Be Back In A Few

I'm going to be out of town for a few days, so my already sporadic posting will seem even more so. In the meantime, have a look around...

Labels: no music, travel

posted by aikin @ 10:18 AM 0 Comments

Duty Calls

Hey everyone -
I'm sure you've all heard about the onslaught of flooding left by Tropical Storm Fay as she lingered around the Florida area. Here in Miami we were particularly fortunate to have only seen a little rain and a little bit of wind.

Anyway, I'm called away on a work-related emergency trip to the harder hit areas in north Florida. I'm bringing my laptop, but I can't say that I'll have time for any serious posting. I will if I can, but I can't promise!

Stick with me and check back. At the very latest, I should resume posting by Sunday.

Be safe!

Labels: current events, no music, travel

posted by aikin @ 12:45 PM 1 Comments

Deutschpunk

Hey friends and neighbors! I made it back. I’ve actually been home since Sunday, but I needed a couple of days to decompress and get back into the day-to-day groove. Or rut – whichever.

Berlin was awesome. I saw a lot of very interesting and historic-type stuff. I met a few cool people. And, all in all, I had a good time. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you care to see a few pictures, I’ve put some on my MySpace space. Scenery-type pictures. You’re not going to see any evidence of any drunken misadventures.

I picked up a couple of CDs while I was there, of course. The record stores I went into were much like indie record stores in the U.S. They actually carried a lot of the same stuff. I tried looking for alternative European releases, but couldn’t come up with anything that I hadn’t heard already.

Once I exhausted all of that, I thought I’d have a go at local (“local” in this case meaning “German”) music. I’m a big fan of the beer hall music, but only in a beer hall, so I decided not to buy any of that. A section I figured would be interesting to browse was German punk.

The German language, while lovely coming from a blond-haired, blue-eyed fräulein, can also sound harsh and guttural, which makes for an excellent punk language. I found a 1989 compilation titled Deutsch Punk Kampflieder (which I think translates to “German Punk Combat Songs”). I did a little bit of Googling and found that some of the bands on this disk were seminal German punk bands: Slime, Toxoplasma, and Canal Terror were among the top bands from this mid-to-late 80’s era.

I also found, at a site called Taringa!, a little bit of Deutschpunk history, if you’re interested:

In the 1980s, lots of new punk bands became popular in the scene and developed the so-called “Deutschpunk” style, which is not a generic term for German punk rock, but a style of punk music that included quite primitive songwriting, very fast rhythms and politically radical left-wing lyrics, mostly influenced by the Cold War. Probably the most important Deutschpunk band was Slime from Hamburg, the first band whose LP was banned because of political topics. Their songs “Deutschland,” “Bullenschweine,” and “Polizei SA/SS” were banned; some of them are still banned today, because they propagated the use of violence against the police or compared the police to the SA and SS of Nazi Germany.

All of these bands released their records on one of the leading punk labels in West Germany: Weird System Recordings from Hamburg, Aggressive Rockproduktionen (AGR) from West Berlin, or Mülleimer Records ("Garbage Can Records" ) from Stuttgart.

During this period, many bands were influenced by U.S. hardcore punk bands like Black Flag or The Adolescents. Those bands were also known for their extremely left-wing attitude and their aggression carried in their songs. [sic]

For tonight’s music, I’m going to drop on you some “left-wing” Deutschpunk music from Slime, Daily Terror, Canal Terror, and Toxoplasma. These bands range from a Rancid-type style to what sounds to me like the early 80’s SoCal punk bands. Generally, I don’t like listening to music in a language I don’t understand, but the attitude in this music is enough to carry it, even if you don’t know exactly what they’re saying.

Deutschland muss Sterben.mp3 Slime
Polizei SA/SS.mp3 Slime
99 Stunden.mp3 Daily Terror
Todesschwadron.mp3 Daily Terror
Maximierung des Gewinns.mp3 Canal Terror
Teenager Frust.mp3 Toxoplasma

I am going to leave it to you to translate the titles if you want. There are many, many Web sites that do free translation. My favorite is AltaVista’s Babel Fish, mainly for its simplicity – and it seems reasonably accurate.

Note: The above pictures, from top to bottom, are Stefan from Toxoplasma; a "Daily Terror" t-shirt, obviously; and a group shot of Slime.

Labels: local stuff, punk, travel

posted by aikin @ 9:23 PM 3 Comments

Back In A While

Yes - I'm on vacation. I expect to resume posting on or about the 18th.

In the meantime, make yourself at home. Mix up a drink and have a look around.

Just please keep the kids off the furniture!

Labels: no music, travel

posted by aikin @ 9:33 AM 0 Comments

Achtung Baby

Last post before the big vacation. I’m going to stay at Berlin’s Hansa Studios for this album, but jump ahead about 14 years.

U2’s Achtung Baby was released in November 1991. It was partially recorded in Berlin, although the majority of the sessions took place in Dublin. The album is electronics heavy – a big departure from Rattle and Hum, as well as the previous studio albums from U2. Bono even described the album as “the sound of four men trying to chop down The Joshua Tree.”

Achtung Baby was also darker sounding than previous efforts, thanks in large part to songs such as “The Fly,” “Acrobat,” and “Love Is Blindness,” which deal with themes of helplessness, broken relationships, and (in the case of “Love Is Blindness”) violence in the name of love.

Sessions for Achtung Baby started in late 1990 in Berlin, where the band worked for six to eight weeks, after which they took a three-month break, resuming work at Elsinore (near Dublin) in February 1991. Supposedly, the Edge said that the magic just wasn't there (in Berlin), which created a tense atmosphere and friction among the band members as well as between the band and the album producers, Flood and Daniel Lanois.

The main problem was that the band had split into two camps over which direction they should take with the new album. Bono and Edge had spent the previous few months listening to alternative, rap, electronic, and dance music, and wanted to experiment with that sound. Larry and Adam, on the other hand, favored a style more in keeping with the band's previous work.

After abandoning the Berlin recording sessions and moving back to Dublin, a truce was reached. U2 found that they could still write good songs and get along together at the same time. 'One' in particular came from a few bars that Edge had worked out, and the rest improvised around. This was songwriting like they used to do it. Achtung Baby would include many of the new influences Bono and Edge had been so enthusiastic about, but it would still be a recognizable U2 record.

For tonight’s post, I’ve got the opening track, which I think is representative of the direction Bono and Edge wanted to go. “Zoo Station,” in case you don’t know, refers to the Bahnhof Zoo train station in Berlin. “One,” of course, was an insanely huge single, but is still a song that I think is fantastic. The song is very ambiguous in its meaning, which allows it to take on a very personal meaning.

Zoo Station.mp3
One.mp3

Labels: classic rock, travel, U2

posted by aikin @ 9:23 PM 0 Comments

Some Weird Post

I’m going back to Hansa Studios in Berlin for tonight’s post: Iggy Pop’s 1977 classic, Lust for Life.

This was Iggy’s second solo album, as well as his second David Bowie-produced disk. The Idiot, his solo debut, was so heavily influenced by Bowie as to be nearly unrecognizable as an Iggy Pop album. Hugh Wilken, in the “33 1/3” book about Low, wrote that The Idiot could well be considered the unofficial beginning of Bowie's “Berlin” period. (Bowie and Iggy began writing and recording songs for The Idiot in mid-1976, before Bowie started work on his own album.)

The Lust for Life sessions took place soon after the release of The Idiot and completion of a short tour in support of the album. It’s generally considered to be more of an “Iggy Pop” record than The Idiot, being less musically experimental and having more of a rock and roll flavor. In “The Complete David Bowie” by Nicolas Pegg, Iggy is quoted as saying, “See, Bowie's a hell of a fast guy... I realized I had to be quicker than him, otherwise whose album was it gonna be?”

The songs I pulled for this post are as dark as anything else that would come from this era: “The Passenger,” despite its recent commercial use, is often considered the embodiment of the punk outcast. A Bowie biographer called it one of Iggy’s “most haunting tracks,” while an Iggy Pop biographer wrote that the song was possibly inspired by Bowie’s “cultural vampirism.”

As much as I love the title track, it has become so associated with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines that I couldn’t bring myself to post it. Instead, I went with “Some Weird Sin.” Rock critic Dave Thompson, writing for AllMusic, described “Some Weird Sin” as such: “When Lust for Life was released in fall 1977, at the height of punk, an entire generation was looking to Pop for guidance. Those other songs indicated some of the directions that were possible. ‘Some Weird Sin,’ with its straightforward riffs and lost-boy lyric, showed what was actually required.”

The Passenger.mp3
Some Weird Sin.mp3

~~~~

Note: The bottom picture - of Iggy and Debbie Harry - was taken by famed rock photog Bob Gruen. This photo and many, many other awesome pictures are for sale through his Web site.

Labels: classic rock, punk, travel

posted by aikin @ 9:24 PM 0 Comments

Berlin - the album

In ongoing anticipation of my trip to Berlin, tonight I bring you some music from Lou Reed’s Berlin album.

This is a damn tough album to listen to. When it was first released, in 1973, it was such a huge musical departure for Reed that neither fans nor critics knew what to think. Most hated it at the time. Critics complained about Bob Ezrin’s (over)production and the dark story the record tells. Ultimately, though, most would come to see it as one of Reed’s best albums.

Thematically, this is the story of Jim and Caroline, who live in Berlin. Caroline toys with Jim and sleeps around, growing so cold and withdrawn that “her friends call her Alaska.” He’s a speed freak who beats her. Eventually, after their children are taken from Caroline as an unfit mother, she commits suicide. In the concluding “Sad Song,” Jim says, “I’m gonna stop wastin’ my time / Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.”

Reed recently toured a production of Berlin, which brought the album back into the public eye. “The story still thrills as it repels,” David Fricke wrote in an online Rolling Stone review. “The way Reed, with a poet's ear and a reporter's eye and no intruding moral comment, renders both artificial ecstasies (booze, speed, reckless sex) and real-life horror (beatings, blood on the sheets).”

Berlin was not recorded in Berlin, but New York and London. In an interview last year with The Guardian, Reed explained why he chose Berlin as a setting. “His idea was to use the divided city of Berlin – which he had then never visited – as a metaphor for human discord,” the article says. “The theme of Berlin, Reed says now, was Othello. ‘Jealousy, jealousy, jealousy. There are certain subjects that will always stand out, and jealousy's a real big one. Show me a man that's never been jealous.’”

Caroline II.mp3
How Do You Think It Feels.mp3

Labels: classic rock, travel

posted by aikin @ 9:44 PM 0 Comments

“Ich bin ein Berliner”

Hey everyone – I thought I should give you fair warning that I’ll be taking a break next week. I’m going to Germany – Berlin, specifically – and won’t be taking my computer, so, no posting.

I’m pretty excited about the trip. I was there in 1994 or ‘95, but it was a very short visit as part of a whirlwind tour of Europe. The city was pretty chaotic and I remember a lot of construction and it being difficult to get around. Somewhere I have a journal with observations made during that trip, but it’s nowhere immediately available, so I’ll spare you.

What prompted the decision to make another trip was an article in the New York Times about Hansa Studios, where David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Nina Hagen all recorded career-defining albums. The legendary studio, as well as other rock and roll landmarks, has become a stop on a music history-oriented tour. That put me in the mind that it would be really cool to take a trip to Berlin and see some of the offbeat historical stuff I missed during that first trip.

I organized my trip around my schedule, without even thinking that there might be some sort of tour schedule. Silly me, I figured, “It’s a tour – it’ll be there.” So it was well after I had my itinerary locked in that I looked into booking the rock history tour, through the company I had read about in the Times, The Fritz Music Tour.

Unfortunately, the tours only run on Sundays, and since I booked the trip based on my schedule, I arrive on a Sunday and leave the following Saturday. I was bummed to learn that the impetus behind my whole trip was now not going to happen. I did email the guys who do the tour and found they may be able to get me into Hansa Studios. They also sent me a list of shows I could check out while I’m in town. So, all is not lost.

In recognition of my upcoming trip, I thought I’d post music this week from or influenced by Berlin, with an emphasis on Hansa Studios. I’m kicking things off tonight with David Bowie’s “Heroes” album.

Released in 1977, “Heroes” is the second installment of what is generally called Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy.” It’s bracketed by Low and Lodger. Of the three, “Heroes” is the only one recorded entirely in Berlin. While researching a little for this post, I found a cool site called Music Nerds*, from which I got some of the following info about “Heroes”:

“‘Heroes’ was recorded at the height of the cold war in a studio next to the Berlin Wall. The constant low level tension caused by being watched by suspicious - and potentially dangerous - guards, plus the larger implication of why the Wall was there at all, provided a very creative atmosphere.” 



“Heroes” co-producer Tony Visconti considered the sessions “one of my last great adventures in making albums. The studio was about 500 yards from the wall,” he told a Bowie biographer. “Red Guards would look into our control-room window with powerful binoculars.”

The tracks I’ve pulled from “Heroes” for tonight’s post are the title track, which I love, and “Joe the Lion.” “Heroes” (the song) is about a German romance in the figurative and literal shadow of the Berlin Wall. “Joe the Lion” reportedly is about performance artist Chris Burdon. It’s also a song that rocks, driven by Robert Fripp on guitar.

Joe the Lion.mp3
Heroes.mp3

~~~~~

*If you’re interested in making your musical nerdiness official, check out the Music Nerds Web site. They are looking for “contributors who offer their own personal take on every single track on a given album.”

Labels: classic rock, travel

posted by aikin @ 9:53 PM 2 Comments

Road Trippin'

I’m out of town for a few days – drove over to the Gulf side of Florida to visit Tampa Bay’s beaches. Why go to Miami’s beaches when you live there, right? Leave those to the tourists.

Thanks to Pete at IckMusic, I had three-plus hours of the Boss for my ride. I need you to go there as soon as you’re finished here. He’s got some live Bruce Springsteen from a 1978 show at the Roxy in Los Angeles. HE broke the show into three posts, so make sure you check them all.

So no sooner do I show up in Tampa then my rental car conks out. Completely dead. Fortunately I’m at my hotel and not one of the sleazy places where I stopped to buy beef jerky. But now, the car has been towed away and I’m sitting here, on the Internet, watching Comedy Central, and ordering out for food. I could have done this at home for a fraction of the cost.

I may or may not get another car tonight. Regardless, it’s already 8:30, so tonight seems to be pretty much shot.

I just wanted to bitch about things today. I’ll be back tomorrow with some music. If I can’t track down any local stuff, there is plenty on my laptop.

Labels: no music, travel

posted by aikin @ 8:41 PM 0 Comments