From: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org (alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest) To: ammf-digest@smoe.org Subject: alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest V1 #802 Reply-To: ammf@fruvous.com Sender: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest Wednesday, October 14 1998 Volume 01 : Number 802 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Columbus ["Schwan, Phil" ] Commonwealths ["Schwan, Phil" ] Re: Commonwealths [BBWMinors@aol.com] Re: Welcome West Coast fans to big-east Fru lovin'! ["pam :)" ] Buying CDs online [cricket5@hotmail.com] Re: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio [Srm9988n@aol.com] Interesting article [Chad Maloney ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 17:49:31 GMT From: "Schwan, Phil" Subject: Columbus Just so I know who all to look for, who all is going to be at Ludlow's tomorrow night? - -Phil (Thrawn) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 19:49:43 GMT From: "Schwan, Phil" Subject: Commonwealths As penance for my error, I offer Virginia, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania as the four true commonwealths. Now up to my ears in Black Swamp, Thrawn ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 20:21:08 GMT From: BBWMinors@aol.com Subject: Re: Commonwealths Deep in the recesses of way-too-trivial memory, I also recall that the longest "official state name" is ... The Commonwealth of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Do you think this is anything like a lowest high point? This completely useless knowledge tidbit comes from another life when I (gaaaak, aaargh) worked on (pleh, pleh, pleh) Wall Street. (Got fired when they realized that I didn't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing when the money figures went up or down. I'm very proud of getting fired from that job. I did, however, save the town of Parma, Missouri a lot of money first). Lisa ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 11:49:03 -0000 From: "pam :)" Subject: Re: Welcome West Coast fans to big-east Fru lovin'! Aye, who's asking whom? wrote in message ... >Mind you, I'm in upstate New York and I think a license plate >from Indiana is exotic and western. Ahh...so did I...until I started to go out to school here...now I think a NY license is foreign... :) pam... (who's looking forward to convincing the bouncers to let her into the Fruvous show in Bloomington on Friday) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 13:27:58 GMT From: Loren Becker Subject: Re: Whoa! Too much excitement! Chad Schrock wrote: > I still haven't gotten my Quill yet. :( It's because I live > close to Washington and they are punishing us because of the > "Story That Just Will Not Die" isn't it? I'm just an innocent > civilian caught in the Crossfire. (But not the one on CNN.) nope. sorry, chad. i had already read my quill by the first post to the ng about it and i live _in_ washington. i think it's just that nobody is really sure you exist so... > Would a private concert by you-know-who make much of a > difference? :) is that an offer you ar authorized to make? > Yup. It's raining. :) not very much but it was a nice rain. more spring than fall though. very strange things these seasons. loren. wishing she was in new england for a real fall. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 15:44:34 GMT From: cricket5@hotmail.com Subject: Buying CDs online Hey there! For those of you who like buying cds online whether it's the newly-released Fruvous stuff or just cds in general, you should know that if you link to one of those sites from Fruvous Dot Com, Chris O'Malley gets a commission. Not much, but hey, money is money. Chris does a lot of work keeping FDC up-to-date for all of us, this seems like a very small way to pay him back. I know he has links to CDNow and Music Blvd among others on the "Moxy Merchandise" page. Now, go follow Kevin's advice and buy "Wood" and "b" for all your friends ;-) Mary - -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 19:15:40 GMT From: Srm9988n@aol.com Subject: Re: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio Cos lived up to his usual deft wordplay with: >She was just some Juani Saucep'n when she walked into Ohio... (Laugh!) and CeeCee added: > But then there's really little else to do there unless you >like glassware or driving across bridges. Well, yes, you are right about the bridges. Must be what, ten of them in Zanesville alone? And it's not *that* big a town. Oddly enough, I do like glassware and ceramics. This time of year the outlet should have some great Halloween decorations. Little terra-cotta pumpkins that hold tealight candles and whatnot. And since some of you are privileged enough to be attending a certain Halloween shindig (humph!) this might be what you could consider a Really Useful Tip. >Oh, and they have those weird trashcans, but I see little tourist value in >that. ;) I must confess, I didn't notice their trashcans -- although I did once check out trash storage and collection practices in Beverly Hills, just to see how much it differed from that of mere mortals. (In addition to matching trash -- um, they're not cans, they're more like ... canisters, they have matching, hanging flower baskets in the back alleys of Beverly Hills. Where I live they have clotheslines. Which answered my query, I think.) - -- Lori (who is so completely off topic, I don't know if even Cos can help me now, (unless he comes up with something wonderful from River Valley, peut-etre.)) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 10:19:08 -0500 From: Chad Maloney Subject: Interesting article Hey all, I was reading my MMW Digest from yesterday or two days ago and came across a post from Paul Gershon who posted an article from a magazine that was a good read. I haven't fully formed opinions on its contents completely, but it says a lot of things that were good to be said. No Fruvous content directly. The best I could do is that I've heard Dave break out into a Eugene Chadborune song before. The following is a post by Pete Gershon to the Medeski Martin and Wood mailing list. Credit, ownership and copyrights and such for the article belong to Signal to Noise, a good mag for modern improv and experimental music. This is reposted without permission and I sure hope that is okay. Apologies to Eugene Chadbourne and Pete Gershon if I shouldn't have posted this here. If you enjoy the article, check out http://www.sover.net/~asp/signaltonoise for more info on how to support the Signal to Noise magazine. I know reading this editorial made me subscribe to it, so I hope only good things will come out of me reposting it here. - Chad - --- fwd --- Here's a long but very thought-provoking editorial by Eugene Chadbourne which appears in the current issue of Signal to Noise (formerly Soundboard). It's actually quite germane to the message Robert Bernhardt posted in the last digest. "Losing the Wider Audience" Although I was happy to see Jason Koornick's generally positive review of my book I Hate the Man Who Runs This Bar (Mix Books), the next to last paragraph really irked me. Normally my philosophy is not to bother answering critics, although I have sometimes corrected incredible inaccuracies in articles. (The New Yorker magazine is the only I know of that actually employs a fact-checker.) However there are several reasons I want to answer Jason on some of the statements in this paragraph. This is a very strange paragraph in which he seems to reveal that the entire point of the book has eluded him. I don't really think this is true, though, because he seems to have enjoyed the book and made some very nice complimentary statements about it. Mainly I want to correct his suspicion that I have lost some "idealism...in many years of constant struggle with both the music industry and bar owners." I don't want to see this much power granted to whatever lamebrains, scumbags and idiots I may have struggled with over the years. One needs to define "idealism" in this context because it is a very important part of creativity. There is no way I have lost any of my idealism because of what may have gone down from time to time in business dealings. I may have lost a few bucks here and there, sure. I have gained a few gray hairs as well, although that may have just been inherited. And after certain experiences--such as the time a young guy booked a date in Burlington, Vermont, than cancelled it without telling anyone involved, forcing us all to travel up there for nothing--I feel like I may have lost a year of my life out of stress. How does Jason define idealism? From the context of this paragraph I get the impression he feels idealism is the hope a young musician might have of making it really big, becoming a well known star and bringing his music to a larger audience, something he says I have failed at. How does he define my failure? I don't believe I have failed. In fact, I am supremely happy at my contacts all over the world, the existence of an enthusiastic audience for my music wherever I go and the sheer number of my recordings that have been sold. Does he realize that I have released more than 100 CDs and LPs, and at LEAST 1,000 copies have been sold of each one...that is more than 100,000 units sold! I don't see that as a failure. From the point of view of someone starting out in the business, it would be a dream. One of the main points I tried to make in the book, however, was that a dream like this, or even the more inflated dream of being an idol to teenagers, playing in stadiums and making hundreds of thousands of dollars (for a corporation if not for yourself) have nothing to do with playing high quality music. I have always believed, and I still believed, that the quality of a piece of music has nothing to do with how many people hear it. Some of the most brilliant music ever played has been played for small audiences, or for no one but the musicians. This I feel is a real idealistic approach to making music. It is completely opposite to the "market" or "numbers" point of view espoused by a mass market critic such as Robert Christgau, who feels a hack such as Michael Bolton has more importance than Ornette Coleman because he "reaches" more people. Reaches them with what, I ask? In between the lines of Jason's statements I suspect something phishy, particularly because your magazine hails from Vermont. Forgive me if I am paddling in the wrong pond, but when Jason describes musicians achieving "goals they can't even dream of", is he thinking of this Burlington bar band that now plays stadiums, with legions of fans following around? As a highly critical music listener I don't really wonder why a group that sounds like a million other bar bands with great creative aspirations has achieved such success in the music business, because it happens all the time to many people with much less talent. And after about five years of watching my oldest daughter Jenny piss away her youth traipsing around after Phish, Ino longer wonder what that's all about, either. There are many trends in the society and activities that are set to music but really have nothing to do with music. Entire fashion movements can be based on what a bandmember is wearing. Overnight an entire generation will start wearing their hair a certain way. But don't tell me it has anything to do with the pure art of music, because it doesn't. I was surprised to see Jason take this tack in a magazine full of articles gloryifying artists such as Roscoe Mitchell, Grant Green, Raphe Malik! Are these artists that have reached a wider audience? Not in the way Jason thinks. But having been a friend of Roscoe's for more than 20 years, I wonder whatever happened to all the rock groups and pop performers everyone was nuts about back when I first started listening to the Art Ensemble of Chicago back in the '70s... As I discuss in my book, many of these acts have recordings that they can't even GIVE away in bins in front of record stores today. Meanwhile, Roscoe goes on doing his music, with very little regard for whatever might be selling out stadiums then or now. Kids like groups such as Phish and the scene that revolves around them for social reasons. I am sure it is great fun, a non-stop party. It is also a lifestyle completely devoid of any responsibility whatsoever to anyone. This is what my daughter is missing out on. If the group of people she is traveling with gets a flat tire and doesn't make it to the next gig, it really doesn't make a difference to anybody. Of course many young people want to have fun all the time and see the entire notion of responsibility, having someone depend on you for something, as something only burned out old farts talk about. However I have always felt a true creative talent has a responsibility to create the greatest work possible, to continue expanding and evolving. Jason seems to feel it is an achievement that I can continue to be creative struggling in the low light of my eentsy following, but it really seems easier for musicians such as myself to continue to be enthusiastic and creative than it is for the "big stars." Not only is it common for the real big names to create less and less interesting music as time goes on, the bigger they get the less able they are to even have normal contact with regular people. A typical complaint I hear about the members of Phish! One friend of mine that ran into them in a hotel said they were incredibly rude. My daughter refuses to ask them for autographs to pass along to her little sisters, because she says "they are not into that." Hey, Angela Lansbury gave me her autograph and she is much better known around the world than anyone in Phish ever will be! I am of course happy that groups such as Phish and Leftover Salmon and Medeski, Martin and Wood "led" my daughter to discover Doc Watson, Coltrane, Sun Ra, Derek Bailey et al. In some cases such as drummer Jon Phishman it is probably a source of intellectual comfort that providing part of a musical education to fans is part of their scene, and I respect him for that attitude. Although of course one has to have more admiration for the members of society who find their way to the really good stuff without being led there by others. Other players such as Medeski, etc have the audacity to make comments in their interviews about jazz being too aloof and intellectual, and brag about how they are bringing it down to a more communicative level, to which I say: Up yours! Nitwit! An Archie comic is easier to understand than James Joyce or William Burroughs, but because of my idealism I would rather be cast in the latter mould. One thing many players who "fail to reach a wider audience" share in common is the humorous-but-serious attitude that it is always a good sign if the average person CANNOT understand something. A few years ago my daughter the Phish phan said she didn't know what would happen to the group if they continued expanding into more adventurous, creative enterprises such as Trey's Escape album, because to quote her "Once you've heard Coltrane you realize Phish really isn't any good at that kind of music." I tried to discourage her from comparing lots of things to giants such as Coltrane, because I said it leads to frustration. I encouraged her to appreciate the music she likes for what it is, not what it isn't. Maybe that's the reason she's on Phish tour again this summer, but I suspect the real reason is because it's one of the funner social occasions she's experienced, and she wants to continue having fun. I keep doing what I am doing because I am interested in music, not in friends and fun. I want Jason to know that, and I hope this column gets it across more clearly than my book did. If not, I am giving up on the guy. - --Eugene Chadbourne http://www.sover.net/~asp/signaltonoise ------------------------------ End of alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest V1 #802 ********************************************