Oopsie…
Former Kid Rock DJ Uncle Kracker is in deep shit, kids. Matthew Shafer was arrested earlier today on a second-degree sexual offense charge. The victim claims Kracker committed a sexual act against her at a local joint called the Ess Club. Kracker has had some hits on his own, including “When The Sun Goes Down,” a duet with Kenny Chesney.
Yes, kids who are too young to remember vinyl, the format of music you grew up with is celebrating 25 years of domination. But for how much longer can/will the CD dominate? It’s hard to guesstimate, but not hard at all to see that the mp3 format has changed things so significantly as to cause enough damage to the CD as to make it obsolete sooner than later. We now live in an iPod world where it’s all about the instant gratification. Fine by me. If it forces bands and labels to rethink the whole structure, as in makings album not 60-plus minutes long and getting down to the real nitty gritty – great hit singles and less chaff – who am I to argue? Back when vinyl was the standard, it was a big deal to have a double album. When the CD took over, it was odd if you didn’t have more than 15 songs trying to fill every last second of the disc.
If you could take the new business model, and bring back genuine artist development and such and not wait four years between albums so bands can either stagnate or their rabid fans lose interest while cookie cutter bullshit artists are sent out in droves just to capitalize on money that will be lost in the long run, I think the music industry could regain some footing. An honest pricing system wouldn’t hurt either. No one really thinks that $19.99 for a single CD at FYE is a good deal, or that $17.99 is a “sale price.” Oh, and you also have to stop treating the older consumers such as myself like we don’t matter anymore. We’re the ones who are in it for the long haul. The kids being catered to through NOW compilations aren’t the demographic that’s going to mean squat when it comes down to it. And lastly, the RIAA needs to just fucking stop suing everyone as if they really cared about the artists. No one’s ever bought that lie.
Well get ready to possibly maybe not hold your breath again. That’s right, Van Halen featuring David Lee Roth on lead vocals will be announcing a 50-date tour next week. Now, we all know how things have gone so far for these guys. So suffice it to say that if shit falls apart before (or even after) any tickets are sold, no one should be surprised. But hey, the traveling rock fossil show might be of interest just to see how long it lasts if it indeed begins. At this rate, we’ll probably see Chinese Democracy released before any version of Van Halen completes a 50 date tour.
For some reason, it hasn’t made the major news sites yet, but per his official MySpace page and through his publicist, it’s been made official that Lee Hazlewood has succumbed to renal cancer. I really didn’t know Hazlewood beyond much more than his name, his association with Nancy Sinatra, and the fact that he’d written “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’,” but earlier this year, I fell in love with his swan song, Cake or Death, which inspired me to start filling in his back catalog; as such, I’m sorry to hear this news and wish more than anything that I’d discovered his work sooner than I did.
Here’s the text from the aforementioned notice on his MySpace page:
HIS BOOTS WILL KEEP ON WALKING
LEE HAZLEWOOD:
9 July 1929 – 4 August 2007
Kiss all the pretty ones goodbye
Give everyone a penny that cry
You can throw all my tranquil’ pills away
Let my blood pressure go on its way
For my autumn’s done come
My autumn’s done come.
Lee Hazlewood, My Autumn’s Done Come
We are sad to announce that LEE HAZLEWOOD has died peacefully at his home outside Las Vegas, USA, after a three year struggle with cancer. He celebrated his 78th birthday earlier this month surrounded by family and friends from around the world. He passed away on August 4th, 2007, in Henderson, Nevada, and is survived by his son Mark, his daughters Debbie and Samantha, and his devoted wife Jeane.
For over half a century, LEE HAZLEWOOD proved himself to be one of the most ingenious, inspired and impressively stubborn sons-of-a-bitch the music industry ever saw. His career – a word that HAZLEWOOD himself scorned – saw him take on almost every aspect of the music industry – a word that HAZLEWOOD himself was equally dismissive of – and come out on top every time. Most famous for his work with Nancy Sinatra – he wrote and produced many of her biggest hits, including These Boots Were Made For Walking, Sugartown and the unforgettable Some Velvet Morning – HAZLEWOOD in fact started his musical career as a DJ in Coolidge, Arizona. It was here he first met Duane Eddy, with whom he began to flesh out and record some of his songs. In 1955 he set up Viv Records and in 1956 hit paydirt with Sanford Clark’s legendary The Fool, and the following year he gave up DJing to focus on production and writing. In the early 1960s he established the LHI label (which is best known for having released the debut album by Gram Parson’s first group, The International Submarine Band) and began releasing his own solo albums, including the extraordinary “Trouble Is A Lonesome Town”.
In the mid sixties, in the face of The British Invasion (led by the likes of The Beatles), HAZLEWOOD retired to the shadows (where he was always most comfortable) only to be reluctantly dragged out to work with Nancy Sinatra. Their work together – including the iconic Boots – was an overnight success and saw her become a star in her own right worldwide, but she also insisted that HAZLEWOOD step out in front of the microphone himself, leading to the release of three “Nancy & Lee” albums.
In the early 1970s HAZLEWOOD moved to Sweden to ensure his son was not drafted by the US military. He recorded a series of solo albums there as well as collaborating with film director Torbjörn Axelman, but then ‘retired’ again, working only occasionally over the next two decades. Instead he began to follow an itinerant lifestyle which he pursued until very recently, living in Ireland, Germany, Spain and of course America. However it was the rediscovery of this work two decades later by a new generation of musicians – including the likes of Sonic Youth, whose drummer Steve Shelley tracked HAZLEWOOD down and reissued a number of his solo albums on his Smells Like Records imprint – that led to a resurgence of interest in his work as a performer. In the late 90s he returned to the studio to record the typically cryptically titled standards album “Farmisht, Flatulence, Origami, ARF!!! and Me”, and in 1999 he returned to the stage at the invitation of Nick Cave who was curating that year’s Meltdown Festival in London. Following a sold out show at the Royal Festival Hall he sanctioned the release of two albums of unreleased material, most notably “For Every Solution There’s A Problem”, toured Europe, and then returned to the studio to record his final album, “Cake Or Death”, which was released to worldwide acclaim in 2006.
HAZLEWOOD’s music has always been a staple of movie soundtracks, but it has continued to become more and more fashionable, regularly turning up in films as diverse as The Dukes Of Hazzard – which saw Jessica Simpson perform These Boots Were Made For Walking for the title track – and the arthouse flick Morvern Callar – which used Some Velvet Morning to great effect.
The family have requested that those wishing to honour LEE HAZLEWOOD should make donations to the Salvation Army…
It’s only fair, after all, what with this NME article, Jack White brands journalists lazy.
In the short piece – which is undoubtedly part of a longer rant, but you know me: as a journalist, I can’t be bothered to confirm that – White declared, “Journalists are inherently the laziest people on earth. Even in the age of Google, they don’t do any work to check what they’re writing about. I’d say 90 per cent of what they get is from the press release. We have fun putting things in there – like in the press release for ‘Elephant’, somebody inserted a joke about how none of our studio equipment was made after 1963. Before you knew it, people thought we wouldn’t touch a piece of equipment unless it’s 60 years old or something! It gets to the point where you’re answering questions based on a joke somebody made.”
Okay, first off, if I’m putting together a piece and it falls to me to provide a fact or figure, then I absolutely confirm its accuracy before I place it within whatever I’m writing. Honestly, who wouldn’t? White’s right about one thing, at least: in the age of Google, where just about any answer is available at your fingertips within mere seconds, there’s absolutely no reason not to check your facts.
But, see, here’s the inherent problem with White’s jackarsery: why in the hell would a journalist Google something from a press release?
Dude, your band put the fucking thing out! I mean, I write press releases and bios for bands all the time, and I would never knowingly and willfully put a fake bit of information into either one of them. Why? Because there’s a very reasonable presumption that you’re going to include accurate information in those things!
Similarly, while I know bands love to just make shit up to fuck with the writers that bore or irritate them, there’s no reason for most writers to presume that the person they’re interviewing is going to give them a statement about themselves that needs to be fact-checked. One of my first-ever interview was with Sean Kelly, lead singer of The Samples, and he fed me eight kinds of shit about the various between-album hobbies of his bandmates, offering claims that one of them followed ornithological pursuits, while another made mirrors in his spare time…and me being a squeaky-clean young intern, I ate it up like it was ambrosia, running his comments intact in the piece.
Ouch.
Now, mind you, years later, I ended up writing The Samples’ official bio, and a not-very-chagrined Kelly apologized with a laugh, saying it was all in good-natured fun…and I was cool with that.
This, however, isn’t cool at all.
This is Jack White, one of the biggest alt-rock figures of the 21st century, basically telling the journalists who’ve praised their work for the last several years, “We put a bunch of bullshit in our press releases, and if you accept it at face value, then you’re a lazy dumb-ass.”
Actually, I’m pretty sure Jack White’s the only real dumb-ass in this situation. I mean, clearly, the journalists he’s just railed against will be extracting their revenge in the pages of their respective publications. Of course, I’m sure he’s of the belief that it won’t matter, and that the fans will still keep buying White Stripes albums as much as they always did…and, even worse, he’s probably right.
But that doesn’t make him any less of a dumb-ass.
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