Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo is an American indie rock band formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984. Since 1992, the lineup has consisted of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, James McNew. In 2015, original guitarist Dave Schramm rejoined the band and appears on their fourteenth album, Stuff Like That There. Despite achieving limited mainstream success, Yo La Tengo has been called "the quintessential critics' band" and maintains a strong cult following. Though they play original material, Yo La Tengo is renowned for its wide repertoire of cover songs both in live performance and on record. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley formed the band as a couple in 1984, they chose the name "Yo La Tengo" in an effort to avoid any connotations in English. The name came from a baseball anecdote. During the 1962 season, New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn and Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacón found themselves colliding in the outfield; when Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, "I got it! I got it!" only to run into Chacón, who spoke only Spanish.
Ashburn learned to yell, "¡Yo la tengo! ¡Yo la tengo!" instead. In a game, Ashburn saw Chacón backing off, he relaxed, positioned himself to catch the ball, was instead run over by left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish and had missed a team meeting that proposed using the words "¡Yo la tengo!" as a way to avoid outfield collisions. After getting up, Thomas asked Ashburn, "What the hell is a Yellow Tango?". Kaplan and Hubley placed an advertisement to recruit other musicians who shared their love for bands such as the Soft Boys, Mission of Burma, Arthur Lee's Love; the group's debut recording was a 7" single entitled "The River of Water" backed with a cover of Lee's "A House Is Not a Motel", released in late 1985 with Dave Schramm on lead guitar and Dave Rick on bass. After recording "Private Doberman" for inclusion on a Coyote Records compilation entitled Luxury Condos Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon, Rick left the band and was replaced by Mike Lewis, the founding bass player of Boston garage-punk bands DMZ and Lyres, a member of Brooklyn garage rock band the A-Bones throughout his tenure in YLT.
In 1986, Yo La Tengo released their first LP. Produced by former Mission of Burma bassist Clint Conley who took over bass duties on three songs, the album "marked Yo La Tengo as a band with real potential" according to reviewer Mark Deming. Kaplan was credited as "naive guitar" on the sleeve, in the liner notes for the 1993 reissue of the album on City Slang Records, went so far as to say "Dave's guitar playing is inarguably the best thing about the record." Schramm and Lewis left the band after the album's release, with Kaplan subsequently taking on the role of lead guitar and Stephan Wichnewski joining to play bass. The group's next album New Wave Hot Dogs sold poorly, but in the words of Mark Deming, "was a quantum leap over the sound of their debut."The release of President Yo La Tengo in 1989 did much to establish the band's reputation among rock critics including Robert Christgau who praised the "mysterioso guitar hook" in the first song titled "Barnaby, Hardly Working". Produced by Gene Holder of The dB's, the album was the band's last release on Coyote.
Despite the positive reception of the album, sales were still poor and Wichnewski left the band not long after. Hubley and Kaplan began playing two-electric-guitar shows. Kaplan, though a pragmatist, started carrying a bug trapped in amber in his pocket for luck. Yo La Tengo reunited with Dave Schramm in 1990 to record Fakebook, an album of acoustic tunes, including covers of Cat Stevens, Gene Clark, The Kinks, Daniel Johnston, among others, with five original songs by the band themselves, including an acoustic version of Barnaby Hardly Working. Again produced by Gene Holder, the album's folk sound was a change of pace for the band. Years Kaplan recalled that the album was "just me and Georgia looking for an excuse to record with Dave Schramm and Al Greller" who played guitar and double bass on the album, respectively. In 1991, with Dave Schramm in tow, Yo La Tengo collaborated with Daniel Johnston on the song "Speeding Motorcycle", released as a single; the band released a 7" single on Bar/None Records with the song "Walking Away from You" backed with a cover of Beat Happening's "Cast a Shadow."
Gene Holder played the bass. The That Is Yo La Tengo EP released that year included some tracks that would end up on the group's next LP. After the release of That Is Yo La Tengo, James McNew began playing bass with the band, forming the trio that continues to make up the band today. According to McNew, The band recorded May I Sing with Me in Boston with Holder producing and Lou Giordano engineering; the album was released on Alias Records in 1992. Three of the album's eleven songs were carried over from the That Is Yo La Tengo EP and feature Holder on bass; the Upside-Down EP was released on CD in support of the album, rounding out the band's releases on Alias. In 1993, Yo La Tengo began their partnership with Matador Records, releasing a 7" and CD5 of the song "Shaker" which the band recorded with John Siket in New Jersey; the following LP, 1993's Painful, was the beginning of the band's fruitful creative partnership with producer Roger Moutenot, who has produced all of their subsequent albums up until 2013's Fade, produced by John McEntire.
Painful is the first Yo La Tengo album to feature James McNew on every song. Ira Kaplan ex
Lawyers in Love (song)
"Lawyers in Love" is the first single and title track of Jackson Browne's 1983 album of the same name, Lawyers in Love. Though not as successful as Browne's previous single "Somebody's Baby", nonetheless at #13 it became Browne's fourth-highest peaking hit on the Hot 100. Browne wrote most of the songs including that one; the music video for the "Lawyers in Love" took the title phrase and created a series of visual images surrounding it themed on the Cold War. Browne played at least two or three parts, one as a yuppie-ish lawyer and one as an ordinary man wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, a pair of black hi-top Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars, sitting in a catatonic state in front of a television, unable to assimilate the world's events; some analysts saw "Lawyers in Love" as an evolving "bridge" between Browne's personal works and his 1980s' political works. Others saw it as dry commentary on American social mores and something of a scathing critique of the conservativism and materialism of the Ronald Reagan era, something, present in Browne's work as far back as "Take It Easy".
Christopher Connelly, in reviewing the album for Rolling Stone in 1983, paid extra attention to the title track, writing that "in'Lawyers in Love,' God's interplanetary travelers discover Americans'waiting for World War III,' shoveling down fast food in front of the television. All told, it's an unusually whimsical lyric from a man not noted for his sense of humor." As for the music, Connelly called the song "Browne's headiest track to date: a solid keyboard-and-guitar attack flavored by a chanting falsetto figure, a church-organ swell, sha-la-la backup vocals an old-fashioned modulation out of the middle eight.""As probing a dissection of cold-war politics in the Reagan era as the mainstream will allow," Jimmy Guterman wrote of the song in Rolling Stone in 1986. Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics
Rock music
Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the early 1950s, developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and particularly in the United Kingdom and in the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style which drew on the genres of blues and blues, from country music. Rock music drew on a number of other genres such as electric blues and folk, incorporated influences from jazz and other musical styles. Musically, rock has centered on the electric guitar as part of a rock group with electric bass and one or more singers. Rock is song-based music with a 4/4 time signature using a verse–chorus form, but the genre has become diverse. Like pop music, lyrics stress romantic love but address a wide variety of other themes that are social or political. By the late 1960s "classic rock" period, a number of distinct rock music subgenres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, southern rock, raga rock, jazz-rock, many of which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, influenced by the countercultural psychedelic and hippie scene.
New genres that emerged included progressive rock. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on new wave, post-punk and alternative rock. From the 1990s alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge and indie rock. Further fusion subgenres have since emerged, including pop punk, electronic rock, rap rock, rap metal, as well as conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock/post-punk and techno-pop revivals at the beginning of the 2000s. Rock music has embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers in the UK and the hippie counterculture that spread out from San Francisco in the US in the 1960s. 1970s punk culture spawned the goth and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism as well as changes in social attitudes to race and drug use, is seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult consumerism and conformity.
The sound of rock is traditionally centered on the amplified electric guitar, which emerged in its modern form in the 1950s with the popularity of rock and roll. It was influenced by the sounds of electric blues guitarists; the sound of an electric guitar in rock music is supported by an electric bass guitar, which pioneered in jazz music in the same era, percussion produced from a drum kit that combines drums and cymbals. This trio of instruments has been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments keyboards such as the piano, the Hammond organ, the synthesizer; the basic rock instrumentation was derived from the basic blues band instrumentation. A group of musicians performing rock music is termed as a rock group. Furthermore, it consists of between three and five members. Classically, a rock band takes the form of a quartet whose members cover one or more roles, including vocalist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bass guitarist and keyboard player or other instrumentalist. Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple unsyncopated rhythms in a 4/4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four.
Melodies originate from older musical modes such as the Dorian and Mixolydian, as well as major and minor modes. Harmonies range from the common triad to parallel perfect fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Since the late 1950s and from the mid 1960s onwards, rock music used the verse-chorus structure derived from blues and folk music, but there has been considerable variation from this model. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock; because of its complex history and its tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that "it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition." Unlike many earlier styles of popular music, rock lyrics have dealt with a wide range of themes, including romantic love, rebellion against "The Establishment", social concerns, life styles. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources such as the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music, rhythm and blues.
Music journalist Robert Christgau characterizes rock lyrics as a "cool medium" with simple diction and repeated refrains, asserts that rock's primary "function" "pertains to music, or, more noise." The predominance of white and middle class musicians in rock music has been noted, rock has been seen as an appropriation of black musical forms for a young and male audience. As a result, it has been seen to articulate the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, "rock and roll implies an identification of male sexuality and aggression". Since the term "rock" started being used in preference to "rock and roll" from the late-1960s, it has been contrasted with pop music, with which it has shared many characteristics, but from wh
Phantom Planet
Phantom Planet is an American rock band from Los Angeles, formed in 1994. The band consists of Darren Robinson, Sam Farrar and Jeff Conrad; the band is best known for its track "California", which became the theme song for the TV series The O. C.. The band featured actor Jason Schwartzman on drums until 2003 and continued to release well-received albums in his absence. On November 25, 2008, the band announced in a blog entry on their website that they are going on "hiatus, will not be playing any more live shows or making any new records, indefinitely." They played their last pre-hiatus show on December 12, 2008, in Los Angeles, but have since reunited for handful of shows. Phantom Planet was named in 1994, they played their first show in 1994 at The Troubadour in California. Most of their friends could not attend. Two of the songs they played are featured on the bonus material of the Chicago, Chicagogone DVD. Among the songs performed were "My Friend Liz's Dad" and a cover of the Beastie Boys 1994 song "Sabotage".
While still in their teens, the group played in and around the Hollywood area catching the eye of Geffen Records executives. Phantom Planet signed with Geffen in 1997 and released their first effort, Phantom Planet Is Missing in 1998. Phantom Planet is Missing showed musical similarities to the popular band Weezer, with influences ranging from The Beach Boys to Electric Light Orchestra, but the album failed to gain any significant ground with either critics or fans. However, as some group members started to make appearances on both the small and large screen and the group pressed on, Phantom Planet built momentum. Shortly thereafter Geffen Records folded into Universal as part of a major record industry merger, within a few years Phantom Planet had signed with Epic Records. Charlotte Froom, the daughter of famed producer Mitchell Froom—who had worked with Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney—caught the band's show just at the time when the group was looking for a producer to record their second effort.
Excited by the group's music, the young Froom approached her father to produce the group, after meeting with Phantom Planet, he agreed. Froom brought in engineer Tchad Blake, who had worked with Pearl Jam and Sheryl Crow, to work on the record; the Guest was released in 2002 and showcased a solid dose of poppy vocals, solid melodies, sing-along choruses, which helped anchor Phantom Planet as a formidable indie outfit. The group's presence was solidified by its commitment to touring; the group toured for 18 months both as a headliner and an opening act, in late 2002 the band got the opportunity to open for one of their collective idols, the legendary Elvis Costello. The Guest got an extra boost when the record's notable power ballad "California" was chosen as the theme song for the Fox Network's hit TV series The O. C; as a result, the record was reissued in late 2003 with bonus tracks and a new cover, giving Phantom Planet a whole new round of exposure. The band's eponymous third album in 2004 marked a change in lineup.
Ditching their radio-friendly pop rock, the band moved towards a garage rock sound. Lead singer Alex Greenwald stated. "I love rock'n' roll music," Greenwald said. "I loved bands, like The Beatles, that changed with every single record they made. That's been our plan from the get-go. We want our records to be like experiments. We want to have fun with the music. People can hear, they discover you're bored and you're boring." In the middle of recording the album, founding member and drummer Jason Schwartzman abruptly left the band to focus on his acting career. He was replaced by Jeff Conrad. Phantom Planet was released to mixed reviews from critics. Shortly after the album's release, guitarist Jacques Brautbar left the band to pursue a career in photography. Early on in the recording process Phantom Planet's contract with Epic Records expired, which left them searching for a new record label. Soon after this, they signed to Fueled by Ramen. On January 20, 2008, Phantom Planet posted a bulletin on their Myspace page that stated that the album will be finished by the January 24, that the official release date would be April 15, 2008.
Fueled By Ramen re-released a teaser trailer and stated that the first single from the album will be a reworking of "Do the Panic". In an interview with RaggedMag, Greenwald stated that "all bands are kind of their own cult, you know, but we want to take it to a new level. We like the show Lost, though it's fiction, there's this air of mystery that's lacking in a lot entertainment these days. I like mystery in things, what a little bit of enigma brings out of people and their imaginations... a band is about community, within itself it is a brotherhood. But a band can't be anything without the people to love it. Our goal will be to recruit and befriend as many people as possible with our message." When describing the new record, Greenwald said. If The Beatles had Sgt. Pepper's and The Rolling Stones had Their Satanic Majesties Request, we have our'Leader.' We're concocting it, but at the same time we're following it." The album, titled Raise the Dead, was released as scheduled on April 15, 2008. On November 25, 2008, Phantom Planet announced in a blog entry on their website that they would be playing their last show December 12, 2008 at The Troubadour in Los Angel
A-side and B-side
The terms A-side and B-side refer to the two sides of 78, 45, 331⁄3 rpm phonograph records, or cassettes, whether singles, extended plays, or long-playing records. The A-side featured the recording that the artist, record producer, or the record company intended to receive the initial promotional effort and receive radio airplay to become a "hit" record; the B-side is a secondary recording that has a history of its own: some artists released B-sides that were considered as strong as the A-side and became hits in their own right. Others took the opposite approach: producer Phil Spector was in the habit of filling B-sides with on-the-spot instrumentals that no one would confuse with the A-side. With this practice, Spector was assured that airplay was focused on the side he wanted to be the hit side. Music recordings have moved away from records onto other formats such as CDs and digital downloads, which do not have "sides", but the terms are still used to describe the type of content, with B-side sometimes standing for "bonus" track.
The first sound recordings at the end of the 19th century were made on cylinder records, which had a single round surface capable of holding two minutes of sound. Early shellac disc records records only had recordings on one side of the disc, with a similar capacity. Double-sided recordings, with one selection on each side, were introduced in Europe by Columbia Records in 1908, by 1910 most record labels had adopted the format in both Europe and the United States. There were no record charts until the 1930s, radio stations did not play recorded music until the 1950s. In this time, A-sides and B-sides existed. In June 1948, Columbia Records introduced the modern 331⁄3 rpm long-playing microgroove vinyl record for commercial sales, its rival RCA Victor, responded the next year with the seven-inch 45 rpm vinylite record, which would replace the 78 for single record releases; the term "single" came into popular use with the advent of vinyl records in the early 1950s. At first, most record labels would randomly assign which song would be an A-side and which would be a B-side.
Under this random system, many artists had so-called "double-sided hits", where both songs on a record made one of the national sales charts, or would be featured on jukeboxes in public places. As time wore on, the convention for assigning songs to sides of the record changed. By the early sixties, the song on the A-side was the song that the record company wanted radio stations to play, as 45 rpm single records dominated the market in terms of cash sales, it was not until 1968, for example, that the total production of albums on a unit basis surpassed that of singles in the United Kingdom. In the late 1960s, stereo versions of pop and rock songs began to appear on 45s; the majority of the 45s were played on AM radio stations, which were not equipped for stereo broadcast at the time, so stereo was not a priority. However, the FM rock stations did not like to play monaural content, so the record companies adopted a protocol for DJ versions with the mono version of the song on one side, stereo version of the same song on the other.
By the early 1970s, double-sided hits had become rare. Album sales had increased, B-sides had become the side of the record where non-album, non-radio-friendly, instrumental versions or inferior recordings were placed. In order to further ensure that radio stations played the side that the record companies had chosen, it was common for the promotional copies of a single to have the "plug side" on both sides of the disc. With the decline of 45 rpm vinyl records, after the introduction of cassette and compact disc singles in the late 1980s, the A-side/B-side differentiation became much less meaningful. At first, cassette singles would have one song on each side of the cassette, matching the arrangement of vinyl records, but cassette maxi-singles, containing more than two songs, became more popular. Cassette singles were phased out beginning in the late 1990s, the A-side/B-side dichotomy became extinct, as the remaining dominant medium, the compact disc, lacked an equivalent physical distinction.
However, the term "B-side" is still used to refer to the "bonus" tracks or "coupling" tracks on a CD single. With the advent of downloading music via the Internet, sales of CD singles and other physical media have declined, the term "B-side" is now less used. Songs that were not part of an artist's collection of albums are made available through the same downloadable catalogs as tracks from their albums, are referred to as "unreleased", "bonus", "non-album", "rare", "outtakes" or "exclusive" tracks, the latter in the case of a song being available from a certain provider of music. B-side songs may be released on the same record as a single to provide extra "value for money". There are several types of material released in this way, including a different version, or, in a concept record, a song that does not fit into the story lin
Kent Music Report
The Kent Music Report was a weekly record chart of Australian music singles and albums, compiled by music enthusiast David Kent from May 1974 through to 1988. After 1988, the Australian Recording Industry Association, using the report under licence for a number of years, chose to produce their own listing as the ARIA Charts. Before the Kent Report, Go-Set magazine published weekly Top-40 Singles from 1966, Album charts from 1970 until the magazine's demise in August 1974. David Kent publicised the Australian charts from 1940–1973 in a retrospective fashion using state by state chart data obtained from various Australian radio stations. Kent had spent a number of years working in the music industry at both EMI and Phonogram records and had developed the report as a hobby. The'Kent Music Report' was first released on a commercial basis in July 1974 and was offered for subscription; the report data was based on radio station charts from around the country, which were amalgamated using a points based ranking system that Kent had developed.
These radio station charts were compiled using data collected from local record stores and, as such, were based on retail sales. In 1976, as funding from subscriptions grew, Kent himself started collecting sales data from retail stores to supplement the radio station charts, his operation grew and staff were employed to assist with research. Within a year or so, the major record companies started using the Report for their own marketing programs and it had established itself as the leading national chart publication. From 1982, retail sales data collected by Kent and his staff were used and radio station charts were dropped from the primary tabulations; some radio station chart. At about the same time, the Australian Recording Industry Association was established by the major record companies, being EMI, Festival Records, CBS, RCA, WEA and Polygram. From 1983 until 1988 ARIA had a licensing arrangement with Kent to use the Report under their own banner; the Kent Report continued however and in 1987 was rebadged as the'Australian Music Report'.
In 1988 the arrangement with ARIA ended and the ARIA Charts were produced in-house by the Association. In April 1998, the AMR charts ceased publishing, leaving the ARIA charts as the only nationally recognised chart publication. In 1993, David Kent published his Australian Chart Book 1970 - 1992; this was based on his chart data published as the "Kent Music Report" from May 1974 onwards. He specially "retro-calculated" charts based on state-based Australian radio station charts available to him dated before May 1974, to fill in the missing years. On this basis, he put together Australian national charts from 1940 - 1969, published as Australian Chart Book 1940 - 1969 in 2005. Before 1949, radio station music charts in Australia were only available on a monthly basis, this is reflected in his published data. Although ARIA published the official Australian National charts from 1988 onwards, Kent continued to calculate charts from this date, data from which were published in a third book in his Australian Chart Book series.
David Kent. Australian Chart Book 1970 - 1992. Australian Chart Book, St Ives, N. S. W. ISBN 0-646-11917-6. David Kent. Australian Chart Book 1940 - 1969. Australian Chart Book Pty Ltd, Turramurra, N. S. W. ISBN 0-646-44439-5. David Kent. Australian Chart Book 1993 - 2005. Australian Chart Book Pty Ltd, Turramurra, N. S. W. ISBN 0-646-45889-2. David Kent's Australian Chart Book website
