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The Clash, Fleetwood Mac, Bill Callahan, Mazzy Star, Arctic Monkeys in the new Uncut; plus the music and film of the 2000s

Michael Bonner
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0
The Clash, Fleetwood Mac, Bill Callahan, Mazzy Star, Arctic Monkeys in the new Uncut; plus the music and film of the 2000s

I hope you had a good Bank Holiday break. I spent a very enjoyable chunk of it reading the new Carl Hiaasen novel – excuse the shameless self-promotion, but you can read an interview I did with Hiaasen over on my blog. But now we’re back in the office, and it’s my pleasure to introduce you all to the new issue of Uncut, which goes on sale tomorrow. We have an exclusive cover story on The Clash, which finds Allan meeting up with Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon for an exhilarating look back at the band’s story; Allan, of course, was a college friend of Joe Strummer and an early champion of the band, and I hope you agree that brings a level of intimacy and additional insight to this brilliant piece. Elsewhere, Andy Gill chats to Mick Fleetwood about his extraordinary life and times in Fleetwood Mac. Jaan Uhelszki spends a evening round at Bill Callahan’s house in Austin, Texas, while I catch up with the enigmatic Mazzy Star ahead of the release of their first album in 17 years. The legendary Tony Joe White answers your questions in An Audience With…, Country Joe And The Fish talk us through the making of their protest classic, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’-To-Die Rag”, and Billy Corgan talks us at length through the high points of his life in Smashing Pumpkins in our Album By Album feature. In our predictably packed reviews pages, Allan celebrates the return to active service of Roy Harper, and we look at other new releases from Arctic Monkeys, Okkervil River, Elvis Costello And The Roots, Elton John and Just Vernon’s latest project Volcano Choir. In reissues, David Cavanagh gets to grips with Van Morrison’s Moondance: Deluxe Edition, there’s The Beach Boys box set, Roky Erickson and The Band. In Film, I review the James Hunt/Ayrton Senna picture, Rush, Morrissey’s latest live offering and – a big recommendation here – Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a brilliant American indie in the spirit of Terrence Malick with great performances from Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara and Keith Carradine. In DVD, Jonathan Romney salutes Alain Delon in the stylish New Wave thriller Plein Soleil, while in Books I review Nic Roeg’s memoir. We also report back from unmissable gigs by Steely Dan, Patti Smith and Atoms For Peace in our Live pages. Up front, meanwhile, in Instant Karma!, we preview A Scene In Between – an extensive account of the indie scene during the 1980s – marvel as Paddy McAloon relaunches Prefab Sprout, look forward to a new film about John Fahey, praise the return of Slint and welcome newcomers Factory Floor. And finally… Mark Lanegan selects the music he listens to while cleaning out his shed. As if that wasn’t enough, I should also mention that the latest Ultimate Music Guide is dedicated to Basildon’s finest, Depeche Mode. It’s in the shops now, or you can order it online here. As usual, it features a ton of vintage interviews from the Melody Maker and NME archives as well as brand new reviews of all the band’s albums from the Uncut writing team. Finally, as you might have noticed from recent edition’s the editor’s letter, that we produced a special promotional feature in association with hmv, celebrating six decades of music and movies. We’ve reached the 2000’s now, so I’ll leave you with this playlist of some favourite music and films from that decade… Have a good week! Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner. Michael Music The White Stripes White Blood Cells 2001 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OyytKqYjkE Robert Plant & Alison Krauss Raising Sand 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVpv1e1YoXQ LCD Soundsystem The Sound Of Silver 2007 Lambchop Nixon 2000 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PxY_RPBeM Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot 2002 The Arcade Fire Funeral 2004 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCOfoDnCV_Y Joanna Newsom Ys 2006 Radiohead Kid A 2000 Ryan Adams Gold 2001 Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes 20008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrQRS40OKNE Films The Departed Directed by Martin Scorsese 2006 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auYbpnEwBBg The Dark Knight Christopher Nolan 2008 City Of God Fernando Meirelles 2002 There Will Be Blood Paul Thomas Anderson 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA0qVTFiXX8 No Country For Old Men The Coen Brothers 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ywF_G7jNl0 Moon Duncan Jones 2009 The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GxSDZc8etg Zodiac David Fincher 2007 Mulholland Dr. David Lynch 2001 Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Michel Gondry 2004 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnSgSe2GzDc

I hope you had a good Bank Holiday break. I spent a very enjoyable chunk of it reading the new Carl Hiaasen novel – excuse the shameless self-promotion, but you can read an interview I did with Hiaasen over on my blog. But now we’re back in the office, and it’s my pleasure to introduce you all to the new issue of Uncut, which goes on sale tomorrow.

We have an exclusive cover story on The Clash, which finds Allan meeting up with Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon for an exhilarating look back at the band’s story; Allan, of course, was a college friend of Joe Strummer and an early champion of the band, and I hope you agree that brings a level of intimacy and additional insight to this brilliant piece. Elsewhere, Andy Gill chats to Mick Fleetwood about his extraordinary life and times in Fleetwood Mac. Jaan Uhelszki spends a evening round at Bill Callahan’s house in Austin, Texas, while I catch up with the enigmatic Mazzy Star ahead of the release of their first album in 17 years. The legendary Tony Joe White answers your questions in An Audience With…, Country Joe And The Fish talk us through the making of their protest classic, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’-To-Die Rag”, and Billy Corgan talks us at length through the high points of his life in Smashing Pumpkins in our Album By Album feature.

In our predictably packed reviews pages, Allan celebrates the return to active service of Roy Harper, and we look at other new releases from Arctic Monkeys, Okkervil River, Elvis Costello And The Roots, Elton John and Just Vernon’s latest project Volcano Choir. In reissues, David Cavanagh gets to grips with Van Morrison’s Moondance: Deluxe Edition, there’s The Beach Boys box set, Roky Erickson and The Band. In Film, I review the James Hunt/Ayrton Senna picture, Rush, Morrissey’s latest live offering and – a big recommendation here – Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a brilliant American indie in the spirit of Terrence Malick with great performances from Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara and Keith Carradine. In DVD, Jonathan Romney salutes Alain Delon in the stylish New Wave thriller Plein Soleil, while in Books I review Nic Roeg’s memoir. We also report back from unmissable gigs by Steely Dan, Patti Smith and Atoms For Peace in our Live pages.

Up front, meanwhile, in Instant Karma!, we preview A Scene In Between – an extensive account of the indie scene during the 1980s – marvel as Paddy McAloon relaunches Prefab Sprout, look forward to a new film about John Fahey, praise the return of Slint and welcome newcomers Factory Floor. And finally… Mark Lanegan selects the music he listens to while cleaning out his shed.

As if that wasn’t enough, I should also mention that the latest Ultimate Music Guide is dedicated to Basildon’s finest, Depeche Mode. It’s in the shops now, or you can order it online here. As usual, it features a ton of vintage interviews from the Melody Maker and NME archives as well as brand new reviews of all the band’s albums from the Uncut writing team.

Finally, as you might have noticed from recent edition’s the editor’s letter, that we produced a special promotional feature in association with hmv, celebrating six decades of music and movies. We’ve reached the 2000’s now, so I’ll leave you with this playlist of some favourite music and films from that decade…

Have a good week!

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

Michael

Music

The White Stripes

White Blood Cells

2001

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Raising Sand

2007

LCD Soundsystem

The Sound Of Silver

2007

Lambchop

Nixon

2000

Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2002

The Arcade Fire

Funeral

2004

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCOfoDnCV_Y

Joanna Newsom

Ys

2006

Radiohead

Kid A

2000

Ryan Adams

Gold

2001

Fleet Foxes

Fleet Foxes

20008

Films

The Departed

Directed by Martin Scorsese

2006

The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan

2008

City Of God

Fernando Meirelles

2002

There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson

2007

No Country For Old Men

The Coen Brothers

2007

Moon

Duncan Jones

2009

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow

2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GxSDZc8etg

Zodiac

David Fincher

2007

Mulholland Dr.

David Lynch

2001

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Michel Gondry

2004

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnSgSe2GzDc

An interview with Carl Hiaasen: “I want to be able to turn over rocks and shine a spotlight on these cockroaches”

Michael Bonner
-
0
An interview with Carl Hiaasen: “I want to be able to turn over rocks and shine a spotlight on these cockroaches”

I spent a chunk of the weekend reading Bad Monkey, the new novel by Carl Hiaasen - one America's great crime writers. After a rather fallow period recently, the book feels very much like Hiaasen is back to full strength. As ever, it tells of greed and corruption set in Hiaasen's beloved Florida; but this one opens with a honeymooning couple reeling in a severed arm on a fishing trip, and from there the story takes in healthcare fraud, reckless real estate development and features a particularly vicious primate that, we are told, one appeared alongside Johnny Depp in The Pirates Of The Caribbean. Anyway, it reminded me to dust down this interview I did with Hiaasen for Uncut in 2002, around the publication of his novel, Basket Case - a music industry satire. Along the way, we chatted about obituary notices, his long friendship with Warren Zevon and, of course, his tremendous run of novels. Carl Hiaasen collects obituary headlines. He cuts them out of newspapers and pins them to his bulletin board back home in the Florida Keys. It’s some hobby. “A couple of them I put in this book,” the 48-year-old novelist tells Uncut, sitting in his suite in a London hotel, midway through a tour to promote his ninth, brilliantly funny novel, Basket Case. “One of them was ‘Ronald Lockley, 96, An Intimate Of Rabbits’. That’s all it says. ‘An Intimate Of Rabbits’. How can you not read that? Another one I’ve had on my board for years: ‘Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolan Of Mauritius Dies At Age 85’. I just thought this was such an extraordinary name. It’s like something out of Kurt Vonnegut, but he was a real guy. I thought ‘This is beautiful’, because the way The New York Times had written it was in a way we should have all known who he was. Shame on you if you don’t! I just liked it, so there’s this old yellow clipping, it’s still on my bulletin board, and I just thought someone’s doing this for a living, someone’s writing about this stuff, and I’m intrigued by this kind of job.” With this in mind, it’s perhaps no surprise that Jack Tagger, the narrator of Basket Case, is a middle-aged journalist working the obituary beat on a local paper, The Union-Register. Deeply cynical and prone to bouts of morbidity, Tagger has an unhealthy interest in comparing the ages of dead celebrities with his own years, despairing that he’s managed to live longer than Jack London and Elvis Presley, but consoled by the knowledge that, at 47, he’s still got a few years left before he reaches the age when Harry Nilsson joined the Choir Invisible. “I think settling on a middle-aged journalist who is a little disillusioned with the business as well as other things in his life appealed to me,” explains Hiaasen, immaculately dressed in chinos, a blazer and an Oxford blue shirt. 
“I felt comfortable getting inside Jack’s head and I’d always wanted to write about an obituary writer. And I thought the time to do that would be to have a character in middle age, because that’s the worst possible time to start writing about death, because it’s the time when you start contemplating it.” __________ Basket Case follows Tagger’s investigation into the mysterious death of James Bradley Stomarti, aka Jimmy Stoma, singer with Eighties rockers Jimmy And The Slut Puppies. It’s markedly different from Hiaasen’s previous novels, which mostly concern themselves with highlighting the very real threat posed to the Everglades by crooked politicians and avaricious land developers (“There’s always this trail of slime which comes down the peninsula,” he sighs). This time round, the target of Hiaasen’s withering satire is the music industry – personified by Jimmy’s greedy, ambitious widow, Cleo Rio, and her inept, ponytailed producer, Loreal. By fondly upholding Jimmy’s memory and making Cleo out to be an unscrupulous, grasping star-fucker, Uncut wonders whether Hiaasen – who collaborated with Warren Zevon on his 1995 album, Mutineer, and counts Roger McGuinn and David Crosby among his friends – is using Basket Case to pass comment 
on the shortcomings of today’s music scene. “I like some of the bands now, but you have to admit that music videos and TV have changed a lot of things and people that could never have got a record made 25 years ago will now get in through the door on the basis of how they look,” he says. “And part of what I did with Cleo was to try to have some fun with the diva thing, because that’s sort of a new concept. I mean, Tina Turner was around a long time before you could call her a diva, but now you have all these young, petulant, insouciant Alanis-wannabes who realise that if they can just get one video on MTV then they’re going to be big. There’s something so transitory about it now. Out of morbid curiosity 
I watch the Grammys and the MTV Awards and you know that 90 per cent of the people walking up that red carpet are going to be trivia questions in three years from now. And I wanted to comment on the idea of their 15 minutes is coming and going and they know it, and they’ve got to hit it big, and this is Cleo. So she’s got this phoney producer, and there’s a million of them out there who can barely work a board, and the naked ambition is there. “Some of it’s nostalgic,” he admits. “I’m sure there was plenty of bad music written when I was a kid and we tend to remember the good stuff, but the fact is there was also incredible loyalty among listeners. 
I mean, you bought everything the Stones did, you went out and you bought everything The Kinks came out with. Now, a band waits two or three years between albums and they’re all ‘Axl who?’ It’s astonishing, and I don’t know if it’s a function of the fact that there’s just so much more music out there now, or whether it’s a function of television – if you don’t see it on TV enough, then you forget about it. What accounts for the fact people don’t stick with a group or a singer these days? I remember my folks making fun of Ozzy Osbourne, but you know what? You turn on FM rock in the States and there’s Ozzy. Now tell me that 20 years from now we’re going to be listening to Kid Rock. I don’t think so. And I’m not saying it’s better or worse, I’m just saying it’s changed, the appetite and the loyalty’s changed.” Hiaasen acknowledges he loved “messing around with lyrics, trying to create a fictional discography” for The Slut Puppies (a term his wife coined to describe the sexual habits of certain Floridian males), and has even co-written a song, “Basket Case”, for Warren Zevon’s new LP, My Ride’s Here (opening lines: “My baby’s a basket case/A bipolar mama in leather and lace”). “But the challenge was the new technical stuff about how albums are made,” he acknowledges. “You can essentially produce a whole album on a laptop with Pro Tools and all these things. Warren has a home studio, so I was able to talk to him, and Roger McGuinn is just a wizard at all this stuff, so I talked to him, and I was amazed at what you can do with these programs. So I had to get educated about that, but then I had to also be able to describe it as it would hit Jack’s ear and have him try and understand it, too. He’s sort of like me, I mean he’s fumbling around with eight tracks, so I wanted to explain what was going on without getting too technical, ’cos I didn’t want it to be too inside, too much of a primer on record production, as that wasn’t the point. So that was the challenge – learning about how it was done. But the fun of it, of course, is always the lyrics.”
 __________ Carl Hiaasen began writing when he was six on a battered manual typewriter, bashing out sports reports for his parents. After high school, he took a journalism course at the University of Florida, graduating in 1974 to join 
a Fort Lauderdale-based newspaper during one 
of the most turbulent times in American history. “I was 21 when I started as a reporter, and Watergate was breaking and Nixon was about to resign, and I think you certainly went in with the idealism,” he explains. “I didn’t go in thinking ‘I want to work for The Washington Post and bring down a crooked president,’ but I went in thinking ‘There are stories like this all over the place, and wherever I’m working I want to be able to turn over rocks and shine a spotlight on these cockroaches,’ because that’s what it’s all about, and you certainly wanted to kick some ass.” He moved to The Miami Herald in 1976, working on the paper’s investigations team, where he swiftly made himself a royal pain in the ass for the greedy and corrupt, dragging kicking and screaming into the public arena everything from suspect land deals to drug smuggling and the cocaine wars in Miami. “I never saw myself in the role of crusader,” he insists. “I just thought this was going to be a good gig – I had a social conscience, I wasn’t marching 
in the streets, but I thought this was a chance to go out and help. And also learn to write. If you’re going to be a writer – if you want to learn how the world works and how people really talk – there’s no better place to learn than a big city newsroom. All the senses that you use on covering a story, whether 
it’s a city hall meeting or a car accident or a homicide or whatever, all the senses that you’re using and putting in your notebook are things you’re going to have to pull out of your imaginary notebook when you’re writing novels. It’s great training and it’s no accident that so many novelists have come from a newspaper background.” After three early novels, co-written with Herald colleague Bill Montalbano, Hiaasen’s first solo work, Tourist Season, was published in 1986. Fast-paced and hugely entertaining, it was fuelled by a savage wit and 
a dark, righteous indignation at the injustices committed in this world which have since become his stylistic trademarks. A regular fixture in the 
bestseller lists, his novels have even found their way onto the English literature syllabuses in some American universities, firmly establishing him as America’s pre-eminent satirist and crime writer. He still contributes a twice-weekly column to the Herald, and it’s hard not to speculate that the sub-plot of Basket Case – the gutting of American journalism – 
is inspired by Hiaasen’s own experiences. “I’m lucky, because I work at a much bigger and aggressive newspaper,” he says. “Even though we’ve certainly been pared down and got beaten up financially in the same way that Jack’s paper is, when it happens at a big paper you can fill the holes, but in a small paper you start losing that much of 
a staff, you literally stop covering cities, you stop covering politicians, you don’t have enough warm bodies to do it. I wanted to set the story at a smaller paper – it would be more dramatic so the folks could see the readers are the ones that are getting screwed out of this corporate devouring of newspapers. It angers me that the readers are secondary to the stockholders now, and how papers are budgeted and resources are allocated. It’s much less a question of serving the readers than keeping the profits jacked up to really obscene levels, profit levels that would make General Motors drool with envy. And that’s what most newspapers do, and the best way to make money in newspapers is to not put so much news in the paper because it’s expensive.” With Florida linked to many of America’s 
murkier national scandals – the chad debacle 
during the Bush-Gore presidential race, the Enron bankruptcy and the 9-11 hijackings – Hiaasen has no shortage of ready-made material for his books and columns. In short, you couldn’t make them up, and we should thank God that Hiaasen’s out there, exposing the shitweasels of this world, riled up 
and righteous. “For me, it’s therapeutic to write these novels,” he says, finally, a smile breaking across his face. “But I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t be funny, if I wasn’t pissed off.”

I spent a chunk of the weekend reading Bad Monkey, the new novel by Carl Hiaasen – one America’s great crime writers. After a rather fallow period recently, the book feels very much like Hiaasen is back to full strength. As ever, it tells of greed and corruption set in Hiaasen’s beloved Florida; but this one opens with a honeymooning couple reeling in a severed arm on a fishing trip, and from there the story takes in healthcare fraud, reckless real estate development and features a particularly vicious primate that, we are told, one appeared alongside Johnny Depp in The Pirates Of The Caribbean.

Anyway, it reminded me to dust down this interview I did with Hiaasen for Uncut in 2002, around the publication of his novel, Basket Case – a music industry satire. Along the way, we chatted about obituary notices, his long friendship with Warren Zevon and, of course, his tremendous run of novels.

Carl Hiaasen collects obituary headlines. He cuts them out of newspapers and pins them to his bulletin board back home in the Florida Keys. It’s some hobby.

“A couple of them I put in this book,” the 48-year-old novelist tells Uncut, sitting in his suite in a London hotel, midway through a tour to promote his ninth, brilliantly funny novel, Basket Case. “One of them was ‘Ronald Lockley, 96, An Intimate Of Rabbits’. That’s all it says. ‘An Intimate Of Rabbits’. How can you not read that? Another one I’ve had on my board for years: ‘Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolan Of Mauritius Dies At Age 85’. I just thought this was such an extraordinary name. It’s like something out of Kurt Vonnegut, but he was a real guy. I thought ‘This is beautiful’, because the way The New York Times had written it was in a way we should have all known who he was. Shame on you if you don’t! I just liked it, so there’s this old yellow clipping, it’s still on my bulletin board, and I just thought someone’s doing this for a living, someone’s writing about this stuff, and I’m intrigued by this kind of job.”

With this in mind, it’s perhaps no surprise that Jack Tagger, the narrator of Basket Case, is a middle-aged journalist working the obituary beat on a local paper, The Union-Register. Deeply cynical and prone to bouts of morbidity, Tagger has an unhealthy interest in comparing the ages of dead celebrities with his own years, despairing that he’s managed to live longer than Jack London and Elvis Presley, but consoled by the knowledge that, at 47, he’s still got a few years left before he reaches the age when Harry Nilsson joined the Choir Invisible.

“I think settling on a middle-aged journalist who is a little disillusioned with the business as well as other things in his life appealed to me,” explains Hiaasen, immaculately dressed in chinos, a blazer and an Oxford blue shirt. 
“I felt comfortable getting inside Jack’s head and I’d always wanted to write about an obituary writer. And I thought the time to do that would be to have a character in middle age, because that’s the worst possible time to start writing about death, because it’s the time when you start contemplating it.”

__________

Basket Case follows Tagger’s investigation into the mysterious death of James Bradley Stomarti, aka Jimmy Stoma, singer with Eighties rockers Jimmy And The Slut Puppies. It’s markedly different from Hiaasen’s previous novels, which mostly concern themselves with highlighting the very real threat posed to the Everglades by crooked politicians and avaricious land developers (“There’s always this trail of slime which comes down the peninsula,” he sighs). This time round, the target of Hiaasen’s withering satire is the music industry – personified by Jimmy’s greedy, ambitious widow, Cleo Rio, and her inept, ponytailed producer, Loreal. By fondly upholding Jimmy’s memory and making Cleo out to be an unscrupulous, grasping star-fucker, Uncut wonders whether Hiaasen – who collaborated with Warren Zevon on his 1995 album, Mutineer, and counts Roger McGuinn and David Crosby among his friends – is using Basket Case to pass comment 
on the shortcomings of today’s music scene.

“I like some of the bands now, but you have to admit that music videos and TV have changed a lot of things and people that could never have got a record made 25 years ago will now get in through the door on the basis of how they look,” he says. “And part of what I did with Cleo was to try to have some fun with the diva thing, because that’s sort of a new concept. I mean, Tina Turner was around a long time before you could call her a diva, but now you have all these young, petulant, insouciant Alanis-wannabes who realise that if they can just get one video on MTV then they’re going to be big. There’s something so transitory about it now. Out of morbid curiosity 
I watch the Grammys and the MTV Awards and you know that 90 per cent of the people walking up that red carpet are going to be trivia questions in three years from now. And I wanted to comment on the idea of their 15 minutes is coming and going and they know it, and they’ve got to hit it big, and this is Cleo. So she’s got this phoney producer, and there’s a million of them out there who can barely work a board, and the naked ambition is there.

“Some of it’s nostalgic,” he admits. “I’m sure there was plenty of bad music written when I was a kid and we tend to remember the good stuff, but the fact is there was also incredible loyalty among listeners. 
I mean, you bought everything the Stones did, you went out and you bought everything The Kinks came out with. Now, a band waits two or three years between albums and they’re all ‘Axl who?’ It’s astonishing, and I don’t know if it’s a function of the fact that there’s just so much more music out there now, or whether it’s a function of television – if you don’t see it on TV enough, then you forget about it. What accounts for the fact people don’t stick with a group or a singer these days? I remember my folks making fun of Ozzy Osbourne, but you know what? You turn on FM rock in the States and there’s Ozzy. Now tell me that 20 years from now we’re going to be listening to Kid Rock. I don’t think so. And I’m not saying it’s better or worse, I’m just saying it’s changed, the appetite and the loyalty’s changed.”

Hiaasen acknowledges he loved “messing around with lyrics, trying to create a fictional discography” for The Slut Puppies (a term his wife coined to describe the sexual habits of certain Floridian males), and has even co-written a song, “Basket Case”, for Warren Zevon’s new LP, My Ride’s Here (opening lines: “My baby’s a basket case/A bipolar mama in leather and lace”).

“But the challenge was the new technical stuff about how albums are made,” he acknowledges. “You can essentially produce a whole album on a laptop with Pro Tools and all these things. Warren has a home studio, so I was able to talk to him, and Roger McGuinn is just a wizard at all this stuff, so I talked to him, and I was amazed at what you can do with these programs. So I had to get educated about that, but then I had to also be able to describe it as it would hit Jack’s ear and have him try and understand it, too. He’s sort of like me, I mean he’s fumbling around with eight tracks, so I wanted to explain what was going on without getting too technical, ’cos I didn’t want it to be too inside, too much of a primer on record production, as that wasn’t the point. So that was the challenge – learning about how it was done. But the fun of it, of course, is always the lyrics.”


__________

Carl Hiaasen began writing when he was six on a battered manual typewriter, bashing out sports reports for his parents. After high school, he took a journalism course at the University of Florida, graduating in 1974 to join 
a Fort Lauderdale-based newspaper during one 
of the most turbulent times in American history.

“I was 21 when I started as a reporter, and Watergate was breaking and Nixon was about to resign, and I think you certainly went in with the idealism,” he explains. “I didn’t go in thinking ‘I want to work for The Washington Post and bring down a crooked president,’ but I went in thinking ‘There are stories like this all over the place, and wherever I’m working I want to be able to turn over rocks and shine a spotlight on these cockroaches,’ because that’s what it’s all about, and you certainly wanted to kick some ass.”

He moved to The Miami Herald in 1976, working on the paper’s investigations team, where he swiftly made himself a royal pain in the ass for the greedy and corrupt, dragging kicking and screaming into the public arena everything from suspect land deals to drug smuggling and the cocaine wars in Miami.

“I never saw myself in the role of crusader,” he insists. “I just thought this was going to be a good gig – I had a social conscience, I wasn’t marching 
in the streets, but I thought this was a chance to go out and help. And also learn to write. If you’re going to be a writer – if you want to learn how the world works and how people really talk – there’s no better place to learn than a big city newsroom. All the senses that you use on covering a story, whether 
it’s a city hall meeting or a car accident or a homicide or whatever, all the senses that you’re using and putting in your notebook are things you’re going to have to pull out of your imaginary notebook when you’re writing novels. It’s great training and it’s no accident that so many novelists have come from a newspaper background.”

After three early novels, co-written with Herald colleague Bill Montalbano, Hiaasen’s first solo work, Tourist Season, was published in 1986. Fast-paced and hugely entertaining, it was fuelled by a savage wit and 
a dark, righteous indignation at the injustices committed in this world which have since become his stylistic trademarks. A regular fixture in the 
bestseller lists, his novels have even found their way onto the English literature syllabuses in some American universities, firmly establishing him as America’s pre-eminent satirist and crime writer. He still contributes a twice-weekly column to the Herald, and it’s hard not to speculate that the sub-plot of Basket Case – the gutting of American journalism – 
is inspired by Hiaasen’s own experiences.

“I’m lucky, because I work at a much bigger and aggressive newspaper,” he says. “Even though we’ve certainly been pared down and got beaten up financially in the same way that Jack’s paper is, when it happens at a big paper you can fill the holes, but in a small paper you start losing that much of 
a staff, you literally stop covering cities, you stop covering politicians, you don’t have enough warm bodies to do it. I wanted to set the story at a smaller paper – it would be more dramatic so the folks could see the readers are the ones that are getting screwed out of this corporate devouring of newspapers. It angers me that the readers are secondary to the stockholders now, and how papers are budgeted and resources are allocated. It’s much less a question of serving the readers than keeping the profits jacked up to really obscene levels, profit levels that would make General Motors drool with envy. And that’s what most newspapers do, and the best way to make money in newspapers is to not put so much news in the paper because it’s expensive.”

With Florida linked to many of America’s 
murkier national scandals – the chad debacle 
during the Bush-Gore presidential race, the Enron bankruptcy and the 9-11 hijackings – Hiaasen has no shortage of ready-made material for his books and columns. In short, you couldn’t make them up, and we should thank God that Hiaasen’s out there, exposing the shitweasels of this world, riled up 
and righteous.

“For me, it’s therapeutic to write these novels,” he says, finally, a smile breaking across his face. “But I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t be funny, if I wasn’t pissed off.”

Billy Corgan: “I should’ve quit Smashing Pumpkins when Jimmy Chamberlin left after Mellon Collie…”

Uncut
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Billy Corgan: “I should’ve quit Smashing Pumpkins when Jimmy Chamberlin left after Mellon Collie…”
Billy Corgan has told Uncut that he regrets not quitting Smashing Pumpkins when drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was sacked in 1996. During the tour to support their Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness album, Chamberlin and touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdosed on heroin, Melvoin fatally, w...

Billy Corgan has told Uncut that he regrets not quitting Smashing Pumpkins when drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was sacked in 1996.

During the tour to support their Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness album, Chamberlin and touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdosed on heroin, Melvoin fatally, which led to Chamberlin’s dismissal from the band.

Corgan has now said the absence of the drummer, and the resulting Adore album, seriously damaged the band.

“Did Jimmy being sacked cripple the band?” says Corgan. “Oh, absolutely. I should’ve quit right then. Instead, I doubled-down on a bad situation, and it got worse. The band went into a Cold War vibe. People stopped talking. And with walking away from rock stylistically, I was burning my bridges.”

Billy Corgan recalls the making of each one of Smashing Pumpkins’ albums in the new issue of Uncut, dated October 2013, and out on Wednesday (August 28).

Photo: Paul Elledge

October 2013

Ipclee
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October 2013
A number of thoughtful readers have written recently to remind me it will be the 10th anniversary in September of Warren Zevon's death, not that I was likely to forget. I came slowly to his music, but then fell hard for it, Warren quickly occupying a high-ranking place in my personal pantheon, up t...

A number of thoughtful readers have written recently to remind me it will be the 10th anniversary in September of Warren Zevon’s death, not that I was likely to forget.

I came slowly to his music, but then fell hard for it, Warren quickly occupying a high-ranking place in my personal pantheon, up there with the more frequently acknowledged greats of American songwriting.

I actually have Peter Buck to thank for turning me on to him. In June 1985, I was in Athens to interview REM for a Melody Maker cover story, ahead of the release of Fables Of The Reconstruction. We were at a night shoot for a video the band were filming for “Can’t Get There From Here”. It was about 3am. Michael Stipe was asleep in a ditch. The film crew were packing up their gear. Mike Mills and Bill Berry had just split. Buck, meanwhile, was knocking back a beer and telling me, among other things, that in a couple of days, he, Bill and Mike would be on their way to Los Angeles to record an album with a singer-songwriter named Warren Zevon, who at the time was managed by an old college friend of Peter’s, Andrew Slater.

Warren Zevon! I was frankly shocked. At the time, Zevon for me was part of a discredited West Coast culture of cocaine and excess, self-regarding balladry and narcissistic wimpery, the kind of bollocks punk was meant to have killed off. I had a vague memory of seeing him, perhaps 10 years earlier, supporting Jackson Browne at London’s New Victoria Theatre. The only song I really knew of his was “Werewolves Of London”, which I took to be a novelty number.

Anyway, Peter listened to me rant and listens some more when I start ranting again, getting a second wind after becoming momentarily breathless. “Allan,” Buck said then. “Just listen to the fucking records and get back to me.” I told him I would and eventually did. Back in London, I began to track down Zevon’s back catalogue. There wasn’t much of it – just six albums at the time since his 1969 debut, Wanted Dead Or Alive. It took a few weeks but I found copies of Warren Zevon (1976), Excitable Boy (1978), Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School (1980) and The Envoy (1982). There was no sign anywhere , however, of his 1980 live album, Stand In The Fire, which I eventually discover, years later, in a second-hand store on Polk Street in San Francisco.

What I heard fair blew my mind. I had been expecting the winsome warbling of some flaxen-haired minstrel, and here was this apparent cross between Randy Newman and Lee Marvin – a sardonic songwriting genius with a legendary taste for vodka, guns and drugs. His talent, I discovered, was matched only by a capacity for self-destruction that had provoked one critic to describe him as “the Sam Peckinpah of rock’n’roll”, and it didn’t take long to find out why. Spread across those four albums were some of the most amazing songs I’d ever heard – toxic epics about headless machine-gunners, mercenaries, murder, Mexican revolutionaries, rough sex, rape, necrophilia, Elvis, baseball, heroin, heartbreak, incestuous hillbillies and hard-drinking losers.

I was hooked on them, as I would be on the albums that followed – among them the record he’d made with REM, one of his best, Sentimental Hygiene. There was a period when he didn’t record, but he was prolific towards the end, even making his masterpiece, The Wind, as he was dying.

The only time I met him was in September 1992, after a fantastic show at The Town & Country in Kentish Town. We made small talk in a dimly lit backstage corridor, Warren as well groomed as a Mafia don, politely listening to my fanboy blather. I mentioned that my wife, Stephanie, also a fan, had been looking forward to seeing him, but was ill at home. Would he sign something for her?
“Let’s do it,” he said. I gave him my ticket. He held it against the wall and started writing.
“Is it terminal?” he asked.
What?
“Your wife is ill,” he reminded me. “Has she got anything terminal?”
Uh, no… Why?
“Because I was just about to write ‘Get well soon’, and I didn’t
want to sound facetious,” he said, and with an unforgettable smile
and a brisk handshake he was gone.

ISSUE ON SALE FROM WEDNESDAY AUGUST 28

Uncut is now available as a digital edition, download it now

Watch footage from The Replacements first gig in 22 years

Uncut
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Watch footage from The Replacements first gig in 22 years
The Replacements played live for the first time in 22 years at the Toronto leg of alt-rock roadshow Riot Fest last night (August 25). Founding members Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson were joined in the band's reunion line-up by Josh Freese and Dave Minehan, who'd played in Westerberg's band previ...

The Replacements played live for the first time in 22 years at the Toronto leg of alt-rock roadshow Riot Fest last night (August 25).

Founding members Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson were joined in the band’s reunion line-up by Josh Freese and Dave Minehan, who’d played in Westerberg’s band previously.

Westerberg jokingly told the crowd, “Sorry it took us so long. For 25 years we’ve been having a wardrobe debate… unresolved.”. The band opened with “Takin’ a Ride,” the first song on their first album, Sorry, Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash, before rattling through 22 tracks including “Bastards Of Young”, “Can’t Hardly Wait”, “Swingin Party”, “Alex Chilton” and covers of Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and The Sham’s “Borstal Breakout”.

Click below to watch fan-shot footage of the band performing “Favorite Thing”.

The band currently have two more comeback gigs scheduled: at Riot Fest Chicago on September 15 and Riot Fest Denver on September 21.

The Replacements played:

‘Takin’ A Ride’

‘I’m In Trouble’

‘Favorite Thing’

‘Hangin’ Downtown’

‘Color Me Impressed’

‘Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out’

‘Kiss Me on the Bus’

‘Androgynous’

‘Achin’ to Be’

‘I Will Dare’

‘Love You Till Friday’

‘Maybellene’

‘Merry Go Round’

‘Wake Up’

‘Borstal Breakout’

‘Little Mascara’

‘Left Of The Dial’

‘Alex Chilton’

‘Swingin Party’

‘Can’t Hardly Wait’

‘Bastards of Young’

‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’

‘I.O.U.’

Otis Redding – The Complete Stax/Volt Singles Collection

Uncut
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Otis Redding – The Complete Stax/Volt Singles Collection

The soul legend's stunning career charted through is ever-evolving 45s... With his sweat-stained sharksin suits and his tireless cries of “gotta-gotta” and “sock it to me”, Otis Redding became a stereotype, even a caricature, almost as quickly he became famous. He was The Soul Singer: a template for all those Geno Washingtons who reduced his approach to a set of mannerisms. That’s the debit side, and it’s easily overshadowed by the contents of these three discs, which contain the A and B sides of every single released by the Stax family of labels during his lifetime and in the aftermath of his death. Together they present all the testimony anyone might need to demolish a belief that Redding was superior to his imitators only by a matter of degree – as well as some of the evidence for the prosecution. Redding was born in Macon, Georgia in 1941. While a schoolboy he sang in doo-wop groups and acquired a rudimentary ability on drums, piano and guitar before joining the Pinetoppers, a band led by the guitarist Johnny Jenkins, as the lead singer. By the time he cut his first sides in Memphis for Stax’s Volt subsidiary in 1962 he had already made his first recordings, for the small Finer Arts and Alshire labels during a trip to Los Angeles (where he washed cars to keep body and soul together) in 1960 and for Confederate in Macon the following year. His Stax/Volt debut, in October 1962, was with “These Arms Of Mine”, cut in the time left over at the end of an unsuccessful Jenkins session. His own composition, it was a model for the kind of country-soul ballad that would become the staple diet of southern soul singers for the remainder of the decade. Otis’s unaccompanied voice starts it off, quickly joined by doowop-ish piano triplets (almost certainly played by Booker T Jones), Johnny Jenkins’s guitar and the MGs’ rhythm team of bassist Lewis Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson Jr. So basic that it could have been recorded as a demo, it is distinguished by the restrained passion of Otis’s vocal performance and by the way the inherent rawness of his voice adds impact to the pleading of his delivery. The hint of emotional abandon on the fadeout provides a pre-echo of the never-ending crescendos to come. It scraped into the R&B Top 20 and the pop Hot 100, which for a little independent label represented a sign of hope. His next three A-sides – “That’s What My Heart Needs”, “Pain in My Heart” and “Come to Me” – were from much the same mould. “Pain in My Heart”, written by Aaron Neville, was the biggest success, gaining the accolade of a cover version on the Rolling Stones’ second album. Not until the release of the fourth single, “Security”, in April 1964, was Redding’s voice surrounded by the mature Stax sound, featuring the grainy Memphis Horns and Steve Cropper’s bluesy Fender Esquire in partnership with Duck Dunn’s bass and Al Jackson’s rat-tat-tat snare. His voice, too, was becoming more and more distinctive, his countryfied tone and diction offering an alternative to the urban sophistication of singers based in New York, Chicago and Detroit. The single barely crawled into the Hot 100, and with the next release, “Chained And Bound”, Otis returned to the formula of the early singles. But “Security” had laid the foundations for the release that finally established his name in the public mind. A Roosevelt Jamison ballad titled “That’s How Strong My Love Is” provided an early definition of Deep Soul and re-established him in the R&B charts, before the designated B-side, “Mr Pitiful”, stormed the discotheques, becoming easily his biggest hit to that point. Here is the Stax sound in its pomp: an opening horn fanfare, the chopping guitar, Dunn’s riffing bass, and a title borrowed from the nickname bestowed on Redding by an admiring radio DJ. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)”, jointly written by Otis and Jerry Butler, the former lead singer of the Impressions, dives even deeper into the dark waters of Deep Soul, and performed even better. Again Otis begins alone, as he had done on “These Arms Of Mine”, before the arrangement rises and falls through a series of distraught climaxes before going out with the singer whimpering over a blare of horns and Jackson’s implacable snare. Next came “Respect”. Released in August 1965, this may be one of the most significant pop records ever made, even though its memory was largely eclipsed two years later by Aretha Franklin’s remake. On the intro and the choruses Jackson uses his snare drum to emphasise all four beats of the bar, rather than just stressing the traditional backbeat, thus giving birth to the even four-on-the-floor rhythm that powered Northern Soul, disco and dance music all the way to Daft Punk. With the next single, “I Can’t Turn You Loose”, Redding started to turn into the caricature of a soul-singing wind-up doll, a process accelerated by a cover of the Stones’ “Satisfaction”, where the tempo became more hectic and the delivery more frantic, every hole filled by a “gotta-gotta”. This became Otis’s on-stage schtick, lapped up by soul fans who attended the Stax-Volt tour of Europe in 1967 and the hippies at the same year’s Monterey Pop Festival. Among the songs he performed at Monterey was “Try a Little Tenderness”, an elaborate arrangement of a 1930s standard that, in its studio-recorded 45rpm form, evolved from gospel-drenched soul ballad to arm-flailing stomper in 3min 20sec flat. Then came the pop hits with Carla Thomas – remakes of “Tramp” and “Knock On Wood” – and, on December 10, 1967, the plane crash outside Madison, Wisconsin, that killed him and five others. And straight away, with an almost unbearable poignancy, came the introspective “(Sittin’ On The) Dock Of The Bay”, a posthumous No 1 that presented a grieving world with a clue to the direction he might have taken, had he lived: a move away from the formulaic Mr Pitiful ballads and Love Man stompers towards a more varied, considered, sophisticated musical eloquence. Then again, in another posthumous hit from those final sessions, the gorgeous “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember”, he suggested that there might still be life left in the old tricks. Richard Williams

The soul legend’s stunning career charted through is ever-evolving 45s…

With his sweat-stained sharksin suits and his tireless cries of “gotta-gotta” and “sock it to me”, Otis Redding became a stereotype, even a caricature, almost as quickly he became famous. He was The Soul Singer: a template for all those Geno Washingtons who reduced his approach to a set of mannerisms. That’s the debit side, and it’s easily overshadowed by the contents of these three discs, which contain the A and B sides of every single released by the Stax family of labels during his lifetime and in the aftermath of his death. Together they present all the testimony anyone might need to demolish a belief that Redding was superior to his imitators only by a matter of degree – as well as some of the evidence for the prosecution.

Redding was born in Macon, Georgia in 1941. While a schoolboy he sang in doo-wop groups and acquired a rudimentary ability on drums, piano and guitar before joining the Pinetoppers, a band led by the guitarist Johnny Jenkins, as the lead singer. By the time he cut his first sides in Memphis for Stax’s Volt subsidiary in 1962 he had already made his first recordings, for the small Finer Arts and Alshire labels during a trip to Los Angeles (where he washed cars to keep body and soul together) in 1960 and for Confederate in Macon the following year.

His Stax/Volt debut, in October 1962, was with “These Arms Of Mine”, cut in the time left over at the end of an unsuccessful Jenkins session. His own composition, it was a model for the kind of country-soul ballad that would become the staple diet of southern soul singers for the remainder of the decade. Otis’s unaccompanied voice starts it off, quickly joined by doowop-ish piano triplets (almost certainly played by Booker T Jones), Johnny Jenkins’s guitar and the MGs’ rhythm team of bassist Lewis Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson Jr. So basic that it could have been recorded as a demo, it is distinguished by the restrained passion of Otis’s vocal performance and by the way the inherent rawness of his voice adds impact to the pleading of his delivery. The hint of emotional abandon on the fadeout provides a pre-echo of the never-ending crescendos to come.

It scraped into the R&B Top 20 and the pop Hot 100, which for a little independent label represented a sign of hope. His next three A-sides – “That’s What My Heart Needs”, “Pain in My Heart” and “Come to Me” – were from much the same mould. “Pain in My Heart”, written by Aaron Neville, was the biggest success, gaining the accolade of a cover version on the Rolling Stones’ second album.

Not until the release of the fourth single, “Security”, in April 1964, was Redding’s voice surrounded by the mature Stax sound, featuring the grainy Memphis Horns and Steve Cropper’s bluesy Fender Esquire in partnership with Duck Dunn’s bass and Al Jackson’s rat-tat-tat snare. His voice, too, was becoming more and more distinctive, his countryfied tone and diction offering an alternative to the urban sophistication of singers based in New York, Chicago and Detroit.

The single barely crawled into the Hot 100, and with the next release, “Chained And Bound”, Otis returned to the formula of the early singles. But “Security” had laid the foundations for the release that finally established his name in the public mind. A Roosevelt Jamison ballad titled “That’s How Strong My Love Is” provided an early definition of Deep Soul and re-established him in the R&B charts, before the designated B-side, “Mr Pitiful”, stormed the discotheques, becoming easily his biggest hit to that point. Here is the Stax sound in its pomp: an opening horn fanfare, the chopping guitar, Dunn’s riffing bass, and a title borrowed from the nickname bestowed on Redding by an admiring radio DJ.

“I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)”, jointly written by Otis and Jerry Butler, the former lead singer of the Impressions, dives even deeper into the dark waters of Deep Soul, and performed even better. Again Otis begins alone, as he had done on “These Arms Of Mine”, before the arrangement rises and falls through a series of distraught climaxes before going out with the singer whimpering over a blare of horns and Jackson’s implacable snare.

Next came “Respect”. Released in August 1965, this may be one of the most significant pop records ever made, even though its memory was largely eclipsed two years later by Aretha Franklin’s remake. On the intro and the choruses Jackson uses his snare drum to emphasise all four beats of the bar, rather than just stressing the traditional backbeat, thus giving birth to the even four-on-the-floor rhythm that powered Northern Soul, disco and dance music all the way to Daft Punk.

With the next single, “I Can’t Turn You Loose”, Redding started to turn into the caricature of a soul-singing wind-up doll, a process accelerated by a cover of the Stones’ “Satisfaction”, where the tempo became more hectic and the delivery more frantic, every hole filled by a “gotta-gotta”. This became Otis’s on-stage schtick, lapped up by soul fans who attended the Stax-Volt tour of Europe in 1967 and the hippies at the same year’s Monterey Pop Festival. Among the songs he performed at Monterey was “Try a Little Tenderness”, an elaborate arrangement of a 1930s standard that, in its studio-recorded 45rpm form, evolved from gospel-drenched soul ballad to arm-flailing stomper in 3min 20sec flat.

Then came the pop hits with Carla Thomas – remakes of “Tramp” and “Knock On Wood” – and, on December 10, 1967, the plane crash outside Madison, Wisconsin, that killed him and five others. And straight away, with an almost unbearable poignancy, came the introspective “(Sittin’ On The) Dock Of The Bay”, a posthumous No 1 that presented a grieving world with a clue to the direction he might have taken, had he lived: a move away from the formulaic Mr Pitiful ballads and Love Man stompers towards a more varied, considered, sophisticated musical eloquence. Then again, in another posthumous hit from those final sessions, the gorgeous “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember”, he suggested that there might still be life left in the old tricks.

Richard Williams

Alex Turner: “I would have called AM ‘Arctic Monkeys’ if we didn’t have such a ridiculous name”

Uncut
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Alex Turner: “I would have called AM ‘Arctic Monkeys’ if we didn’t have such a ridiculous name”
Alex Turner has told Uncut that he would have made the new Arctic Monkeys album self-titled, if the group didn’t have “such a ridiculous name”. The frontman, speaking in the new issue of Uncut, dated October 2013 and out on Wednesday (August 28), said that the band instead shortened the nam...

Alex Turner has told Uncut that he would have made the new Arctic Monkeys album self-titled, if the group didn’t have “such a ridiculous name”.

The frontman, speaking in the new issue of Uncut, dated October 2013 and out on Wednesday (August 28), said that the band instead shortened the name to AM, as it felt like it summed up the early morning vibe of the album.

“It sort of feels right where we should be,” Turner says. “It’s a new sound that we haven’t made before, so it kind of made sense to self-title it. Which I would have done, if we didn’t have such a ridiculous name.”

AM, which is reviewed in the new issue of Uncut, is the band’s fifth album and is released on September 9.

New trailer unveiled for Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis

Michael Bonner
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New trailer unveiled for Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coen Brothers have released a third trailer for their upcoming film, Inside Llewyn Davis. As I'm sure you know from previous reports, this is their inimitable take on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s. We've had a lot of fun trying to decipher what information about the film we can ...

The Coen Brothers have released a third trailer for their upcoming film, Inside Llewyn Davis. As I’m sure you know from previous reports, this is their inimitable take on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s.

We’ve had a lot of fun trying to decipher what information about the film we can from the previous, far shorter, trailer, and inevitably, we’ve been pontificating over what connection Llewyn himself might have to Bob Dylan. After all, we were struck by the use of a rare Dylan cut – “Farewell” – on the trailer’s soundtrack, plus visual references to the Freewheelin… sleeve and shots of Llewyn Davis crossing Jones Street, where that album cover was photographed.

Anyway, this latest trailer seems to suggest that a lot of the Dylan references we spotted first time round were, predictably for the Coens, a slight case of misdirection. We get to see a little more of the unfolding story here, and we also get a closer look at John Goodman‘s character, an old jazzer who seems to bear some passing resemblance to Dr John.

If you want to find out a little more about the film, then we’ve already posted a first look review of the film, from the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The film’s UK release date, meanwhile, is January 14, 2014…

To keep you going in the meantime, there’s a pile of related activity. The soundtrack itself is released on November 11, but before that, Jack White, Patti Smith and Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings are among the acts playing at a special event devised by the Coens and the film’s musical director, T Bone Burnett, in New York next month. That, I would like to see…

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

Lovelace

Michael Bonner
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Lovelace

Biopic of Deep Throat star... In 1972, Linda Boreman became briefly notorious as Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, an adult film that became a catalyst for swirling social and historical forces. The film was targeted by Nixon and the FBI, while its director, Gerry Damiano, became an unlikely counterculture hero, battling against charges of distributing obscene material. Allegedly funded by the Mafia, the film is reported to have grossed a staggering $600m – of which the star apparently saw only £1,250. Lovelace herself, meanwhile, became celebrated as the liberated girl next door until her autobiography, Ordeal, revealed her as the victim of her manager/husband, Chuck Trainor. A 2005 documentary, Inside Deep Throat, covered a lot of this ground, but Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have revisited Lovelace’s life for a full biopic, that while sympathetic lacks the nerve to fully detail the injustices she suffered at Trainor’s hands. We start with her oppressive childhood in working class Florida with her parents (Robert Patrick and – brilliant – Sharon Stone) from which she’s rescued by charming hustler Trainor (Peter Sarsgaard) and introduced to director Damiano (Hank Azaria), ushering in her career as the first bona fide porn star. Along the way, James Franco cameos as Hugh Hefner, and there are brisk turns from Chris Noth, Wes Bentley and Chloe Sevigny. Despite Epstein and Friedman’s decision to shoot key sequences of Linda’s story from different viewpoints – presumably to expose Trainor’s Machiavellian influence – and some excellent work from Amanda Seyfried in the lead, the film drifts too far into Boogie Nights territory, and seems less inclined to push to the meat of the story. As fine as Sarsgaard is as Trainor, you can’t help but wondering what, say, John Hawkes, or James Woods in his prime would have made of the role. Michael Bonner Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

Biopic of Deep Throat star…

In 1972, Linda Boreman became briefly notorious as Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, an adult film that became a catalyst for swirling social and historical forces.

The film was targeted by Nixon and the FBI, while its director, Gerry Damiano, became an unlikely counterculture hero, battling against charges of distributing obscene material. Allegedly funded by the Mafia, the film is reported to have grossed a staggering $600m – of which the star apparently saw only £1,250. Lovelace herself, meanwhile, became celebrated as the liberated girl next door until her autobiography, Ordeal, revealed her as the victim of her manager/husband, Chuck Trainor. A 2005 documentary, Inside Deep Throat, covered a lot of this ground, but Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have revisited Lovelace’s life for a full biopic, that while sympathetic lacks the nerve to fully detail the injustices she suffered at Trainor’s hands.

We start with her oppressive childhood in working class Florida with her parents (Robert Patrick and – brilliant – Sharon Stone) from which she’s rescued by charming hustler Trainor (Peter Sarsgaard) and introduced to director Damiano (Hank Azaria), ushering in her career as the first bona fide porn star. Along the way, James Franco cameos as Hugh Hefner, and there are brisk turns from Chris Noth, Wes Bentley and Chloe Sevigny. Despite Epstein and Friedman’s decision to shoot key sequences of Linda’s story from different viewpoints – presumably to expose Trainor’s Machiavellian influence – and some excellent work from Amanda Seyfried in the lead, the film drifts too far into Boogie Nights territory, and seems less inclined to push to the meat of the story. As fine as Sarsgaard is as Trainor, you can’t help but wondering what, say, John Hawkes, or James Woods in his prime would have made of the role.

Michael Bonner

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg – Album By Album

Andrew Mueller
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The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg – Album By Album
From Uncut’s July 2008 issue (Take 134): the group’s songwriter and frontman talks us through his mighty back catalogue ___________________ As Westerberg contemplates this year’s reissues of the magnificent records he made with The Replacements, he occupies a position at once enviabl...

From Uncut’s July 2008 issue (Take 134): the group’s songwriter and frontman talks us through his mighty back catalogue

___________________

As Westerberg contemplates this year’s reissues of the magnificent records he made with The Replacements, he occupies a position at once enviable and unjust. Though he’s one of the most influential musicians of the US post-punk era, Westerberg is no household name. “I remember,” he drawls down the line from Minneapolis, “sitting in with Steve Baker, president of Warner Bros, and he looked me in the eye and said: ‘What is it that you want?’ And I said, ‘I want to be bigger than REM.’ I could see his face sort of wither, and all but a tear come to his eye, as if to say, ‘It’s not gonna happen, ever, Paul.’ We changed the subject…”

___________________

THE REPLACEMENTS – SORRY MA, FORGOT TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH

(Twin Tone, 1981)

Minneapolitan friends Westerberg (guitar, vocals), Bob Stinson (guitar, died 1995), Tommy Stinson (bass, now of Guns N’ Roses) and Chris Mars (drums, now solo artist/painter) make unreconstructed debut for local label. Not quite punk, and not quite rock…

WESTERBERG: “This was the result of a manic phase. My mania tends to come quicker and leave faster now, but at this time, I was around 19 to 21, it came out of five years playing in basement groups that were going nowhere, and I realising that I had to grab this by the horns. They were called Dogbreath when I joined – they were kind of Chris’ band – which was just the worst name ever. We tossed a few others around. I suggested The Substitutes, but they pooh-poohed that, and we became The Impediments. We played one gig and the guy said you’ll never play here again, so we changed to The Replacements. They just had such energy. Punk was happening, but most bands were still lost in the Allmans, Jethro Tull etc. Then a guy across the street played us the Pistols, and I literally went home, cut my hair and broke records over my knee. The songs on Sorry Ma… hold up. It was definitely a showcase of the four of us as a rock’n’roll band. We wanted to be wild, with reckless abandon!”

THE REPLACEMENTS – LET IT BE

(Twin Tone, 1984)

Fourth studio release, and first certifiable classic. Westerberg grows in confidence as a balladeer on “Unsatisfied” and “Androgynous”, but “Gary’s Got A Boner” and a cover of Kiss’ “Black Diamond” prove they haven’t grown all the way up.

“I’d matured a bit. Enough to go back and listen to the records I didn’t break – the records I just stuck up the back of the rack – Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Dylan. We’d just come off touring ‘Stink’ and Hootenanny, and everyone else was hardcore, in black, deathly serious. We weren’t the loudest or the meanest, we weren’t the scariest, and I thought, ‘Well, we’re not gonna get anywhere down that path – perhaps we should try to craft songs that are a bit better than what we’ve been hearing.’ Writing songs like ‘Androgynous’ and ‘Answering Machine’ wasn’t difficult – I’d been tinkering with stuff like that early on. Presenting them to the group was. It was hard getting across the idea we should just put the best songs on the record, even if there wasn’t always a place for Bob to have a hot lead. Bob was the hard one to get to acquiesce. So the breakthrough LP ended up putting the chink in the armour of the idea of us as a four-piece rock band.”

THE REPLACEMENTS – PLEASED TO MEET ME

(Sire, 1987)

Officially a three-piece following the departure

of Bob Stinson, The Replacements record in Memphis with Big Star’s producer Jim Dickinson, and end up writing a song about Big Star’s singer (“Alex Chilton”). Also contains Paul Westerberg’s prettiest song, “Skyway” – a homage to the overhead footpaths of Minneapolis.

“The idea to send us to Memphis was Michael Hill’s at Sire. We always preferred to get out of town to make a record because of the hijinks. Later we realised that’s where we wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars. We first met Alex Chilton in New York, in between Let It Be and Tim, and he saw us one of those weird nights where we tried to play two songs at once. We cut some tracks with him in Minneapolis, some reissued or boot-legged, but then we signed with Sire, and they said no, we needed a proper producer. But I wrote the tribute to Alex, in my own stupid way. I think he was flattered. Certainly embarrassed. ‘Skyway’ is about waiting for the bus in the cold, when I had a job in a factory, watching the working ladies overhead, not giving me a second glance. ‘Pleased To Meet Me’ brought the three of us in the band very close [Bob Stinson had been sacked]. We were scared, as we didn’t know what to do – I think some of our best music came from that.”

THE REPLACEMENTS – DON’T TELL A SOUL

(Sire, 1989)

Possibly not helped by the fate-tempting title. A few hardcore ’Mats fans get sniffy about the glossy production, but nothing wrong with the songs. Failure of “We’ll Inherit The Earth” and “I’ll Be You” to become global hits is a mystery of Mary Celeste proportions.

“We were instructed to do so [make a breakthrough LP]. We started up in Woodstock, to keep us out of mischief. Trouble had started to find us. It was a question of, can we get the rhythm track down before someone falls over, but we’d still walk to the bar in town each night, and the results were chaotic. You come back next morning and listen to that 2am jam, and it’s like, well, this is rubbish. So they pulled in [producer] Matt Wallace, and we hit it off. It’s a really good record, but Warners had signed REM, and Sire had The Cult, and we were being pushed towards the latter. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. Did we want what REM had? We saw what REM did to make it. Other than their huge talent and personality, they went to every record outlet, every distributor, every radio station. We’d go and break out whiskey and go on radio and curse. We always thought the way to make it was to make great music and be exciting live. We shot ourselves in the foot.”

THE REPLACEMENTS – TIM

(Sire, 1985)

Perfect. First major label release – and last ’Mats LP to feature Stinson – contains two of Westerberg’s best back-of-a-beermat laments (“Here Comes A Regular”, “Swinging Party”), some of the most furious rock’n’roll they recorded (“Bastards Of Young”, “Left Of The Dial”) and still finds time for a triumphantly gratuitous dismissal of air hostesses (“Waitress In The Sky”). Or does it?

“‘Waitress In The Sky’ has been misconstrued since day one. It came from my sister, who was a flight attendant, and she used the phrase in disgust, explaining that she was treated like a waitress in the sky. So I took the role of the demanding bastard in the aeroplane who expects the flight attendant to be a nurse and a maid. Some took it as a slam, but it was me trying to speak through her experiences. Nobody ever threw a drink on me over it.

“Signing to a major didn’t seem a big thing. It wasn’t a goal when we started – all we wanted to do was get out of the basement and perform, and making records was secondary, and writing songs further down the line. See, I always wanted to be a lead guitar player. I was forced to become the singer because Bob was a better guitar player. And then I couldn’t sing other people’s songs, so I had to write my own. We didn’t sit down to make Tim a different record – these were just the songs I’d started to write. Three or four years of touring, and playing fast and very loud… at first it was a kick, and then it became a pain, almost like athletics more than rock’n’roll. We were drawing kind of a male audience, and we realised that girls preferred the slower songs, as simple as that.

“‘Left Of The Dial’ is about college radio, of course, as that’s where all our airplay came from, and it was colleges where we used to play. The irony that four guys, none of whom had a high school diploma, would play every college in America – ridiculous. It never dawned on us that the kids had to go study for their tests next day. So we ended up going to college in an odd kind of way.

“It wasn’t a harmonious recording, no. [Sire CEO] Seymour Stein sent Tommy [Ramone] out to Minneapolis to produce it, and it was a case of wanting to groom the singer and his songs, so not as much attention was paid to Bob. At that time Bob was drinking more than us, and his drug intake was getting pretty intense. It wasn’t like making the first record, where we’d all have a couple of belts and hit it live in the studio. It was hard for Bob to show up and have Tommy tell him, ‘We don’t need a lead part until later, and maybe not until tomorrow.’ And maybe he’d show up the next day and maybe he wouldn’t, so I’d play the solo on ‘Kiss Me On The Bus’, instead.

There was a conscious effort at writing songs for him to play on – ‘Dose Of Thunder’, things like that. It took the most time, and frankly we were bored. Bob was the quickest to get bored, and when he was, he was usually wasted. Not that the rest of weren’t, but it was tough.”

PAUL WESTERBERG – SUICAINE GRATIFICATION

(Capitol, 1999)

Recorded substantially in Westerberg’s basement, this is simply one of the great lost albums of the ’90s. And despite better reviews than penicillin, it sinks without trace. “Born For Me” becomes one of the tracks examined in Nick Hornby’s thoughtful critique 31 Songs.

“I’d done my last tour with a rock band, and it ended at an outdoor festival where every kid had learned from watching Green Day that we throw mud at performers. I got hit with a can or something, then played a slow blues for 10 minutes, and walked off. I’d just had it, and went into a deep depression for two years or so. These songs were written during that contemplation period – you know, what am I going to do with my life? I was reading a lot of Cocteau at the time – that second song, with its idea of suicide being an act of self-defence, I lifted from one of his poems. I felt lost and empty. I’d had a rock band, but my rock band was over. It felt like a catharsis when the record came out, but part of the tragic perfection of it all was that as it was being mastered, Gary Gersh, the head of Capitol who’d signed me, left the company. So the man who championed me was given the boot the day my record was finished. So it was flushed down the crapper.”

GRANDPA BOY – THE DEAD MAN SHAKE

(Fat Possum, 2003)

An arch new band name, but, musically, almost a full-circle return to the garages of Westerberg’s youth. Resolutely lo-fi home-cooked punk rock is leavened with telling covers (Hank Williams, John Prine), and some songs end suddenly just because the tape runs out…

“The name is an assessment of how I felt about myself – like an old man, as far as rock’n’roll was concerned, a forgotten relic. Yet when I turned the amp up and played that guitar, I still got that joy I did when I was 15. So this was me trying to be a Link Wray figure –they think they’re playing rock’n’roll? I’ll show ’em rock’n’roll. I started medication – anti-depressants – at that time, and it lifted me and cranked me up. I felt like rockin’. I’d made my I’m-gonna-kill-myself record, that was end of that phase, and I found myself up all night, painting leather clothes with spray paint, making stuffed mannequins and doing all sorts of other things I used to do when I was young – that first hit of anti-depressants was like taking speed when I was a kid. Whenever I start altering garments, look out, ’cos I’m getting ready to rock. I know people look down on it, but I must tell you that for my mother, who is over 80, that’s her favourite record I’ve ever made.”

PAUL WESTERBERG – OPEN SEASON

(Lost Highway, 2006)

In one of the least likely career moves ever, a commission to write an OST for an animated kids’ film inspires some of Westerberg’s best work, and a deserved second outing for “Good Day”, his tribute to the late Bob Stinson…

“Me and my manager were trying to gets songs placed in films. We stopped by Sony Pictures and met Lia Vollack. She said, ‘Can you write a song about a bear?’ So I went home and knocked out ‘The Right To Arm Bears’. I sent more songs, and they hired me to score the entire film. I was writing songs to barely moving sketches. They’d change the plot, so I’d have to change the words. If you listen closely to ‘Whisper Me Luck’, the last word is ‘Fuck’ – I had to get my little dig in after all the fucking around they did to me. Putting ‘Good Day’ on was hard. Me and Tommy played at the premiere, and I had to tell him that there’s this scene in the movie which is kind of sad, and it has ‘Good Day’ in it – which I wrote about his brother. He was in tears by the end of the movie, and he gave me a very warm embrace. The last time he’d held me like that was at Bob’s funeral. We both lost something when Bob died, and we never got it back. In a lot of ways Bob was just like that big mean bear, but really, he was a pussycat.”

Van Dyke Parks: “I’d call Harry Nilsson a genius… and by the way I haven’t met any others”

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Van Dyke Parks: “I’d call Harry Nilsson a genius… and by the way I haven’t met any others”
Van Dyke Parks talks about “genius” Nilsson in the new issue of Uncut, dated September 2013 and out now. Along with Chris Spedding, Bobby Keys, Herbie Flowers, Peter Frampton and more, Parks pays tribute to the late Harry Nilsson in a piece looking at his three brilliant, contrary early ’70...

Van Dyke Parks talks about “genius” Nilsson in the new issue of Uncut, dated September 2013 and out now.

Along with Chris Spedding, Bobby Keys, Herbie Flowers, Peter Frampton and more, Parks pays tribute to the late Harry Nilsson in a piece looking at his three brilliant, contrary early ’70s records.

“He was the smartest person I ever met in the music business,” says Van Dyke Parks. “He was operating at the highest creative level imaginable. I wouldn’t call him a musical genius – I’d just call him a genius. And by the way, I haven’t met any others.

“He redefined what a song could do, with incredible intimacy: beautiful and consoling and illuminating and clear.”

The new issue of Uncut is out now.

The Alan Lomax Archive posted online

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The Alan Lomax Archive posted online
The Alan Lomax Archive has been made available online by the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in the 1980s. According to a report on NPR.org, over 17,400 sound recordings have digitized and posted online by the Association. Working from the 1930s to the Nin...

The Alan Lomax Archive has been made available online by the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in the 1980s.

According to a report on NPR.org, over 17,400 sound recordings have digitized and posted online by the Association.

Working from the 1930s to the Nineties, Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Speaking to NPR.org, Don Fleming, executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, said, “For the first time, everything that we’ve digitized of Alan’s field recording trips are online, on our website. It’s every take, all the way through. False takes, interviews, music.”

“Alan would have been thrilled to death. He would’ve just been so excited,” says Anna Lomax Wood, Lomax’s daughter and president of the Association for Cultural Equity. “He would try everything. Alan was a person who looked to all the gambits you could. But the goal was always the same.”

You can access The Alan Lomax Archive here.

Picture credit: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

David Crosby on new album, CSNY and Neil Young tour cancellation

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David Crosby on new album, CSNY and Neil Young tour cancellation
David Crosby has spoken about plans for his forthcoming solo album, the long-delayed CSNY 1974 live album and his current relationship with Neil Young. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Crosby has explained that his new solo album has been co-written, co-produced and arranged by his son, James: "...

David Crosby has spoken about plans for his forthcoming solo album, the long-delayed CSNY 1974 live album and his current relationship with Neil Young.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Crosby has explained that his new solo album has been co-written, co-produced and arranged by his son, James: “It’s different than anything I’ve ever done. I’ve always wanted to hear the band instrumentals in the same kind of place where I wanted the vocals. I wanted to make something experimental and out there, and this time I got it. I think I’m going to call it Dangerous Night.”

Crosby’s other major project is the CSNY live album recorded on the band’s 1974 tour, which was originally scheduled to come out this month and is now reported to be coming next spring.

“We had a different opinion of what standards the audio comes to,” explains Crosby. “Neil, of course, was demanding that 96 wasn’t good enough and we had to go up to 192. And so we did. I mean, if you’re making a record with four people you have to take them all into account. Neil has been on this crusade every since Apple did the MP3 for iTunes. He wanted to have Steve Jobs shot. He hates MP3. You can’t even say the word ‘MP3’ in front of him. Steam will come out of his ears. He’s a bit of a nut about it, but I get where he’s coming from.”

Crosby also addressed the recent Neil Young & Crazy Horse tour cancellations, due to an ongoing injury to guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro‘s hand.

“I just talked to Neil yesterday,” says Crosby. “He feels real bad for Poncho… I have so much respect for Neil because he always follows his muse. It’s often counter to what I want, because, because I want to work with him. But I also want him to follow his muse. I want him playing music that excites him right that minute. And if that includes me, that’s wonderful. If it doesn’t, that’s wonderful too. He’s still making great music and still tries to push the envelope. Sometimes he succeeds, something he makes Trans.”

Luxury Rolls Royce belonging to John Entwistle goes up for auction

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Luxury Rolls Royce belonging to John Entwistle goes up for auction

A luxury Rolls-Royce specially customised for the The Who's late bassist John Entwistle has been put up for auction. The brown-coloured 1980 Silver Shadow was especially converted from a standard saloon into a makeshift estate by a private engineer so Entwistle had room to get his Irish wolfhound dogs in the back. After the late bassist died from a heart attack in Las Vegas in 2002 the vehicle was sold by his family to a Scottish laird who has now decided to put it up for auction. A spokesman for Bonhams, which is handling the sale, told the Daily Mail: "There was never an official factory-bodied estate version of the Shadow but that did not deter those wealthy enough from commissioning their own. "The car has been kept at an estate in Perthshire, Scotland where it was mainly used for grouse shooting, and has been garage stored in a "bubble" to maintain ideal air temperature." The vehicle, which has a 6,750cc V8 engine, cream leather upholstery and a mahogany dash and steering wheel, is expected to sell for between £12,000 and £16,000 when it goes under the hammer next month (September).

A luxury Rolls-Royce specially customised for the The Who’s late bassist John Entwistle has been put up for auction.

The brown-coloured 1980 Silver Shadow was especially converted from a standard saloon into a makeshift estate by a private engineer so Entwistle had room to get his Irish wolfhound dogs in the back. After the late bassist died from a heart attack in Las Vegas in 2002 the vehicle was sold by his family to a Scottish laird who has now decided to put it up for auction.

A spokesman for Bonhams, which is handling the sale, told the Daily Mail: “There was never an official factory-bodied estate version of the Shadow but that did not deter those wealthy enough from commissioning their own.

“The car has been kept at an estate in Perthshire, Scotland where it was mainly used for grouse shooting, and has been garage stored in a “bubble” to maintain ideal air temperature.”

The vehicle, which has a 6,750cc V8 engine, cream leather upholstery and a mahogany dash and steering wheel, is expected to sell for between £12,000 and £16,000 when it goes under the hammer next month (September).

The Band reveal track listing for four-CD live set

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The Band reveal track listing for four-CD live set
The Band are to release a new four-CD and DVD collection, titled Live At The Academy Of Music 1971, on October 7 through Universal Music Catalogue. The set consists of four concerts The Band played at New York City’s Academy Of Music in the final weeks of 1971, and feature a surprise guest appear...

The Band are to release a new four-CD and DVD collection, titled Live At The Academy Of Music 1971, on October 7 through Universal Music Catalogue.

The set consists of four concerts The Band played at New York City’s Academy Of Music in the final weeks of 1971, and feature a surprise guest appearance from Bob Dylan at the New Year’s Eve show.

Select highlights from the concerts were previously compiled for The Band’s 1972 double LP, Rock Of Ages.

The new collection features new stereo and 5.1 Surround mixes, including 19 previously unreleased performances and newly discovered footage of two songs filmed by Howard Alk and Murray Lerner.

Discs 1 and 2 feature performances of every song played over the course of the four concerts, while discs 3 and 4 feature the soundboard mix for the entire New Year’s Eve show. Disc 5 consists of a DVD of the tracks from discs 1 and 2 in 5.1 Surround, plus Alk and Lerner’s filmed performances of “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” and “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show”.

The set will be released in a deluxe, 48-page hardbound book with previously unseen photos, a reproduction of Rolling Stone’s original Rock Of Ages review, an essay by Robbie Robertson, and appreciations of The Band and the set’s recordings by Jim James and Mumford & Sons.

The first two discs will also be released as a 2CD set.

Says Robertson, “We were in a huddle of playing music, enjoying what we were doing, and I had a feeling, ‘We should capture this.’ To end 1971 with these shows felt, for all of us, like the right thing to do. This is a fulfillment of that extraordinary musical experience that I feel great about sharing.”

Of the set’s complete New Year’s Eve recording, Robertson says, “This is like being there. It was the final night; there was a thrill in the air. We were excited about New Year’s Eve, and then Dylan joined us for the encore. When he came out, we thought we could wing it, and wing it we did. We thought, ‘We’re not gonna fall off this wire.’ That whole night had a bit of magic to it.”

The tracklisting is:

Disc: 1

The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show (Friday, December 31)

The Shape I’m In (Friday, December 31)

Caledonia Mission (Thursday, December 30)

Don’t Do It (Wednesday, December 29)

Stage Fright (Friday, December 31)

I Shall Be Released (Thursday, December 30)

Up On Cripple Creek (Thursday, December 30)

This Wheel’s On Fire (Wednesday, December 29)

Strawberry Wine (Tuesday, December 28) [previously unreleased]

King Harvest (Has Surely Come) (Friday, December 31)

Time To Kill (Tuesday, December 28)

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (Wednesday, December 29)

Across The Great Divide (Thursday, December 30)

Disc: 2

Life Is A Carnival (Thursday, December 30)

Get Up Jake (Thursday, December 30)

Rag Mama Rag (Friday, December 31)

Unfaithful Servant (Friday, December 31)

The Weight (Thursday, December 30)

Rockin’ Chair (Wednesday, December 29)

Smoke Signal (Tuesday, December 28)

The Rumor (Thursday, December 30)

The Genetic Method (Friday, December 31)

Chest Fever (Tuesday, December 28)

(I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes (Wednesday, December 29)

Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever (Wednesday, December 29)

Down In The Flood (The Band with Bob Dylan) (Friday, December 31)

When I Paint My Masterpiece (The Band with Bob Dylan) (Friday, December 31)

Don’t Ya Tell Henry (The Band with Bob Dylan) (Friday, December 31)

Like A Rolling Stone (The Band with Bob Dylan) (Friday, December 31)

Disc: 3

New Year’s Eve At The Academy Of Music 1971 (The Soundboard Mix)

Up On Cripple Creek [previously unreleased]

The Shape I’m In

The Rumor [previously unreleased]

Time To Kill [previously unreleased]

Rockin’ Chair [previously unreleased]

This Wheel’s On Fire [previously unreleased]

Get Up Jake [previously unreleased]

Smoke Signal [previously unreleased]

I Shall Be Released [previously unreleased]

The Weight [previously unreleased]

Stage Fright

Disc: 4

New Year’s Eve At The Academy Of Music 1971 (The Soundboard Mix)

Life Is A Carnival [previously unreleased]

King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

Caledonia Mission [previously unreleased]

The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down [previously unreleased]

Across The Great Divide [previously unreleased]

Unfaithful Servant

Don’t Do It [previously unreleased]

The Genetic Method

Chest Fever [previously unreleased]

Rag Mama Rag

(I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes [previously unreleased]

Down In The Flood (with Bob Dylan)

When I Paint My Masterpiece (with Bob Dylan)

Don’t Ya Tell Henry (with Bob Dylan)

Like A Rolling Stone (with Bob Dylan)

Disc 5 [DVD]

Live At The Academy Of Music 1971 in 5.1 Surround Sound

The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

The Shape I’m In

Caledonia Mission

Don’t Do It

Stage Fright

I Shall Be Released

Up On Cripple Creek

The Wheel’s On Fire

Strawberry Wine [previously unreleased]

King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

Time To Kill

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Across The Great Divide

Life Is A Carnival

Get Up Jake

Rag Mama Rag

Unfaithful Servant

The Weight

Rockin’ Chair

Smoke Signal

The Rumor

The Genetic Method

Chest Fever

(I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes

Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever

Archival Film Clips – December 30, 1971

King Harvest (Has Surely Come) [previously unreleased]

The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show [previously unreleased]

Nirvana’s original $600 record contract with Sub Pop appears online

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Nirvana’s original $600 record contract with Sub Pop appears online
Sub Pop have posted Nirvana's original record contract with the label on Tumblr - click here to see it. The contract confirms that Nirvana signed with the label for an initial advance of just $600 (£380), which Sub Pop describes drily as "six hundred bucks well spent – not that we had it at the ...

Sub Pop have posted Nirvana’s original record contract with the label on Tumblr – click here to see it.

The contract confirms that Nirvana signed with the label for an initial advance of just $600 (£380), which Sub Pop describes drily as “six hundred bucks well spent – not that we had it at the time”. The agreement is between Sub Pop and the band’s then line-up of Kurt Cobain, Jason Everman, Chad Channing and Krist Novoselic, whose name is written incorrectly as “Chris”.

The contract isn’t dated but stipulates that Nirvana’s agreement with Sub Pop will begin on January 1, 1989. Dave Grohl didn’t join the band until 1990.

Although the contract states that Nirvana will receive an advance of just $600 for their initial one year term, it also confirms that the band would receive larger advances of $12,000 (£7,650) for the first option year and $24,000 (£15,300) for the second option year.

The contract is for “three complete album length master tapes” but Nirvana would end up releasing just one LP on Sub Pop, their 1989 debut Bleach.

A remastered version of their third studio album, In Utero, is being released to mark its 20th anniversary on September 23. It will feature 70 tracks, including previously unreleased recordings and demos, B-sides and compilation tracks and live material featuring the band’s final touring line-up of Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl and Pat Smear.

Beatles fan plans to clone John Lennon using DNA from tooth

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Beatles fan plans to clone John Lennon using DNA from tooth

Dentist and Beatles fan Daniel Zuk has said that he plan to clone John Lennon using the DNA from one of the late musician's teeth. Zuk bought Lennon's tooth for £20,000 at auction in 2011. He told The Sun: "If scientists think they can clone mammoths, then John Lennon could be next. To say I had a small part in bringing back one of rock's greatest stars would be mind-blowing." He continued: "I'm nervous and excited at the possibility we will be able to fully sequence John Lennon's DNA, very soon I hope. Many Beatles fans remember where they were when they heard John Lennon was shot. I hope they also live to hear the day he got another chance." Zuk, who is based in Edmonton in Canada, bought the tooth from the son of Lennon's former housekeeper, Dot Jarlett, after it was removed in the late 1960s.

Dentist and Beatles fan Daniel Zuk has said that he plan to clone John Lennon using the DNA from one of the late musician’s teeth.

Zuk bought Lennon’s tooth for £20,000 at auction in 2011. He told The Sun: “If scientists think they can clone mammoths, then John Lennon could be next. To say I had a small part in bringing back one of rock’s greatest stars would be mind-blowing.”

He continued: “I’m nervous and excited at the possibility we will be able to fully sequence John Lennon’s DNA, very soon I hope. Many Beatles fans remember where they were when they heard John Lennon was shot. I hope they also live to hear the day he got another chance.”

Zuk, who is based in Edmonton in Canada, bought the tooth from the son of Lennon’s former housekeeper, Dot Jarlett, after it was removed in the late 1960s.

Elmore Leonard remembered

Michael Bonner
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Elmore Leonard remembered

We only interviewed Elmore Leonard once in Uncut. This was around the release of Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Leonard’s novel Rum Punch; coincidentally, Leonard also had a new novel out at the same time, Cuba Libre. At that point – spring 1998 – around 17 of his novels had been turned into films, few of them satisfactorily. But Leonard seemed sanguine about the whole business, and during the Uncut interview, he offered some dry observations about Hollywood and some of the directors and actors he’d had meetings with over the years, including Sam Peckinpah, Bruce Willis, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. Few of these meetings had been particularly successful: “I didn’t know what he was talking about most of the time,” he said of Peckinpah. “I don’t think he and I would have worked together very well anyway. My sense of humour isn’t anything like his was – his was like a punch in the mouth. Mine’s a lot more subtle.” Taking about Hoffman, he said, "He had a reputation of looking at something for a long time and then not going with it. We would change things around – in the book, he falls in love with a 50 year old woman. He'd say, 'I can't fall in love with a 50 year old woman, who is going to play the part? There isn't a good-looking woman in Hollywood that's 50 years old.'" Looking back on his 30-year involvement with the film business, Leonard said, “I was never in the position of having a director who really understood the work that I’m trying to do and saw the humour in it. I emphasise characters that are kind of dumb/funny in what they say – but they’re all serious.” It's true enough - not many directors seemed to get under Leonard's skin, or get close to his extraordinary tradecraft or his take on humanity. But Uncut met Leonard at the moment where Hollywood finally caught up with the author. Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shortly and Tarantino’s Jackie Brown had just come out and round the corner was Stephen Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight. They were enough, I guess, to finally wipe the memories of the Ryan O’Neal version of The Big Bounce and Burt Reynolds’ Stick – the latter film Leonard held in cheerful disregard. “I thought Burt Reynolds would be good for the character,” he told us, “but he insisted on directing the picture. With a stronger director, it might have worked but he was a little too slick, it wasn’t real enough for me.” That’s not to say that previous adaptations of Leonard’s books were completely without merit – there’s a lot to commend some of the films of his Western novels, especially The Tall T, Hombre, Valdez Is Coming and both versions of 3:10 To Yuma. And let’s not forget Justified, too: a TV series that’s made good use from his source material. Of the films that were never made, but optioned, I would have liked to have seen Don Cheadle’s Tishomingo Blues, or the Coen Brothers’ Cuba Libre. I'm looking forward to Life Of Crime, an adaptation of his 1978 novel The Switch, starring John Hawkes and Mos Def, which is due to open at the Toronto Film Festival next month. On reflection, it’s strange that we only interviewed Leonard once in Uncut. We spoke to many authors over the years – Richard Price, Carl Hiaasen, Denis Johnson, James Ellroy, Martin Amis, even John le Carre – but it strikes me that Leonard was the author who felt most “Uncut”, if you know what I mean. His novels seemed to feed into all the various aspects of the magazine: the kind of films we wrote about, of course, but you could also detect his influence in a lot of the music we championed in Uncut, especially early on. Anyway, I thought I’d leave you with some clips - one from Leonard himself, dispensing his rules for writing, and the rest from the movie adaptations of his books he did approve of. But before that, here's one final quote from the Uncut interview, where he is talking about some script doctoring on a Charles Bronson movie directed by John Sturges. It's not a great insight, or a particularly life-changing story, but it has a great pay-off line – just like many of Leonard's marvellous stories. "I had to add a fist fight, a gun fight and a love scene," he told us. "Sturges left to shoot another movie and I presented the scenes to the producer, Dino Di Laurentiis. He asked me what I was working on. I told him the story of 52 Pick Up and, as I did, his assistant translated it into Italian. It sounded a lot better." Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner. Elmore Leonard on writing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeZQl2nvnfM Hombre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJIiCUQdFx4 Valdez Is Coming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goeDGCcdd68 Get Shorty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNLaTtpovys Jackie Brown http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7HkBDNZV7s Out Of Sight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw6-UTGz2MM Photo credit Rex/Everett Collection

We only interviewed Elmore Leonard once in Uncut. This was around the release of Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Leonard’s novel Rum Punch; coincidentally, Leonard also had a new novel out at the same time, Cuba Libre.

At that point – spring 1998 – around 17 of his novels had been turned into films, few of them satisfactorily. But Leonard seemed sanguine about the whole business, and during the Uncut interview, he offered some dry observations about Hollywood and some of the directors and actors he’d had meetings with over the years, including Sam Peckinpah, Bruce Willis, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. Few of these meetings had been particularly successful: “I didn’t know what he was talking about most of the time,” he said of Peckinpah. “I don’t think he and I would have worked together very well anyway. My sense of humour isn’t anything like his was – his was like a punch in the mouth. Mine’s a lot more subtle.” Taking about Hoffman, he said, “He had a reputation of looking at something for a long time and then not going with it. We would change things around – in the book, he falls in love with a 50 year old woman. He’d say, ‘I can’t fall in love with a 50 year old woman, who is going to play the part? There isn’t a good-looking woman in Hollywood that’s 50 years old.'”

Looking back on his 30-year involvement with the film business, Leonard said, “I was never in the position of having a director who really understood the work that I’m trying to do and saw the humour in it. I emphasise characters that are kind of dumb/funny in what they say – but they’re all serious.” It’s true enough – not many directors seemed to get under Leonard’s skin, or get close to his extraordinary tradecraft or his take on humanity.

But Uncut met Leonard at the moment where Hollywood finally caught up with the author. Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shortly and Tarantino’s Jackie Brown had just come out and round the corner was Stephen Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight. They were enough, I guess, to finally wipe the memories of the Ryan O’Neal version of The Big Bounce and Burt Reynolds’ Stick – the latter film Leonard held in cheerful disregard. “I thought Burt Reynolds would be good for the character,” he told us, “but he insisted on directing the picture. With a stronger director, it might have worked but he was a little too slick, it wasn’t real enough for me.”

That’s not to say that previous adaptations of Leonard’s books were completely without merit – there’s a lot to commend some of the films of his Western novels, especially The Tall T, Hombre, Valdez Is Coming and both versions of 3:10 To Yuma. And let’s not forget Justified, too: a TV series that’s made good use from his source material. Of the films that were never made, but optioned, I would have liked to have seen Don Cheadle’s Tishomingo Blues, or the Coen Brothers’ Cuba Libre. I’m looking forward to Life Of Crime, an adaptation of his 1978 novel The Switch, starring John Hawkes and Mos Def, which is due to open at the Toronto Film Festival next month.

On reflection, it’s strange that we only interviewed Leonard once in Uncut. We spoke to many authors over the years – Richard Price, Carl Hiaasen, Denis Johnson, James Ellroy, Martin Amis, even John le Carre – but it strikes me that Leonard was the author who felt most “Uncut”, if you know what I mean. His novels seemed to feed into all the various aspects of the magazine: the kind of films we wrote about, of course, but you could also detect his influence in a lot of the music we championed in Uncut, especially early on.

Anyway, I thought I’d leave you with some clips – one from Leonard himself, dispensing his rules for writing, and the rest from the movie adaptations of his books he did approve of. But before that, here’s one final quote from the Uncut interview, where he is talking about some script doctoring on a Charles Bronson movie directed by John Sturges. It’s not a great insight, or a particularly life-changing story, but it has a great pay-off line – just like many of Leonard’s marvellous stories. “I had to add a fist fight, a gun fight and a love scene,” he told us. “Sturges left to shoot another movie and I presented the scenes to the producer, Dino Di Laurentiis. He asked me what I was working on. I told him the story of 52 Pick Up and, as I did, his assistant translated it into Italian. It sounded a lot better.”

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

Elmore Leonard on writing

Hombre

Valdez Is Coming

Get Shorty

Jackie Brown

Out Of Sight

Photo credit Rex/Everett Collection

Nilsson – The RCA Albums Collection

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Nilsson – The RCA Albums Collection

A second chance to go wild about Harry... While the stoned and tie-dyed hordes were overrunning the West Coast during 1967’s Summer Of Love, Harry Nilsson was holed up in Hollywood’s RCA Studios with Jefferson Airplane producer Rick Jarrard and an assortment of top LA session musicians working on his debut album. The 26-year-old was one of an elite coterie of literate, relatively short-haired iconoclasts that included Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks. These were the true radicals of the era, beholden to no trends or movements, each conjuring up his own visionary world while simultaneously keeping alive the values and conventions of American musical tradition from Stephen Foster to Tin Pan Alley. But even among these buttoned-down renegades, Nilsson stood apart, with his three-and-a-half octave vocal range and childlike sense of wonder, his refusal to be ingested into any genre or to perform in public. This studio rat was rock’s Wizard Of Oz, enchanting listeners from behind a shroud of mystery. He comes into focus as never before on The RCA Albums Collection, which contains the 14 LPs he recorded for the label between 1967 and ’77 in accurate reproductions of their original sleeves, adding 123 bonus tracks, 55 of them previously unissued, the whole of it filling 17 discs. That first album, Pandemonium Shadow Show, and the two that followed, 1968’s Aerial Ballet – containing his first hit, a shimmering cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” that was memorably used in the film Midnight Cowboy, along with his signature song “One” – and 1969’s Harry, form a pop trilogy as facile, melodious and inviting as the early works of McCartney and Elton John, while predating both by several years. Listening now to his wildly clever Beatles medley titled “You Can’t Do That” on the first album, followed two songs later by a spot-on cover of “She’s Leaving Home”, it’s easy to see why John and Paul named Nilsson as their favourite artist and favourite band during a 1968 press conference. He then threw three straight change-ups – Nilsson Sings Newman, his exquisite LP of Randy Newman songs, with Newman accompanying him on piano; the resolutely whimsical soundtrack to his animated TV movie The Point!; and Aerial Pandemonium Ballet, a radical reimagining of his first two albums – before aiming his next pitch right down the middle. For Nilsson Schmilsson, he cannily turned to commercially successful producer Richard Perry, resulting in his best-selling album and lone chart-topping single, a nearly operatic rendering of Badfinger’s “Without You”. Schmilsson streamlined the qualities of his earlier records, presenting them more directly, alternately appealing to the listener’s heart (“I’ll Never Leave You”), head (“Gotta Get Up”), sense of rhythm (“Jump Into The Fire”), sense of whimsy (“The Moonbeam Song”) and funny bone (“Coconut”). But on 1972’s Son Of Schmilsson, the follow-up to his biggest commercial success, he began the pattern of self-sabotage that beset his later work in what some critics saw as an act of self-loathing, like a petulant child carefully making a series of drawings, only to scribble all over them. The abrupt shift in tone and intent was exemplified by the refrain of “You’re Breakin’ My Heart” (“…so fuck you”) and the close-mic’d belch that opens the kickass rocker “At My Front Door”. To be sure, the LP has its share of Nilsson’s trademark romantic/ironic refinement, including the gorgeously elegiac “Remember (Christmas)” and the Newman-like ballad “Turn On Your Radio”, but bad-boy humour and hardcore cynicism drive most of the songs and performances. The change transformed Nilsson almost at once from a major recording artist into an oddity – a sideshow to the main stage of popular music. A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night (1973) – his sublime album of standards, arranged by Sinatra stalwart Gordon Jenkins and produced by Nilsson’s Beatles connection Derek Taylor – gave way to the confused, largely abrasive Lennon-produced collaboration Pussy Cats, recorded during the ex-Beatle’s 18-month “lost weekend” in LA, his once-angelic voice sounding ravaged by the abuse he put it through. Then came Duit On Mon Dei, an album’s worth of largely uninspired originals, which arranger Van Dyke Parks ornamented with the requisite marimbas and steel drums. Two more wayward and maddeningly self-indulgent albums in Sandman (1975) and …That’s The Way It Is (1976) followed. Owing RCA one more album, Nilsson pulled himself together, reined in his latter-day tendency to go off the deep end lyrically and vocally, and made the most accessible, least off-putting LP since Schmilsson. Knnillssonn’s 10 songs were self-written, their keys comfortably in his mid-range where the vocal damage was less apparent, the arrangements centred on elegant strings. The overtly romantic “All I Think About Is You”, the achingly candid “I Never Thought I’d Get This Lonely”, the big-hearted, irony-free “Perfect Day”, were genuinely beautiful, and he sang them with the understated sophistication he’d perversely abandoned four years earlier. But this inviting, sophisticated and redeeming record appeared too late for RCA, for the fans he’d let down and for his career as a whole, the wayward years in effect eradicating the collective memory of the great ones. Nilsson died of a massive heart attack in 1994 at the age of 54, having recorded nothing of note after leaving RCA. But he left an enormous amount of music in those 10 years, the bulk of it gathered in this much-needed career overview of the forgotten solipsistic genius of rock’s golden age, in which the strike-outs turn out to be as fascinating as the home runs. Extras: Demos, alternate takes, single mixes, outtakes, mono versions, Italian-language versions, studio banter, radio spots. Bud Scoppa Photo credit: Tom Hanley

A second chance to go wild about Harry…

While the stoned and tie-dyed hordes were overrunning the West Coast during 1967’s Summer Of Love, Harry Nilsson was holed up in Hollywood’s RCA Studios with Jefferson Airplane producer Rick Jarrard and an assortment of top LA session musicians working on his debut album. The 26-year-old was one of an elite coterie of literate, relatively short-haired iconoclasts that included Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks.

These were the true radicals of the era, beholden to no trends or movements, each conjuring up his own visionary world while simultaneously keeping alive the values and conventions of American musical tradition from Stephen Foster to Tin Pan Alley. But even among these buttoned-down renegades, Nilsson stood apart, with his three-and-a-half octave vocal range and childlike sense of wonder, his refusal to be ingested into any genre or to perform in public. This studio rat was rock’s Wizard Of Oz, enchanting listeners from behind a shroud of mystery. He comes into focus as never before on The RCA Albums Collection, which contains the 14 LPs he recorded for the label between 1967 and ’77 in accurate reproductions of their original sleeves, adding 123 bonus tracks, 55 of them previously unissued, the whole of it filling 17 discs.

That first album, Pandemonium Shadow Show, and the two that followed, 1968’s Aerial Ballet – containing his first hit, a shimmering cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” that was memorably used in the film Midnight Cowboy, along with his signature song “One” – and 1969’s Harry, form a pop trilogy as facile, melodious and inviting as the early works of McCartney and Elton John, while predating both by several years. Listening now to his wildly clever Beatles medley titled “You Can’t Do That” on the first album, followed two songs later by a spot-on cover of “She’s Leaving Home”, it’s easy to see why John and Paul named Nilsson as their favourite artist and favourite band during a 1968 press conference.

He then threw three straight change-ups – Nilsson Sings Newman, his exquisite LP of Randy Newman songs, with Newman accompanying him on piano; the resolutely whimsical soundtrack to his animated TV movie The Point!; and Aerial Pandemonium Ballet, a radical reimagining of his first two albums – before aiming his next pitch right down the middle. For Nilsson Schmilsson, he cannily turned to commercially successful producer Richard Perry, resulting in his best-selling album and lone chart-topping single, a nearly operatic rendering of Badfinger’s “Without You”. Schmilsson streamlined the qualities of his earlier records, presenting them more directly, alternately appealing to the listener’s heart (“I’ll Never Leave You”), head (“Gotta Get Up”), sense of rhythm (“Jump Into The Fire”), sense of whimsy (“The Moonbeam Song”) and funny bone (“Coconut”).

But on 1972’s Son Of Schmilsson, the follow-up to his biggest commercial success, he began the pattern of self-sabotage that beset his later work in what some critics saw as an act of self-loathing, like a petulant child carefully making a series of drawings, only to scribble all over them. The abrupt shift in tone and intent was exemplified by the refrain of “You’re Breakin’ My Heart” (“…so fuck you”) and the close-mic’d belch that opens the kickass rocker “At My Front Door”. To be sure, the LP has its share of Nilsson’s trademark romantic/ironic refinement, including the gorgeously elegiac “Remember (Christmas)” and the Newman-like ballad “Turn On Your Radio”, but bad-boy humour and hardcore cynicism drive most of the songs and performances. The change transformed Nilsson almost at once from a major recording artist into an oddity – a sideshow to the main stage of popular music.

A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night (1973) – his sublime album of standards, arranged by Sinatra stalwart Gordon Jenkins and produced by Nilsson’s Beatles connection Derek Taylor – gave way to the confused, largely abrasive Lennon-produced collaboration Pussy Cats, recorded during the ex-Beatle’s 18-month “lost weekend” in LA, his once-angelic voice sounding ravaged by the abuse he put it through. Then came Duit On Mon Dei, an album’s worth of largely uninspired originals, which arranger Van Dyke Parks ornamented with the requisite marimbas and steel drums.

Two more wayward and maddeningly self-indulgent albums in Sandman (1975) and …That’s The Way It Is (1976) followed. Owing RCA one more album, Nilsson pulled himself together, reined in his latter-day tendency to go off the deep end lyrically and vocally, and made the most accessible, least off-putting LP since Schmilsson. Knnillssonn’s 10 songs were self-written, their keys comfortably in his mid-range where the vocal damage was less apparent, the arrangements centred on elegant strings. The overtly romantic “All I Think About Is You”, the achingly candid “I Never Thought I’d Get This Lonely”, the big-hearted, irony-free “Perfect Day”, were genuinely beautiful, and he sang them with the understated sophistication he’d perversely abandoned four years earlier. But this inviting, sophisticated and redeeming record appeared too late for RCA, for the fans he’d let down and for his career as a whole, the wayward years in effect eradicating the collective memory of the great ones.

Nilsson died of a massive heart attack in 1994 at the age of 54, having recorded nothing of note after leaving RCA. But he left an enormous amount of music in those 10 years, the bulk of it gathered in this much-needed career overview of the forgotten solipsistic genius of rock’s golden age, in which the strike-outs turn out to be as fascinating as the home runs.

Extras: Demos, alternate takes, single mixes, outtakes, mono versions, Italian-language versions, studio banter, radio spots.

Bud Scoppa

Photo credit: Tom Hanley

ELP’s Carl Palmer: “Black Sabbath wanted me to replace Bill Ward”

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ELP’s Carl Palmer: “Black Sabbath wanted me to replace Bill Ward”

Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Carl Palmer<.strong> has revealed that he turned the chance to become Black Sabbath's drummer when they reformed in 2011. Palmer, who is also a member of Asia, said he was approached by guitarist Tony Iommi to join the band when they got back together two years ago after original drummer Bill Ward refused to come on board. He told WENN: "Tony and I did talk when they were looking for drummers to make the album and he put me forward. I couldn't do it because I was off with Asia, we were touring and then something else came up. I couldn't have done it but I would have loved to. It just wasn't on the cards." Palmer added: "I was classically trained but basically I'm a rock drummer and I've never been in a true out-and-out guitar band like Black Sabbath, where it's just big riffs - very simple but very dynamic. It would be extremely invigorating. The older I get the more I appreciate that music. I was late to come to heavy metal. Asia had a bit of that but we were a little bit more corporate rock and melodic."

Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Carl Palmer<.strong> has revealed that he turned the chance to become Black Sabbath‘s drummer when they reformed in 2011.

Palmer, who is also a member of Asia, said he was approached by guitarist Tony Iommi to join the band when they got back together two years ago after original drummer Bill Ward refused to come on board.

He told WENN: “Tony and I did talk when they were looking for drummers to make the album and he put me forward. I couldn’t do it because I was off with Asia, we were touring and then something else came up. I couldn’t have done it but I would have loved to. It just wasn’t on the cards.”

Palmer added: “I was classically trained but basically I’m a rock drummer and I’ve never been in a true out-and-out guitar band like Black Sabbath, where it’s just big riffs – very simple but very dynamic. It would be extremely invigorating. The older I get the more I appreciate that music. I was late to come to heavy metal. Asia had a bit of that but we were a little bit more corporate rock and melodic.”

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