Category: Music

Categories
Media Music

Online = CD, print = LP

Harvard Square has a lot of record stores, and I mean that literally — most of them carry CDs and cassettes and posters and such, but it’s mainly bins and bins of vinyl. Some of it’s new, some of it’s collectible, a lot of it is Tom Petty albums from the ’80s for three bucks.

Turntables are even making a comeback of sorts, even though most people don’t own one anymore. The point is, at least in a big metro area, you can still make a living selling LPs.

Why is that? I’d say there are three main reasons:

Dynamics — to lots of people, a well-kept LP on a good turntable just sounds better. My ear isn’t sharp enough to tell the difference, but the idea is that an LP brings in more highs and more lows and a generally warmer sound.

Artwork — the extra space on an album cover provides lots of room for art, and makes the LP a visual experience (I cannot begin to tell you how long I stared at the cover of the first Boston album when it came out. Surprisingly, I did not have many dates back then.)

Keepsakeability — OK, I just made that word up, but you get the idea. A CD is just a tool — take it out of the case and plug it in. An LP is more of a relationship — you spend time taking care of the record, you spend time reading the liner notes, maybe you even put the cover in a frame and hang it on the wall.

It seems to me there might be a lesson here for the newspaper business.

Maybe you treat your online operation as a CD collection — digital, clean, unlimited selection. And maybe you treat your newspaper like an LP — dynamic, beautifully packaged, maybe in a limited edition.

If you follow the newspaper business you know that Tuesday brings the first big move in what might be the endgame for the daily paper — the Detroit papers, it seems, are planning to stop regular daily home delivery. And newspapers across the country are thinking about dropping the print version of the Monday paper — Monday is the thinnest paper with the least news and the fewest ads.

So what if you turned the Monday paper into a magazine?

I’m not talking about going from broadsheet to tabloid — I’m talking about a real magazine, with glossy pages and acres of space for photos and art.

The most underused material at any paper is photography. Photogs shoot hundreds of frames at every assignment, and sometimes the print edition uses one, inside Local, squeezed to credit-card size. Online, some of that work makes it into slideshows. But what if you took all the photos from the previous week and ran 30 or 40 every Monday? What if you had 10 pages of photos from high-school graduations or New Year’s Eve or (in our town) the NASCAR race?

If you live in an NFL town and the Monday edition gave you a killer photo package on Sunday’s game, wouldn’t you want to get ahold of that?

That’s the art. Now the dynamics.

What if you took that Monday edition and ran the best stuff from your blogs? Run the great posts and run the best comments next to them. You could even run a “best of the Web” page from other blogs everywhere. And you could have a standing box listing every one of your blogs, how to find them and how to comment.

A bunch of beautiful photos. Commentary from all around your site (driving people to the site, by the way). A couple of pages devoted to Sunday’s breaking news. And the comics in color.

Seems to me that would be something advertisers would love and readers would jump all over.

You’d struggle a bit on the days when big news breaks on Sunday — maybe two or three times a year. Those days you’d wish you had the flexibility and later deadlines of a broadsheet. But even on those days you could carry a summary in your Monday mag and point readers online. And by the way, if big news broke on Sunday, most of them will have read it online anyway.

These days most newspapers of any size are in the magazine-publishing business — back home in Charlotte, according to this, the Observer puts out at least 10. We know how to put out magazines. I’m not sure if we print them in-house or contract it out, but they get printed somewhere.

No doubt I’m way off base on some crucial element here — it’s too expensive, the deadlines will never work, we have to serve the readers who demand a full news report in print seven days a week. I’m sure somebody can point out all the ways this idea is loony.

But before the newspaper business completely circles the drain, maybe it’s time to try loony.

Here’s the thing about the record-store shoppers in Harvard Square: They’re young. Not all of them, but most. If they’re like the vinyl collectors I know, they’ve got CDs at home, too. They’re not anti-digital. But they know that the record on the turntable and the album cover in your hand is a different experience.

Obviously it’s not as big an audience as the CD audience. But there’s an audience that likes that experience. And apparently they’re willing to pay for it.

Categories
Music Obama

TV, The Radio and Obama

I have a point I want to make but I’m not sure how I’m going to get there — in case you want to go ahead and get out of the car now, I’m going to try to connect the concert I saw Monday night to the reasons Barack Obama is going to be president. It’s possible that we’ll scrape the guardrails one or two times along the way. Just so you know.

The band above is called TV on the Radio. They’re the kind of band I should keep up with if I want to pretend to be up on music today, but the fact is I knew exactly one of their songs (“Wolf Like Me”) because I watched them do it on YouTube. Still, my friend Vognar had tickets to the show and so we went to see them at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston.

(I’m thinking of adding this to my list of life truths: “There is no such thing as bad live music.” I’d go see pretty much any professional or even semi-professional musician if the price was right — I’d see Barry Manilow if he was in Vegas and somebody comped us the tickets. I’d head for the restroom during “Copacabana,” but still.)

Despite the interesting hair (the dude on the left has cut his shorter — he looks less like Jerry Garcia now, although he sounds like David Bowie), TV on the Radio is your basic ordinary rock band, and I mean that in the best possible way. They’re tight live, the main lead singer (the guy in the middle) knows how to get the crowd moving, they understand the dynamics of a show — here’s a couple of fast ones, now a couple of slow ones, here’s our best stuff at the end.

I’ll admit that I don’t know their lyrics — they could be advocating overthrow of the government in their big power ballad. But I doubt it. They’re a good, solid American band, well worth the price of the ticket. They are also one white guy and four black guys.

In pro sports we’ve had black quarterbacks win the Super Bowl and black coaches win NBA titles, and the three most popular athletes of all time are black (Ali, Jordan, Tiger). But that’s not the revolution — at some point, overwhelming talent is impossible to ignore. The revolution came when black QBs could be the third-stringer or black point guards could come in for garbage time or black pitchers could be 10th-best on a 10-man staff. They could be just OK — no different than anyone else — and they could still make the team.

((Those of you who are from soccer-friendly parts of the world might want to add Pele or Maradona to the Ali/Jordan/Tiger pantheon… what can I say, it’s my list and soccer doesn’t make it.))

Barack Obama is by no means ordinary. No matter what you think of his politics, he’s clearly a smart politician and a gifted speaker. But despite all his talk about change — you might have heard once or twice that he is in favor of change — the fundamental thing that has taken him to the White House door is that he does not seem like all that big a change.

I don’t mean that people don’t want a change in the direction of the country — the biggest thing Obama has going for him is that he’s running against eight years of Bush. But he’s not running a campaign all that different from a generic Candidate X that the Democrats might have run out there. In both debates he has been the calm one, the one whose smile seems less forced, the one who (sorry, Mr. McCain, and thank you for your service) acts more normal. In no way whatsoever is he running as the black candidate, the man who would change history, although of course just by being president he would.

People who know Obama say he’s brilliant. Maybe. The vibe he gives off more than anything is that he doesn’t need to PROVE that he’s brilliant, that just being who he is and putting that in front of the voters is enough to make the team.

There are polls that slice the voting public every which way, and there’s definitely a division on Obama among white voters, but I think the pollsters are missing the key question. I don’t think the split is between Northern whites and Southern whites, or rich whites vs. poor whites, or white-collar whites vs. blue-collar whites. The split is between whites who know a lot of minorities — as neighbors, co-workers, classmates — and those who don’t.

Voters who never spend time with people who aren’t like them are scared of Barack Obama. Voters who spend time with lots of different people think of Obama as the guy from down the street who made good. That Obama-is-The-One thing is long gone, if it ever existed much. I think he’s seen now as just the right guy for the job. And that, by itself, makes history.

Categories
Movies Music Video

“Once” more

(Found on YouTube: a camera-phone video from Friday night’s show)

Some of you know about my obsession with the movie “Once.” It’s really not a healthy thing. I’ve seen the movie four or five times now, listened to the soundtrack probably 100 times, watched all the DVD extras, read way too many interviews with the stars. This is all time I could have spent working out or cutting the grass or maybe reading the philosophy I now have as homework for one of my classes. Maybe by now I would have been able to understand John Stuart Mill. Probably not.

The couple at the heart of “Once” — Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova — were playing in concert up here, so of course we went. The show was at the Boston University hockey arena — not exactly the perfect venue for soul-searching acoustic music — but when you have a hit movie and 5,000 people want to see you, a hockey arena it is.

Hansard is the frontman for the Irish band The Frames, who were onstage about half the time and closed the show with their signature song, “Fitzcarraldo.” A few people hollered out requests for Frames songs. But most of us came to see Hansard and Irglova. A beefy guy in a Red Sox cap three rows in front of us kept screaming for “The Hill” — Irglova’s heartwrenching piano ballad about a woman who feels invisible to her lover. It was like watching a dockworker beg Barry Manilow to play “Mandy.”

But when you strip away the beefy guy and the hockey arena and everything else, you’re left with two people making music. This is why “Once” hit me so hard. It’s not just a story with music in it, it’s a story ABOUT music, why it means so much to people, why people are willing to sacrifice so much for it — fixing vacuum cleaners to pay the bills or playing in the street all day for tourists who never throw you a dime.

(One of my ironclad rules to live by is this: Always pay the street musician. This turns out to be a problem here in Cambridge, where at any given moment in Harvard Square there are roughly 642 street musicians.)

It turns out that Hansard and Irglova were walking around Boston the afternoon of the show and ran into a street musician. It also turned out that the guy was coming to the show. So — you know what comes next, right? — halfway through the show they invited the guy up on stage to do one of his songs. (You know you’re in Boston when… the street musician has a Web site.)

Hansard was a busker himself in Dublin, back when he was a teenager, and he still plays the beat-up acoustic guitar he had back then — it has jagged holes where the pick guard should be. He plays it hard. But he can also play it slow and pretty — usually when he’s singing with his partner in music and in life.

“Falling Slowly” won an Oscar for Hansard and Irglova — they had the best moment in the Oscar show, where Irglova got cut off trying to give her speech and they brought her back after the commercial. They’re both professional musicians now, making serious money, but they give off the feeling that they’re still scrambling — Hansard was proud to announce that he had shopped the Boston thrift stores and paid 3 bucks for his shirt.

Sting isn’t a real person to me — he’s such a star that he’s somehow other than human. Prince, the same way. Even Springsteen, even though he tries harder than anyone to prove that beneath it all he’s a regular guy.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova still feel like real people. Maybe it’s just because we’re catching them at the right time. But maybe it’s because they’re just as surprised as we are at the moments when we find our gifts, and the moments when we fall in love.

They played “Falling Slowly” early in the set Friday night, and when their voices came together you had to imagine that they heard what we heard, that no matter whether it was love or friendship or whatever, once they made one voice out of two, they had to be together.

Categories
Harvard Movies Music

Unplugged

Somehow, we turned down this deal.
Free couch on the street! Somehow, we turned down this deal.

Last night we saw our third Hitchcock movie in two days. The Brattle Theatre in downtown Cambridge is doing a retrospective on Hitchcock’s 1950s films; on Sunday we saw a double feature of “Rear Window” (my all-time favorite movie*) and “Vertigo”; last night it was “Strangers on a Train.”

*My top 5 favorite movies:

“Rear Window.”

“The Princess Bride.”

“The Searchers.”

“Richard Pryor Live in Concert.”

“The Sure Thing.”

Of course these aren’t the five GREATEST movies of all time — no “Godfather” in here. These are just the movies I’d happily watch over and over all day long not just because they’re great, but because they match up with some other special moment. No. 6 on the list would probably be “Airplane II,” which is not nearly as good as the first “Airplane!”, but I went with my friends Perry and Virgil and we were the only people in the theater laughing, but we were laughing so hard we just about rolled around on the dangerously sticky theater floor. That’s what makes a favorite movie — the memory of what your life was like when you saw it.

And by the way, I am totally stealing my good friend Joe Posnanski’s Pozterisk idea here. When he patents it I’ll be glad to pay up.

Back home we might not see a movie once a month, much less three in two days. But time is chunkier here. We’re not racing to make deadline or lingering at the office to catch up on e-mails. There’s plenty to do — and will be plenty more once classes start in full next week — but there’s also some air in the day. You can read a book. Or go hang out in Harvard Square and compare the street musicians. Or just take a long walk at night and think about who else has walked these old brick sidewalks.

There’s also air in the day because of what we’re not doing. We’re reading the Boston Globe every day but not like we read the Observer — we don’t need to know how the mayor up here is doing, we won’t be covering the first day of school. We watched the Obama and McCain convention speeches (and Sarah Palin’s, of course*) but I’m not as tuned in as I’d normally be. We’re sort of checking the news in Charlotte — that United Way thing turned out to have some legs after all — but we’re pretty much unplugged there, too.

*So doesn’t Sarah Palin look like she walked right out of the “Hot For Teacher” video?

I have to say, being unplugged is not a bad thing at all.

As a newsman I should whack myself on the knuckles for saying this, but sometimes it feels like there’s just too much news. We’re drowning in it. You can’t ever keep up. It’s like going into the record store and realizing that no matter what you pick, there’s 5,000 great CDs in there that you’ll never get to listen to. (Driving around today I heard 20 great songs on the radio by bands I had never heard of, and of course it was one of those college stations where they ID the songs every two hours, but then they played “Celebrated Summer” by Husker Du* and it was like being lost and finally seeing your house up ahead on the street — hey, I know that song!

*Husker Du. What a band. The loudest band I’ve ever seen live — even louder than the Ramones. Bob Mould lived my dream — he fronted a great rock band and then wrote storylines for World Championship Wrestling. Now that’s a career.

At home I think, most of the time, we try to do it all. But one of the things we have to learn up here is what we can’t do. We can’t take every great class. We can’t read all the books in the library. We can’t go see every great speaker or hear every great band. So, in a weird way, the pressure’s off.

I say that knowing that in a couple of weeks we’ll be pulling all-nighters to get our reading done and dashing across campus to catch a brownbag speaker. But we’ve already learned something important: Find those air bubbles in your day. Then breathe deep.

They’re showing 12 Hitchcock movies at the Brattle. We might have to go 12-for-12.