Saturday, September 13, 2003  

I'm not at liberty to explain why I've been conducting panicked web searches for "Sam Walters penis" today, and I've promised the people who are concerned about both the state of the Comedy Studio's liquor license (Rick Jenkins) and the state of Sam Walters' fragile face (Sam Walters) that I won't post a link to any stories about the 9/11 show on Reuters UK that may or may not have appeared in the Globe and the Hindustan Times.

In the meantime, I *did* turn up this story that Sam apparently wrote after his very first road gig. I feel like my little guy's all grown up!

Definition of hell: finding out that William Gibson has a blog on the day he stops writing it.

R.I.P. Johnny Cash

I will truly miss him and his music. His cover of Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat is one of the most haunting things I've ever heard, and what can you say about Folsom Prison Blues, where he killed a man in Reno just to watch him die?

I've been to Reno, and anyone who's killed people there is aces in my book.

I also remember seeing this and laughing my ass off for about five minutes. Johnny Cash: proto-punk.

Rest in peace, Johnny, and I hope when we see you again, you'll be wearing the loudest goddamn jacket we've ever seen:

The Man in Black

Well you wonder why I always dress in black
Why you never see bright colors on my back
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone
Well there's a reason for the things that I have on

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Livin' in the hopeless hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he's a victim of the times

I wear the black for those who've never read
Or listened to the words that Jesus said
About the road to happiness through love and charity
Why you'd think he's talking straight to you and me

Well we're doin' mighty fine I do suppose
In our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back
Up front there oughta be a man in black

I wear it for the sick and lonely old
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold
I wear the black in morning for the lives that could have been
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men

And I wear it for the thousands who have died
Believin' that the Lord was on their side
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died
Believin' that we all were on their side

Well there's things that never will be right I know
And things need changin' everywhere you go
But till we start to make a move to make a few things right
You'll never see me wear a suit of white

Oh I'd love to wear a rainbow every day and tell the world that everything's okay
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back
Till things're brighter I'm the man in black

We had a great show last night. Tony V won handily, but Sam Walters did indeed reveal genitalia painted like the Stars and Stripes. Luckily, the Reuters guy turned out to be from France, so everything is okeley-dokeley do. Poor Sam drank so much liquid courage that he was pretty much out of comission when we got to the "talking part" of the show. Still, an absolute riot. I'll get the questions typed in and posted as soon as I can. It was nice to have a room full of people who didn't want to spend 9/11 moping. Great energy in the room, and Adam Pearlman and Andy Wasif brought down the house with their Saddam/Baghdad Bob Who's On First (I will beg Adam for a video clip today). I know, it doesn't sound like it should work, but it was a certified panic.

In the meantime, Mark Fiore has this great cartoon up on SFGate.com. Nice to see I'm not the only guy bugged by cheesy 9/11 Flash tributes.

Rick Jenkins is notorious for getting stuff like this completely wrong, but according to this post, Reuters is coming to cover tonight's Thursday Night Fight at the Comedy Studio.

I know what Sam Walters has planned. If it gets in Reuters, it ends with the club being firebombed by a veterans group.

Holy shit.

Look, the RIAA’s current all-out legal Blitzkreig has nothing to do whatsoever with protecting artists from copyright infringement. If you read Janis Ian’s excellent essays about the music industry, you see that artists don’t make money from CD sales anyway. They make their money playing tour dates. Even without that factual basis, I think everyone’s gut can tell that a group that would sue a 12-year old girl doesn’t really give two shits about art.

So listen up: I think the RIAA is thinking LONG TERM. And some very smart suit monkey over there has figured out that the Internet in general and peer-to-peer networks specifically represent an alternative distribution system for music that can (and will) completely circumvent the current model that, and this is the important part, makes the RIAA their money.

You can’t want music you don’t know exists. That is to say that by the time you decide you want a copy of a song, you’ve heard it, or at least heard of it, and right now, that happens because an artist gets signed to a label, which produces the album and creates some sort of marketing campaign and makes sure it gets airplay and MTV time and shelf space at the Big Stores and whatnot, and all along that winding road, money is being made and spent. Lots of people are getting rich off the process, and your purchase price goes into that bottomless kitty. You buy what you’re told is available to buy...you’re given a selection, sure, but it’s still a carefully controlled selection. You only get to choose from a pile that makes the RIAA some cash (again: not the artist).

One side effect of this is that some really, really, really good music that would, in fact, be really, really, really popular if only people actually knew it existed gets excluded from that pile, and consequently, you and I never hear it, and by extension, never buy it. The RIAA doesn’t care about those artists, because those artists don’t make any money for the RIAA. And since they’re locked out of the system, the RIAA doesn’t have to pay any attention to them.

But imagine instead the World’s Greatest Rock Band, which is producing the Best Goddamn Rock and Roll Ever Heard but hasn’t gotten signed to a label and is therefore excluded from the road to fame and glory (minus the stiff corporate cut) outlined above. What if that band takes a 4-track recorder and a copy of Sound Forge and produces 6 or 8 of The Best Rock and Roll Songs In History by themselves (no major label studio is getting any dough), burns them to CD (takes 10 minutes), makes some cover art (everyone’s got Photoshop), manufactures a few thousand copies (there are only about a million companies that’ll do this for under a grand), rips some MP3’s (easy peasy), puts them up on their own website (anybody under 30 can make a website in their sleep these days), voluntarily shares them via Kazaa (so no copyright problems, dig?), and emails them to every home-made Internet radio station on Shoutcast they can find, whereupon they become an Overnight Sensation, which drives thousands of people to their aforementioned website, where they sell their own CD directly to the consumer, who has now ACTUALLY done something good for the artist and gotten much better music than they would have by buying the Band du Jour’s CD at their local Virgin Music Superstore.

It hasn’t happened yet; but it’s going to.

Again, the important thing is that this new model represents a method for music production and distribution that doesn’t need the RIAA (or HMV, or Sony Music, or the Creative Artists Agency) for even one second. Maybe CD sales are down due to piracy (the numbers are equivocal), but it won’t be long before CD sales are down because people are buying music that isn’t measured by Arbitron ratings or Tower Records receipts. Not too far in the future, a whole lot of musicians are going to circumvent the entire corporate structure and get the entire benefit of their album sales. Hell, ravers and club kids are doing it already. Some of the best tracks I’ve heard lately (and found via creative Kazaa searches) were produced by some 17-year-old in his basement. If he had a CD, you betcha I’d buy it, and Eminem can go pound sand.

The RIAA isn’t out to protect artists from music piracy, they’re out to prevent a level playing field. They’re afraid of the competition, and they damned well ought to be. They’re trying to shut down swapping now so that we don’t develop a taste for it . They don’t want us to get in the habit of turning to this alternative distribution system, because in a few years, when thousands and thousands of unsigned artists are making for a much more diverse marketplace, if we’re comfortable using it, they know they’re going to lose.

If Metallica’s worried about what happens when people use the Internet to share their songs for free, they ought to be petrified about what’s going to happen when people use the Internet to discover some bands that still rock.

I always thought I got screwed by having a birthday five days before Christmas, but I have two friends who trump that by having birthdays TODAY. So let me take a break from maudlin thoughts to wish HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Baratunde Thurston (a great comic on tonght's show) and Chris Walsh (a great comic on the competition's show). Hope both of you have great days that aren't spoiled too much by sadness and cheesy flash presentations.

Just a few odds and ends right now. I can't believe I decided to do a Fight tonight; in addition to discovering in the middle of a moment of silence at 8:45 that Maybe I'm Not Over September 11 As Much As I Thought I Was, I still have to write the whole fucking show. Not one joke done yet. So any and all creativity my rapidly addling brain might have left in it will have to towards making the show so good that I don't feel like an evil cocksucker for having decided to do it.

In lieu of my own interesting stuff, a couple of pointers. First Tycho over at Penny Arcade has a great post today, and even though I fell in love with that site for the hysterically funny cartoons, I am constantly amazed at how good the writing is. To wit:

This is history, and listen up, because it's Goddamn important. If people can recollect and deify people for wearing jerseys and hitting balls, or jumping very high let's say, then you and I can catalogue the moments particular to our own fascination and invest them with gravity and power.

Also, a real shit-storm brewing over on the Kvetch Board about whether acting is harder/more artistic than standup. My own view (and I have a BFA in theatre -- the most useless degree in the universe - the entire universe; there are people on other planets and other dimensions more employable than me) is that if acting is artistic coffee, then standup is artistic crack. It's more intense, more difficult, and more rewarding on every level.

Just found out I'll be doing a spot at Tommy Doyle's tonight (1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 617-225-0888). Showtime's 9:00, and it's a great room run by Greg Johnson and Kenny Z. I'm not even drinking very much lately, so this will be a rare opportunity to be able to understand OVER 90% OF THE WORDS I SAY!

I should not be allowed to listen to the radio unsupervised. I'm sitting here, listening to Radio Paradise via Shoutcast, while doing an excruciatingly mindless task at my day job, bopping along to a catchy little tune, and when I check to see who it is, it's the goddamn Grateful Dead!!! Shit! Now I have to cut off my ears to punish them. One of the fundamental precepts of the universe is that the Grateful Dead blow. Christ, next thing you know I'm going to start dancing like a monkey and smelling like peat moss.

I can clearly not be trusted to make musical decisions without strict oversight. My wife won't let me forget The Avril Lavigne Incident, when I found Sk8r Boi while looking for cuts from the Jackass Soundtrack¹ (yes, I'm 33; yes, this is all quite pathetic), thought it was awesome (and dammit, still do), and since I'm so dense when it comes to pop culture, I raced home to my incredibly hip spouse and announced my new musical find, whereupon she laughed in my face and called both my intelligence and my sexuality into question. I believe the quote was, "You did NOT just say you like Avril Levigne! Get out of my house, you goddamn woman!"




_____
¹Most of the music in Jackass: The Movie is performed by CKY, who do, in fact, rock, no matter what my wife says.

How about for the upcoming year, we all pledge to remember 9/11 by learning how to ORGANIZE OUR FUCKING THOUGHTS A LITTLE BETTER? Remember, the firefighters who gave their lives want you to go out and get one.

I have to stop wearing the Red Sox hat I found in the back seat of a cab, because now people see me wearing it and want to talk to me about sports. And not cool sports, either...they want to talk about football. And there is very little on this earth I give less of a shit about than football. Problem is, I'm too much of a pusscake to actually just say that when people start having a sports conversation with me. Instead, I try to remember stuff I've heard other guys say and just spout it back, which is what I'm convinced most of you jock types do, anyway. Except sometimes I remember wrong, so you get a situation like today on the bus when The Boys started talking about the Patriots, and I babble, "I heard they're going to start Bledsoe next week." Blank stares and long pause. As it turns out, they traded Bledsoe to Buffalo like 40 years ago, which is why everyone stared at me like I'd said, "I fucked my neighbor's puppy last night."

So as a general guide to my friends and family, here are the sports I am willing to talk about:

Ultimate Fighting
Skateboarding
Judo
Boxing
Baseball (and only because I promised Sam Walters that I would try to pay more attention to the Red Sox and because it's really the only thing anybody in Boston talks about...but please don't go any deeper than the last night's score and the name of the pitcher, because I will start to cry like a little girl)

Any attempt to initiate conversation about any other sports, including, but not limited to basketball, football, golf, NASCAR, hockey, soccer or any other activity that may be featured on Sports Center will be met with passive resistance and uncomfortable silence.

Have the rough cut of DJ's CD in hand. I think it's pretty great, but there are probably 3 or 4 tracks I should remix, just to make the thing a complete work of beauty. I would guess it'll be available (here, from DJ, or from area stores) in about a month or so. I'll check with his royal Hazardness to see if he'd be amenable to posting one or two preview tracks. Stay tuned!

Gigging tonight at Johnny D's in Somerville. Showtime's 8:00 pm, and I don't know what cover is. Should be a hoot...the rest of the show looks to be great, too. Come on down...who doesn't like drinking on a Monday?

I'm discovering the downside of running this site as a blog. Obviously, President Bush's speech from last night deserves some comment, if for no other reason than to point out that all the tap dancing was a beautiful and moving tribute to the late Gregory Hines. Problem is, I've got a Fight on Thursday, and I can't afford to shoot my comedy load this early in the week, since I figure it's a safe assumption that the people who would come to a Fight are the same people who would read this. So I figure this site'll be a little light on actual funny until Thursday (and probably well past that, for completely unrelated reasons), but I promise that if the Fight goes well, I'll post the material on Friday morning.

So far, a very lazy Sunday. Took Jude to get his hair cut at SnipIts in Burlington. It's this great hair place for kids...the decor is straight out of an old Warner Brothers cartoon (stylistically...no actual Warner Brothers(tm) characters in sight). He was very brave. I note it only because there was this poor kid there who must have been around 12 or 14, and his mom was making him get his hair cut there while his toddler sis got one. I'm trying (and failing) to imagine a worse thing to happen to a junior high kid than to be seen coming out of a goddamn SNIPITS. If you ask me, that's grounds for DSS to get involved.

Am planning on spending the afternoon finishing up a couple of tracks for DJ Hazard's forthcoming CD, which KFJ is producing. We're using a lot of old source material from Back in the Day(tm), and I had to jerry-rig a system to get these last few pieces into my computer. I think I've got it now and should have a rough cut for Deej to listen to by tomorrow. Listening to piles and piles of material has only served to reinforce that he is truly a gifted and funny sumbitch.