Bracketology 2007

For someone who doesn't usually pay attention to college basketball, I tend to do fairly well in NCAA March Madness pools. I don't get bogged down in the details, like I do with other sports, and pick almost completely on gut instincts. Usually there are two or three games in each region that smell like upsets to me, so I pick those, and pick the favorites in all the other games. It's like my strategy for NFL football pools. I determined that there are about four upsets each week on average, so I just chose my four upsets each week, and ended up ahead for the year. This was small stakes, so "ahead" was more a matter of pride than losing the $3-5 lunch money each week.

Last year, I ended up in the top 10% of the ESPN bracketology picks, based on a few hunches. My alma mater, Bradley, was in the tournament as a 13 seed, and I picked them all the way to the sweet 16, which they miraculously made. And as luck would have it, the regional finals were here in Oakland, so I was able to watch Bradley lose to Memphis in the round of sixteen. I also made a few more off the wall picks that payed off. One of these years, I should go to Reno or Tahoe and put my money down on my hunches, but it seems wrong to use my powers for financial gain.

Anyway, here are my picks for the 2007 tournament. Feel free to lay your own money down.

1st Round Upsets: GWU over Vanderbilt, Long Beach over Tennessee, Gonzaga over Indiana, Winthorp over Notre Dame, VCU over Duke, Creighton over Nevada (go MVC!)
Final Four: Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio State, North Carolina
Finals: Kansas, North Carolina
Winner: North Carolina

The Velvet Coverground

I’m going to be away for the next few days, so I’m putting my Friday songs up on Thursday. This week it's covers of all six songs on the first side of an album that came out 40 years ago this week.

I’ve always felt that The Velvet Underground & Nico album is a little bit.. overrated. Calling something "overrated" is kind of a loaded gun, but I think the legacy and influence of this record is more important than it's worth as an actual listening experience. So much of their sound has been co-opted by other bands (some great, some good, many not-so-good) over the years that it's hard for us in the here and now to hear VU & Nico the way listeners did in early 1967.

The Velvets have built up such a legend over the years that it’s hard to divorce the music from the myths. One of the biggest prevailing myths is that the VU were shunned and ignored while they were together and only appreciated after they broke up. From David Fricke’s Britannica entry on the band: “At a time when the San Francisco scene represented the euphoric apex of 1960s counterculture, the Velvets' harsh dose of New York City-framed reality was scorned by the music industry and ignored by mainstream audiences.” Or this writeup that says "their records didn't get much airplay, even on 'underground' FM stations."

The Velvets weren’t played much on mainstream radio, but their first record got lots of airplay on "free-form" FM stations like San Francisco's KMPX, and they were headlining large halls even before the record came out. The flyer at the top of this entry shows the VU playing three nights at SF’s Fillmore (5/27-29/66) as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, supported by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention (I would've loved to be a fly on the wall at those shows!). Even in mid-1966, anonymous bands weren't headlining at the Fillmore!

These EPI shows got a positive mention in the Chronicle (reproduced on the LP gatefold), but apparently Bill Graham didn't like the Velvets because they never played the Fillmore again. But through the rest of their career, they played a bunch of S.F. shows attempting to build a as West Coast audience. Their Live 1969 and Bootleg Series were recorded entirely from San Francisco shows. The Chronicle had an article after the release of the Bootleg Series about the Velvets’ residency at the Matrix in late-1969 that more or less kills the prevailing myth that their NYC attitude was antithesis of West Coast flower power. The popular West Coast bands of that era (the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane) were every bit as “dark” as the VU were, just a little more popular.

Anyway, here are six VU covers making up the entire first side of The Velvet Underground & Nico. Like some folks say about Bob Dylan, I usually prefer Velvet Underground songs by other people to their originals. These are six of Lou Reed’s best songs, I think, and they're downloadable either individually below, or collectively as a big zip file.

1. Sunday Morning – Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs
2. I’m Waiting For The Man – Maureen Tucker
3. Femme Fatale – Tracey Thorn
4. Venus in Furs – Makrosoft
5. Run Run Run – Echo & the Bunnymen
6. All Tomorrow’s Parties – June Tabor & Oysterband

I might do the second side if I can find a decent cover of "Black Angel's Death Song". For those who prefer the originals, the WFMU blog has all the tracks from the acetate of the the Velvets' 1966 Scepter studio sessions that sold for $25,000 on eBay. I'm not sure what you do when you pay that much for a record -- you sure don't play it! Are acetates the vinyl equivalent of CDRs? These mp3s sound scratchier than Robert Johnson 78s from 1927.

Marching on big music

There was an interesting piece today at jefitoblog about gizmodo declaring March "boycott the RIAA month". The only real protest against the recording industry and their recent strongarm tactics against mixtapers and mp3 bloggers and online radio is to stop buying major label music. And stop stealing major label music. And stop blogging about major label music. Basically pretending that the big five four three labels don't exist anymore.

I can't remember the last time I purchasing a new CD on a major label, so I'm completely down with not buying any this month, but even more than not-supporting major labels, it should be a month for supporting non-major labels. Buy CDs directly from artists, or from smaller labels, or from cdbaby. Or if you must buy major label music, buy it used from a local independent record store. In other words, kill the music business by supporting music makers.

One of jefito's commenters said that the three major labels (Sony/BMG, Universal, and EMI/Virgin) are responsible for "70% of all music manufactured and sold", which sounds like 100% b.s. Major labels are responsible for such a small portion of the music made in 2007, and an even smaller portion of that 5% of top quality music that people like us buy. Those three companies probably own a large portion of the music copyrights, but that's not the same as 70% of the music.

I have a much more optimistic view on the future of "music blogging" than Mr. Jefito does. I've posted a few tracks here, and don't know if I qualify as a "music blogger" yet, but I try to post things that are either on independent labels or way out of print. Instead of actual Bee Gees' songs, I'd be more likely to post covers of their songs by artists a little lower on the music food chain. I also don't post the "newest and hippest" artist and tracks, mostly because my taste in music is old and unhip and keeps growing older and unhipper each year. I think the RIAA won't stop all music blogging just like they won't stop all song sharing -- they're just after the highest profile ones.

Some people have complained to about esnips, the site I choose to host my tunes, but they have 5GB of storage for free, and they're hosted outside the USA, so they aren't as vulnerable to the arm of the RIAA. And you don't need an account to listen and download. Plus they let you play the songs before you download them, and one listen is enough for most of the songs I post.

W32.Rinbot.A

I've been late with the blog entries this week because our office network got infected with the Rinbot virus over the weekend. The last two days at work have been a series of scan, quarantine, delete, rescan, reboot, repeats.

The virus comes cloaked as an update to your anti-virus software, so whenever you try to delete it, big brother pushes another rinbot at you. It's hit a lot of big companies over the past week, and seems to be designed to build a virtual "bot-net" to launch DoS attacks against the virus vendor (who's name rhymes with mimantec). At least my home computer still works!

iPod Update: I had to update my iTunes to version 7 to work with my new iPod, which I really didn't want to do since lots of people have been having issues with iTunes7. The "Get Album Artwork" feature is nice, but it only works for albums that are available at Apple's Music Store, which less than 50% of my library is. And I'm not sure what "gapless playback" is, but it causes a bunch of problems, and it's a pain to disable. But my fifth generation iPod supports it, so I guess I'm obligated to turn it on..

Joining the iPod Generation

If 2007 was the year I started blogging and bought an iPod, I'm either way behind the curve or going through a midlife crisis. How about a blog entry about my new iPod?

My two year old Creative MuVo2 music player stopped working this weekend, so I took the plunge and purchased a real iPod yesterday - a sleek black Nano with 8gb of storage. I like it so far. It's hard to believe that 1800 songs can fit in something so tiny! And it was an open container at Fry's, so I got it for 20% off ($199 vs. $249 list).

My old player only had 4gb of storage, so I can double the amount of music on my live, but it's still only 20% of the 40gb of music in my iTunes library, so I needed to come up with a strategy to pull the essential tunes to my Nano. My old MuVo behaved like a USB hard drive where all I needed to do was drag and drop folders to fill it, but iPods need to be loaded via iTunes, so today I was trying to find a way to seamlessly load one fifth of my fifth on my new player. I came up with an elegant solution, which I'm sure no one has ever thought of before!

I set up an iTunes playlist called "My iPod" and set up the iPod to sync up with this playlist only, then I dragged and dropped everything from my library to this playlist until it was full. The choice of what to include and what to exclude was tough though. My first pass was to go artist by artist, including no more than 20 songs (one full album plus a few stray tracks) from anyone. I chose which album by deciding which collection of songs worked best as an album, plus I have a thing for even anniversaries so albums with release years ending in 7 or 2 got special preference.

Here are all the full albums on my new iPod nano. Still 2gb free, and it seems a little too 1960s-focused.. Am I missing anything?

The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (1966)
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's (1967)
The Beau Brummels - Triangle (1967)
The Bee Gees - First (1967)
Belle & Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister (1997)
Big Star - #1 Record/Radio City (1992)
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust (1972)
The Byrds - Younger Than Yesterday (1967)
The Chills - Submarine Bells (1990)
Julian Cope - St. Julian (1987)
Cotton Mather - Kontiki (1997)
Marshall Crenshaw - Marshall Crenshaw (1982)
The dB's - Repercussion (1982)
Nick Drake - Pink Moon (1972)
Fairport Convention - Unhalfbricking (1969)
Field Music - In Context (2007)
Flamin' Groovies - Shake Some Action (1976)
Fountains of Wayne - Utopia Parkway (1999)
Game Theory - Lolita Nation (1987)
Genesis - Foxtrot (1972)
The Go-Betweens - Tallulah (1987)
Jose Gonzalez - Veneer (2005)
Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand (1994)
The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls In America (2006)
Jefferson Airplane - Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
The Kinks - Something Else By The Kinks (1967)
Ted Leo/Pharmacists - Hearts of Oak (2003)
Let's Active - Cypress (1984)
The Lilac Time - & Love For All (1990)
The Loud Family - Interbabe Concern (1996)
Love - Forever Changes (1967)
Moby Grape - Moby Grape (1967)
The Monochrome Set - Eligible Bachelors (1982)
The Negro Problem - Post Minstrel Syndrome (1997)
The New Pornographers - Electric Version (2003)
Randy Newman - Sail Away (1972)
The Orange Peels - Square (1997)
Pentangle - Basket of Light (1969)
Pernice Brothers - Live A Little (2006)
Pink Floyd - Piper At The Gates of Dawn (1967)
Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)
R.E.M. - Murmur (1983)
The Replacements - Pleased To Meet Me (1987)
The Rolling Stones - Between The Buttons (1967)
Elliott Smith - Either/Or (1997)
The Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight (1980)
Surfin' Stevens - Illinoise (2005)
Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend (1991)
Teenage Fanclub - Songs From Northern Britain (1997)
Richard & Linda Thompson - Shoot Out The Lights (1982)
The Velvet Underground - Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
The Who - Sell Out (1967)
Brian Wilson presents SMiLe (2004)
XTC - English Settlement (1982)
Yo La Tengo - Fakebook (1990)
The Zombies - Odessey & Oracle (1967)

FOMM: Listen to the Flower People

After the birds and the bees, this Friday it's the flowers.



The Flowerpot Men - Let's Go To San Francisco
The Flowerpot Men were a British studio band created by Ivy League songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis to capitalize on 1967's flower power fad. The band name came from the same children's show that inspired Peter Gabriel to dress like a flowerpot on his head a few years later, plus there's that "flower"+"pot" pun. The single sleeve calls them "The Flower Potmen" and also misspells the city name as "San Fransisco"!. The singer is the legendary Tony Burrows and the keyboards and bass are played by future Deep Purple members Nick Simper and Jon Lord. I suspect that this song provided direct inspiration for Spinal Tap's "(Listen to the) Flower People" (video)

The Great Society - Somebody To Love
Translator - Today
The Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow album was released in February 1967, so it's 40 years old now. Both of the hits from that album ("Somebody To Love" and "White Rabbit") came from Grace Slick's former band, the Great Society, but the former was the only one recorded while Grace was in the band. The Society's original version of "Somebody To Love" sounds like a demo for the Airplane's hit version, it's not quite as powerful, but also not as played to death on classic rock radio. Twenty years later, San Francisco's own Translator covered another Pillow tune, "Today", as a bonus track on their Everywhere That I'm Not compilation. Translator's four albums are set to be reissued on Wounded Bird later this year, but this cover isn't on any of them. One recent observer described Translator as "sort of a harder-rocking, less Stipe-y R.E.M.". This next S.F. Summer of Love cover song probably won't meet with this observer's approval.

The Golden Palominos - Omaha
This is a cover of a Moby Grape song from the 1985 Visions of Excess LP, with lead vocals by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. The Golden Palominos were a rotating cast headed by drummer Anton Fier (who probably thought those MIDI drums were a good idea), bassist Bill Laswell, and others. The guitars on this song by Henry Kaiser and Chris Stamey. Rolling Stone's album review of Visions said that this group had "enough combined hipness to make even a Moby Grape song sound cool and contemporary". I eschew any definition of "cool" that excludes Moby Grape. Their 1967 debut still sounds great in 2007, while this contempo 80s cover sounds silly and dated in spots (especially those spots with MIDI drums).

Pop Art Toasters - I Won't Hurt You
The Pop Art Toasters were a one-off duet with David Kilgour of the Clean and Martin Phillips of the Chills doing a 5-song EP of 60s covers. Hopefully this will put me back on the Translator observer's good graces. "I Won't Hurt You" was originally by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band in 1966, but I didn't hear the original version of this song until much later. The Pop Art Toasters EP is long out of print, but someone posted "I Won't Hurt You" just a few days ago.

"Dolphins, eskimos,.. it's all a bunch of tree hugging hippie crap!" - Eric Cartman

I started the funniest joke in the world

An imaginary Bee Gees vs. Monty Python youtube mashup..



Narrator: This man is Robin Gibb... writer of jokes. In a few moments, he will have written the funniest joke in the world... and, as a consequence, he will die ... laughing.

RG: I started a joke, which started the whole world crying, but I didn't see that the joke was on me

Narrator: It was obvious that this joke was lethal... no one could read it and live ...

RG: Then I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing.

Policeman: I shall enter the house and attempt to remove the joke.

RG: And I fell out of bed, hurting my head from things that I'd said.

Commentator: There goes a brave man. Whether he comes out alive or not, this will surely be remembered as one of the most courageous and gallant acts in history.

RG: Til I finally died, which started the whole world living. Oh if I'd only seen, that the joke was on me

Commentator: This morning, shortly after eleven o'clock, comedy struck this little house in Dibley Road. Sudden ...violent ... comedy.