That which we call a Rose

Yesterday, Pete Rose told ESPN that he bet on the Reds “every night” during his time as manager, which Keith Olbermann thinks makes him less of a sinner than if he'd only bet on some games, because “At least the game outcomes weren’t affected because he was saving John Franco until a night he had $500 riding on the result“. Even if Rose bet on every game like he said, I’d bet he wagered more on some games than others. Except I don’t bet.

I don’t think baseball should reinstate Pete Rose for the rest of his life. I think he should be eligible for the Hall of Fame, after he finishes serving his lifetime ban. He shouldn’t be able to get money and endorsements as “Hall of Famer Pete Rose”, and if he’s inducted posthumously, then he won’t be able to make any ill-gotten money from the honor.

The best argument against reinstating Pete Rose is that he’s a bad person. As a player, he separated Ray Fosse’s shoulder when he barrelled into him at the 1970 All Star Game (a exhibition game) in a clip that still gets played to show what a “fiery competitor” he was, picked a fight with the scrawny Bud Harrelson in the 1973 NLCS, and complained that Braves pitcher Gene Garber was “showing him up” by striking him out to end his 44-game hitting streak in 1978. And as a manager, he violated Rule 21 (betting on baseball games in which he had a duty to perform), which carries a lifetime ban, no matter whether you bet for or against your team, or on some or all of their games.

But now Rose wants to be reinstated by baseball because, "I believe I'm the best ambassador baseball has." No you aren’t, Pete. Barry Bonds is a better baseball ambassador than you are! And just having the most hits ever doesn’t make you the “best hitter ever”. You were was a singles hitter with no power who didn’t draw walks – the fourth or fifth best hitter on your team during their glory years. So saying that Pete Rose was “arguably the best hitter ever” is like saying that the earth is “arguably flat”.

PS: I hope no one took my George Washington upset pick seriously. That wasn't a very good pick, but it's the only game I've lost so far.

iPod generation, part two

The most comments I've received from any post was last week's listing of all the albums on my new iPod, so here's an update with all the single artist compilations.

The Band - Greatest Hits
Blur - The Best of Blur
David Bowie - Changesbowie
The Buzzcocks - Singles Going Steady
The Church - Almost Yesterday
Julian Cope/Teardrop Explodes - Floored Genius
Cream - The Very Best of Cream
Marshall Crenshaw - This is Easy
Crowded House - Recurring Dream
Echo & the Bunnymen - Songs to Learn and Sing
Guided By Voices - Human Amusements at Hourly Rates
Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians - Greatest Hits
The Jam - Compact Snap!
Jellyfish - Best
Tommy Keene - The Real Underground
Lilac Time - Compendium: The Fontana Trinity
Kirsty MacColl - Galore
Laura Nyro - Time And Love: The Essential Masters
Plasticland - Make Yourself a Happening Machine
Replacements - All For Nothing/Nothing For All
Rolling Stones - London Singles Collection
Rubinoos - Anthology
Amy Rigby - 18 Again
Sloan - A Sides Win
The Smiths - Singles
Squeeze - Singles 45's and Under
XTC - Waxworks

I am human and I need to be loved

The best way to quickly adjust to daylight savings time is to spend the weekend with a toddler. They have more than enough energy to make anyone start going to bed at 9pm and getting up at 6am, even with the "spring forward" time change!

I spent last weekend in Washington visiting friends and their almost-two year old daughter, and little kids are a bunch of fun, but kind of wore me out. I had a few hours at SeaTac airport before my flight home, so I picked up the latest issue of Uncut, which had a special feature on the 30 best Smiths songs, which I listened to while playing their Singles compilation on my new iPod.

My friend Sue had a blog entry while I was away showing her chagrin hearing the Pixies' "Velouria" blasting from a UC frat row window because the Pixies were her college band. Usually when I walk by the frat houses, they're playing either Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, or Led Zeppelin, so I'm impressed that they're gaining some semblance of modernity, and Sue must be a lot younger than me, because I was a couple of years out of college when Bossanova came out!

Last month I said that the Police were my high-school band, so I was trying to think of a band that would qualify as my college band (of my college years were 1983-1987). I think that was the high tide of so-called "college" rock, and the two bands most emblematic of that era were R.E.M. and the Smiths. Coincidentally, the testimonial on Uncut's #1 Smiths song "How Soon Is Now?" was by Peter Buck of R.E.M. In his writeup, Buck talks about how he and Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr shared the same influences, and how he hasn't ever heard "How Soon" on the radio.

Which is strange, because it was played literally all the time on SF's Live 105 between 1985-1990. I always suspected their DJ's would keep the 12-inch singles of "How Soon Is Now?" and New Order's "Blue Monday" on standby in the "bathroom break" pile, for those times when a 7-11 burrito washed down with a double Big Gulp necessitated a long song, because one of those songs was played at least every four hours.

I liked the Smiths before I moved to the Bay Area, but kind of got burned out by all the radio play and their fans, but I've come to appreciate their music a lot more with the passing time.
Many of the song contributors to the Uncut article (James Mercer, Ben Gibbard, Ryan Adams) talked about how Morrissey's songs helped them through their adolescent years, which was exactly the thing that turned me off them way back when. It's not that hard to imagine James, Ben, or Ryan as tortured Smithsteens back in the 80s.

Someone on a mailing list I'm on once said that he tried to steer clear of anyone over the age of 14 who took the Smiths seriously. This sounded kind of harsh and unfair to me, until I realized that he wasn't talking about taking them seriously as a band, but taking Morrissey's lyrics as saying something to me about my life. Hearing the words now, especially offset by the jaunty jangly guitars, it's quite obvious that he was taking the piss. Those lines about ten ton trucks and double decker buses are just too over-the-top angsty to be taken seriously by anyone old enough to drive. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't take them seriously as songs. Morrissey wasn't joking -- he was just being dramatically ironic.

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..