaranteed to put the noses of suspicious music critics, over-burdened radio programmers, and confused retailers out of joint, that was it.
Somewhat miraculously, ‘Moby Grape’ managed to perform decently in spite of Columbia’s miscalculations. The LP reached number 24 on Billboard’s album chart, where it spent six months; it reportedly sold 200,000 copies. The damage done by the label’s strategy at radio was apparently irreversible, however: Spence’s “Omaha” became the band’s only chart single, peaking at number 88 during a two-week stay. The writing was on the wall, and the next step in Moby Grape’s career witnessed…
By the time the band entered the studio with Rubinson in the fall of 1967 to begin work on a new record, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had just been released, and every musician on the planet was cocking an ear to the Beatles’ opulently recorded collection. The members of Moby Grape were in that number, and they were demonstrably led astray by the Fab Four’s example during the making of their second album, Wow.
Wow lacks the rev-it-up spirit of Moby Grape’s masterpiece, but Peter Lewis, Jerry Miller, and Skip Spence’s guitar work is just as impressive and richly layered, and the group’s harmonies and songwriting chops are still in solid shape. While the unobtrusive production on Moby Grape showcased the group’s many virtues, those attributes are visible on Wow despite the layers of studio excess, which sapped the momentum and charm of this band without snuffing them out altogether.
The band seemed to misunderstand its own strengths. In contrast to the lean, diamond-hard originals on ‘Moby Grape’, the second album bore unfocused tunes that were not enhanced by the overbearing and needless presence of strings and horns. Even a tuff little rocker like “Can’t Be So Bad” was dressed up with 20 reed and brass pieces. The album reached its nadir with “Just Like Gene Autry: A Fox Trot,” a trivial spoof of ’20s crooning introduced by ex-vaudevillian Arthur Godfrey; that track was pressed at 78 rpm, and owners of the original LP will recall the annoyance of getting up to change turntable speeds to listen to the number—an event that likely occurred only once in most cases.
Compounding the irritation, Columbia marketed ‘Wow’ with a “bonus album,” ‘Grape Jam’, which featured four listless improvisations with guest stars Mike Bloomfield (inexplicably abandoning his guitar for piano) and Al Kooper, both soon to ring up sales with their own similarly styled Super Session, Hawked at a two-for-one-price, the two-LP package rose to number 20 nationally. For many, the bloom was off the rose, but the group was already being wracked by larger problems, including…
Moby Grape also probably the only band to ever boast two diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics among its members. Skip Spence, was never a stable character to begin with, became an early LSD casualty; by 1967 he was, in the words of writer Jeff Tamarkin, “gobbling tabs of acid like Pez.” During the band’s stay in New York to record ‘Wow’, Spence attempted to attack Don Stevenson with a fire axe, and was committed to Bellevue Hospital. On his release, he hopped on a motorcycle and rode to Nashville; there, without the assistance of sidemen, he recorded the self-penned, self-produced solo classic album “Oar” under his given name, Alexander Spence. This disquieting, sometimes beautiful record has become a cherished classic of underground psycho-rock.
Spence, whose material was later recorded by his erstwhile band in his absence, returned sporadically to the Grape fold during a long period of homelessness and institutionalization; thanks to medication, his life stabilized to some extent before his death from cancer in 1999.
With Spence’s precipitous exit, Moby Grape carried on, recording Moby Grape ’69 as a foursome. The album was a solid return to form, and it was highlighted by three exceptionally strong Bob Mosley contributions, the ballad It’s a Beautiful Day Today and the hard rockers Hoochie and Trucking Man. Despite good reviews in the rock press, ”69′ sustained a meager chart peak of number 133. By the time the set was released, Mosley had one foot out the door: He suddenly bolted for a stint in the U.S. Marines, leaving Moby Grape to wrap its obligations to Columbia as a trio; late 1969’s thoroughly lackluster Truly Fine Citizen was cut with session man Bob Moore standing in for Mosley. Moby Grape ’69 is concise enough — most of the songs are under three minutes and the whole thing clocks in at a shade under a half-hour — and the high points come close to recapturing the electric magic of the group’s nearly flawless debut, especially the gritty groove of “Hoochie,” the doo wop influenced boogie of “Ooh Mama Ooh,” the beatific joy of “It’s a Beautiful Day Today,” the raucous celebration of one “Trucking Man,” and the folk-tinged wisdom of “If You Can’t Learn from My Mistakes.” However, even though these sessions found guitarists Peter Lewis and Jerry Miller, bassist Bob Mosley and drummer Don Stevensonplaying and singing at the top of their game and writing fine songs, the absence of Skip Spence, who left the band after Wow, robs Moby Grape ’69 of a significant share of the energy and drive that was the hallmark of their finest studio work.
It’s significant that the album’s most striking cut, the closer “Seeing,” was written by Spence during the Wow sessions. Mosley ultimately returned to Moby Grape for a lone effort for Reprise Records, 1971’s sadly overlooked and underrated ’20 Granite Creek’ (which also featured an instrumental contribution from the largely sidelined Spence) and a well-written self-titled 1972 solo album that was marred by uncertain playing and production. But he was not a well man: He too was intermittently hospitalized and homeless through the ’90s. He returned to play, quite magnificently, with latter-day incarnations of the band,
Given the fondness of Moby Grape’s onetime manager for launching combative litigation, K. handled Moby Grape from its 1966 founding, which he midwifed, through August 1967, when he was dismissed by the band. Prior to that time, he had managed Jefferson Airplane; after he was fired in 1966, his dispute with the Airplane’s members over their contract dragged through the courts for nearly 20 years, tying up $2 million in royalties and interest, most of which were ultimately awarded to the band. A similar contract conflict with another San Francisco bandIt’s a Beautiful Day, of “White Bird” fame, effectively put the group in deep freeze for two decades.
In 1968, K. sued Moby Grape, claiming his contracts gave him ownership of the band’s name and music publishing. This action remained on the docket for 38 years. During that time, K. assembled various groups to perform under the Moby Grape handle, and released CD editions of ‘Moby Grape’ and ‘Wow’ on his own label, using needle-drops off vinyl pressings of the original LPs as his “masters.” In 2003, K. sued the band again after they issued an excellent album, first released on cassette in 1989 by “the Melvilles,” on CD under the handle ‘Legendary Grape’.
Finally, in 2006, a California appellate court ruled that the members of Moby Grape owned their name and their songs. For most litigants, this would be the end of things. However, in 2007, after an independent label licensed the band’s Columbia catalog from Sony for classily packaged and augmented editions, another suit landed at the band’s feet; this time, K. claimed he owned the artwork for ‘Moby Grape’, ‘Wow’, and ‘Grape Jam’.
Realizing that it would be pointless and impossibly expensive to fight this vindictive new action for miniscule returns, Sony asked that the albums be taken off the market. Thus, to date, nearly half of Moby Grape’s studio work, including its classic debut, is unavailable in fully authorized form. Few rock bands in history have been served a platter of misfortune piled as high as the one placed before Moby Grape. The group’s music—at its best the equal of any made in its time—remains elusive to this day, but it’s worth hunting for.
Last month, Marika Hackman invited her fans to share stories of any time they have felt shame associated with female self-pleasure. Marika has used their stories to prompt a conversation around the taboo topic, which she has explored further in this thoughtful, and often humorous new video for “hand solo.”
“hand solo” extols the virtues of masturbation and features Marika’s favorite line: “Under patriarchal law, I’m going to die a virgin.” The impossible-to-ignore video for “hand solo” has been directed by Sam Bailey who Marika collaborated with previously on the UK Music Video Awards-winning video for‘My Lover Cindy’. The pair worked closely with Evie Fehilly – a sex educator who runs sex-positive workshops in London at the female-focused sex shop SH!
Marika discussing the video: “I wrote ‘hand solo’ as a bit of light-hearted relief, a wank anthem for women everywhere. I loved the idea of playing on old wives’ tales about the dangers of masturbation and pushing the boundaries about what is socially acceptable. I met Sam and we came up with this playful, tongue-in-cheek idea about hands all over the world masturbating on everyday objects, and even places, and eventually the world. The hands were directed by the wonderful Evie Fehilly, a sex educator who runs sex-positive workshops in London at the famous sex shop SH!. Despite the video being quite fun, I wanted to make a serious point at the end, after the world explodes in its orgasm, that masturbation is still for many women perceived as something shameful and embarrassing – the moment of shame after the ecstasy. We asked for any female-identifying people to anonymously submit their experiences of shame relating to masturbation, and we received so many heart-breaking and heavy stories. I hope that when people see these accounts, they can relate and realize that there’s no shame in masturbation.”
Marika Hackman’s new album Any Human Friend is out now on Sub Pop in North and South America and the rest of the world via AMF Records. The album was co-produced by David Wrench (Frank Ocean, The xx, Let’s Eat Grandma) and Marika herself, and shows off a sharper and more liberated sound than ever before.
Despite what the name suggests, most of Avid Dancer’s songs would probably bomb in a dance club. Over two albums and a handful of singles, singer-songwriter Jacob Dillan Summers’ milieu has been shimmery love songs and open-hearted confessionals. But Avid Dancer sounds better than Avid Balladeer, so here he is, making bedroom pop to die for.
But the earth moves — and bodies with it — on Avid Dancer new single “Landslide.” The song chugs into the bright lights on a simple guitar riff, electronic beats and some background “woo-hoos,” dropping its groove to slip into an infectious chorus. It bops like Avid Dancer has not bopped before, and even Summers himself seems surprised by the final product. “This song, like many of my other ‘poppier’ songs, kind of took a couple weeks to really settle with me,” he says, explaining that the obvious sonic shift made him question “the labels I put on myself. Questions like, What is Avid Dancer ‘supposed’ to sound like? Does anyone even care? It’s an internal struggle of identity that I usually have to sort through whenever I choose to release my music.”
Summers did not go this one alone. The song is a collaboration with Chris Chu of POP ETC, whose music has cut a wider swath through various strains of indie-pop. Summers and Chu met early this year when Summers was on tour drumming for Parker Bossley, whose new music Chu was producing.
“We ended up hitting it off really well,” Summers says. “We had a really similar language in the studio as well. … I asked Chris if he’d be interested in writing with me for Avid Dancer, and he was like, let’s make it happen. When I got to Chris’s house a couple months later we immediately settled into a guitar groove and started writing over that progression. The song’s content came from a conversation Chris and I were having about growing up, having kids and trying everything you can to raise yourself to a certain level, but a lot of times falling short, and sometimes hopelessly failing altogether. Finding yourself back where you started, in the middle of the road, which is a dangerous place to be.
“This recording of the song is [from] the original writing session and produced in about five hours on a calm afternoon at Chris’s home in Highland Park. When we got to the chorus we really wanted to have those vocals stand out, so Chris and I sang together on about 10 tracks to give it a feeling of there being more than one person telling this story. Also, Chris arguably has a much better ‘yelling’ voice than I do.”
