Girls Generation did a performance of “The Boys” on Live with Kelly this morning that I didn’t find out about until someone tweeted to me about it last night after my last post went up. I somewhat dreaded it because of how ridiculous the format of the show has been for decades, but I still set my DVR (and ended up watching it live anyway – thank god I have Wednesday mornings off). Regis is, thankfully gone (adios, you babbling idiot…), the monologue was thankfully shorter, and Girls Generation got off a relatively complete performance of “The Boys”, albeit one where there might have been one verse left out of the song (I didn’t replay the performance this time around). They did, however, perform over a backing track rather than use a live band like last night on The Late Show with David Letterman, which was a bit of a letdown.

They also got their first US TV interview courtesy of the show, with host Kelly Ripa being somewhat serious and guest co-host Howie Mandel being a slightly less obnoxious asshole than Regis Philbin. There could have been a bit more research and thought going into the questions asked of the band, but since the show was geared mainly toward a more general audience that is to be expected. The show’s producers also had a shot of the band’s tour bus and the crowd of hardcore Sone (at least one of them holding up a copy of the tin-packaged Korean edition of the new album) waiting outside, which was good because America got to see a crowd of discerning American pop fans who wouldn’t listen to thoughtless, overproduced, and undercomposed dreck like Katy Perry or Scotty McCreepy if you put a loaded pistol to their heads.

So, two for two as far as SNSD’s first two performances on American television go. Let’s see what happens from here (An album or EP with English versions of “Genie”, “Hoot”, and their other earlier hits would be a nice start…)

PROS: Girls Generation and the session musicians backing them – a curious three-piece unit of keyboards, drums, and DJ – could have done a note-for-note performance of “The Boys”, but surprised me by switching up the arrangement a little bit, throwing in a new instrumental break that isn’t on the original recording in the process. Their vocals were live and not lipsynched, which was another plus (there were a few pre-recorded effected vocals running underneath the live mics – more on that in a moment – but those were there to help replicate the production of the original recording while SNSD sang live over them, not for them to mime to). They also handled their choreography well despite the relatively small amount of real estate on the stage floor they had to deal with (and even though Sunny, at least for a second or two, in danger of bumping her ass cheeks into Paul Schaffer’s keyboard stands).

CONS: Firstly, whoever David Letterman’s director is needs to be repeatedly pimpsmacked, as there were quite a few times when the cameras were focusing on members who weren’t singing. The vocal mix wasn’t 100% perfect as a few of the members seemed to have had their mic levels lower than the rest of the group, and at one point a pre-recorded effected vocal almost cancelled out one of the other members’s live vocal. And who said Regis Philbin (who had participated in a field-goal skit with Letterman and guest Bill Murray) could obnoxiously blow his referee’s whistle right after Girls Gen and their band stopped playing? Isn’t that old fart supposed to be completely retired from being on television?

So, that’s SNSD’s American TV debut in a nutshell. Are there going to be other TV performances to follow this one? Or are Interscope going to drop the ball and not push them any further this cycle, just like they unnecessarily delayed the American release of the album Girls Generation are supposed to be promoting for months after its original Korean release? Time will tell…

For now, Third Man are already taking pre-orders for the first single, “Love Interruption”, which will contain a non-LP B-side, and be released on vinyl on February 7th and through iTunes tonight at midnight. Tide yourself over in the meantime with this stream:

And since Record Store Day is happening before the album’s release, I’m sure Third Man are going to have something special coming out that day as well. After all, it was on RSD in 2009 when the first Third Man single, The Dead Weather’s “Hang You From The Heavens”, was released…

Upon learning that Fugazi were about to release a new album, The Argument and a related EP, Furniture, this fall as well as reissue Instrument on DVD (yay!) with bonus footage, I contacted Dischord Records by e-mail. That was mid-August. By late September, Guy Piccotto, one of the band’s two guitarist/frontmen, initially replied that an interview might not be possible with everything that was going on both in the band and in D.C. in general. Being a more understanding journalist, I told Guy in my reply, “No problem — let me know when anyone’s free.” Last Monday, Guy said Brendan was available and passed on his e-mail address.

Fugazi. The name was found by vocalist/guitarist Ian MacKaye (co-founder of Dischord Records and lead singer of the influential early 80′s punk quartet Minor Threat) in a book about Vietnam, a slang term which is actually an acronym for “F’ed up, got ambushed, zipped in.” Their music shed’s punk past in favor of meshing such disparate influences as reggae, funk, go-go and hard rock. MacKaye and the band’s other vocalist/guitarist, Guy Piccotto [pronounced "ghee"], are probably the two most distinctive vocalists in rock today — MacKaye’s Joe Cocker-influenced “melodic shouting” style (honed during the three years that Minor Threat existed and refined with various side projects between 1984 and Fugazi’s formation in 1987), and Piccotto’s one-of-a-kind, full of raw emotion vocalisations. Ian and Guy’s guitar styles — thick powerchording and searing lead lines eminating from either or both guitarists at the same time — stand out in a sea of tenth-generation Ramones/Dickies/Buzzcocks/Descendants copycats and detuned unwashed KornSmackParkVayne slackers to this day, while bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty anchor the whole thing.

“You know what?” Brendan said, “My youngest son son is having a hard time going to sleep. Is it possible that you could call me back in about a half an hour?” It was possible, so I said no problem, thought of a few extra questions to ask in the meantime, and rang Brendan. What follows is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done to date. There were literally a lot of laughs in the close to an hour we spent on the phone, as the transcription will reveal over the next couple of days… [Note: The transcription had originally been spread out at Project X by its editor over the course of a week.]

CJ Marsicano: Hello, Brendan?

Brendan Canty: Hey! How are you?

I am good.

[My youngest son] actually fell asleep about five minutes after you hung up. [CJ laughing] He was playin’ me. Where are you right now?

I’m in Pennsylvania. Hazleton, near Wilkes-Barre.

OK, yeah. Oh OK. I know the area, more or less.

Oh, you do?

Yeah, a little bit.

Oh my god! Small world.

Yeah [laughs] We’re not that far from you guys.

You’re not that much older than I am, too. I’m 34.

Oh yeah, that’s right. You are my age!. Do you work for Project X?

Yeah, I think I’ve done about half the writing so far for that site. I don’t know if you’ve been to it yet.

Yeah, I’ve looked at it.

Oh, that’s wonderful!

So, did you get a chance to listen to the record at all?

No, I didn’t hear the new record yet.

Oh, you haven’t gotten it yet?

No, not yet. What can you tell me about the new album?

Well, it was very long, and now it’s shorter. [laughter]

That’s why there’s the separate EP [Furniture].

Right. We were trying to sequence it with all the songs on it and it was just getting, it was horrendously unlistenable. And then we picked out a couple of the really harder and faster songs and one older song that we just did on the fly in the studio, this old song called “Furniture”, which we started playing back in ’87 or whatever. And we took those off, and the album just fit much better. It suddenly all clicked into place. So we just decided to have two separate entities.

I tend to feel like, if you start to just put out as many songs as possible [on an album], you put out 16 songs, it’s just unbearable, you know. I think an important aspect of the whole thing is the editing process, of getting it down and treating it like one body of work so that people can actually digest it all, as opposed to slogging their way through 16 songs. Even with those songs taken out, it’s still fifty minutes long, so it’s still plenty long.

What else about the record – it probably took more than a month to record, and we had a second drummer on quite a few of the songs, this guy Jerry Busher, who was our roadie for years, and then when we started writing songs, I started throwing double drums on some of the songs on End Hits. He started playing some of those songs live with us, just the few songs from End Hits with double drums, like “Arpeggiator.” Then we have this woman named Amy Domingues play cello on a few of the songs. And then we also put a little bit of piano on there. It gets kind of expansive. I don’t know, it’s up to you to decide, it’s up to the general population to decide what they make of it. I can’t really put a spin on it. I’m not really comfortable putting the spin on it.

Yeah, you can’t really put a spin on your own work after you spend a month recording it and however long beforehand writing it.

Yeah, it took us years to write, really. When I think about writing some of these parts three years ago…

Jeez!

Yeah, it’s ridiculous. But it’s just that we’ve had a lot of things going on in our lives. We haven’t been working on it constantly for that long, but it’s certainly taken a long time to get us into the studio. Finally, we just had to say “let’s just go book the time and have done with it.” [Laughter]

I can imagine like, promoting the movie [Instrument] was taking a lot of time over the past couple of years.

Well, making the movie was. There was making the movie, and there was also, at the time when we started making the movie, I was having kids. I’ve had a couple of kids since then, and that’s sort of one of the reasons over the last few years that we’ve slowed down touring. And so, Guy [Piccotto] and Ian [MacKaye] and [filmmaker] Jem Cohen, who shot the film, they all worked together more than I did on the film. It was really kind of lucky for me that we had a project like that for them to work on, and also it was lucky for me that they were willing to work on it without me and to maintain the band through their spotty schedule over the last few years. You know what I mean. Anyway, they did a lot of that work while I was, you know, losing my mind. [laughter]

Kids.

Yep.

That’s why I don’t have any yet.

[laughter] You know what I mean, Just don’t rush it. If you don’t want ‘em, don’t feel like you have to have ‘em. [laughter] ‘Cause even if you want them more than anything in the world, they’re still a challenge.

Yeah. Jello Biafra said “they don’t give a [mandatory] class on the most important thing in life, and that’s parenting.”

Yeah. Well, actually they do give classes on that… [laughter] Jello might not be tapped into the parenting thing [laughter]

Unfortunately, he’s been divorced since the Frankenchrist trial, so that’s a moot point for him. [laughter]

Yeah, that’s right! [laughter] Yeah, but once you have kids, you realize that there’s an entire universe there that you previously knew nothing about… [laughter] thankfully! Because you’d never get pregnant if you knew about it beforehand! [laughter]

Anyway, that’s pretty much the deal with the new record. It’s called The Argument, and it’ll be out on the 17th of October. And it seems to be getting, people seem to be interested in it. That makes me happy.

I understand you’ve been doing some scoring outside of the band.

Yeah, I’ve been working for some producers that I’ve known for a long time – basically friends, there’s a few different producers that have been making documentaries for TV for the Discovery Channel. So I did [the score for] a mini-series a couple of years ago called Buildings, Bridges and Tunnels, and then I did a score for this show called High Speed Impacts, which is basically like a Butthole Surfers video [laughter] for an hour…

[laughter] Without the penile implants.

Right! Without the penile implants! It was just shit blowing up for an hour! [laughter] It was all test footage from the Sandina Rocket Test Facility in Arizona or Nevada – I can’t remember where it was. You’d think I’d know after I’d watched the damned thing a thousand times. [laughter] But it was just the greatest documentary to work on, ’cause it was literally like – my friend was at Sandina doing a different documentary and he came across all this footage of shit blowing up, and ten different camera angles running at different speeds and super high quality – and he decided to piece it all together and make a storyline out of it and make some sort of documentary out of it, but it was really just, “let’s put as many cool shots [laughter] of shit blowing up in one hour that we possibly can fit in. That was just the greatest one to score, too. It’s very easy, and as far as I’m concerned I can be me and I can rock out a little bit, you know. Don’t have to worry about appeasing people. I’m allowed to be aggressive…

You have to lock yourself in your basement and do the Danny Elfman thing for however many days you get to do the soundtrack.

Yeah, ’cause you don’t get a lot of time to do it, so you really have to cram. I don’t know if it’s exactly … sometimes I think I’d be happier selling real estate! [laughter]

Don’t let my mother hear you say that, she sells real estate!

I won’t. [laughter]. [Doing that instead of recording soundtracks] would bring me into contact with more people, anyways. [laughter]. You kinda crave it after awhile. Luckily I have both outlets in my life, I can be in the basement and I can also get out of the house with Fugazi and go and play in front of a thousand people. When we want to.

You have the luxury now, basically.

It’s pretty nice, I have to say. And the crowds have been so great in the past couple of years. Touring is an absolute pleasure. There’s no skinhead armies out there fucking with little kids, which used to happen. It used to be all messy, but not it’s not messy, it seems to be quite… I don’t know if I’d call it “tame”, but it’s pretty awesome. I think the crowds might understand what we’re going for and maybe don’t think we’re assholes. [laughter]

For awhile, people didn’t know who we were; I think [Instrument] has kinda helped people know who we are better.

People think you’re this dour band, but there’s this sense of humor coming out from all you guys [throughout the film]. I can’t understand the dour thing anyway, I don’t know why they even think that!

I don’t know either! I do understand that we stopped giving interviews a long time ago to major publications, like to Spin, and so they paint us as being stick-in-the-muds. And so, the mass media, a lot of people don’t get [adequate] information about us and they also can’t talk to us point-blank, face to face unless we’re in their town. So, if silence sort of breeds suspicion, I think definitely people get suspicious of people who don’t speak to them. So, anyways, I think the movie helped people to realize that we’re human beings [laughter], so people are relating to us better, and us to them.

I’m looking forward to the DVD of Instrument coming out, ’cause one of these days, I’m gonna stick the videotape of Instrument into the VCR, and the VCR’s gonna spit the tape out of the machine and say, “Fuck you! Play something else!” [laughter]

I appreciate that. [laughter] DVD is actually a great format, isn’t it?

I got about 100 DVD’s right here in my office, I love them!

It’s not a real expanded DVD of ours, but it does have about five extras things on it. There’s the first thing we collaborated with Jem on, which was this movie called Glue Man [based on the closing track of the same name from the band's first record], which I think we did, I can’t remember, exactly, ’88?

Wait a second, the record’s right here. [I had the vinyl editions of all of Fugazi's albums on my desk handy as reference for the whole interview. I grab the first self-titled 12" EP and turn it over to check the copyright date.] 1988.

It is ’88?

Yeah.

I would think it was ’88. I think Ian and Guy actually some of those lyrics together, and then we recorded, the music of it was from an earlier, dubbed-out version of “Glue Man”. [Jem] had released it previously through C-100, which is Mike Stipe’s film company out of Athens. [Editor's Note: Yes, it's that "Mike" Stipe from R.E.M.] But we figured we’d include it because most people probably haven’t seen it. And then it’s got a couple of live things, and there’s another film that Jem made about the Gulf War “celebrations” [laughter] – I don’t know if it’s about them, it’s maybe about humans more than that, but it’s got a slowed down soundtrack from a four-track [recording] that we actually put on it very recently. Yeah, and I guess the other three things are live, just more live music.

Yeah, ’cause you get through the two hours of the [original] movie and you’re like, “That’s it?” [i.e., you're disappointed that it's over.]

Aw, c’mon! [laughter] It’s the longest fucking movie ever made! [laughter]

It’s not!

It is!

[NOTE: Brendan and I were both chuckling through the above sentences, I don't want anyone to get the incorrect impression that the conversation turned into an argument.]

It’s not! [laughter] It’s not The Longest Day, Brendan! The Longest Day is like, four hours!

The Longest what? [still chuckling]

The Longest Day, that war movie with John Wayne and like, sixty other people [in the cast] that took three directors just to make the damn movie!

Oh yeah, that’s right. [laughter] Ever see Shoah? Shoah was ten hours long, that was a movie about recollections of holocaust survivors.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.

That’s a great movie. If you ever see it – I saw it in sitting down in a theater, it was just brilliant. That was the longest film I’d ever seen! Ten hours! [laughter]

I don’t think I could sit through ten hours…

You could! I tell ya, if you see Shoah in a theater, you could sit through ten hours, you just get totally into it, totally captivated. I tend to think that there is a point past an hour and a half where every minute seems like an hour, but then if you know that you’re gonna sit there for ten hours, then it never feels like that, because you’re just adjusting to a completely editing time frame, a different aesthetic completely. So I don’t think you actually ever fall into that. Anyway, that’s my recommended movie of the day. [laughter]

I’ve been on an Asian foreign film kick lately.

Oh yeah?

Yeah, I’ve been finding all these obscure Asian films from Netflix and just renting them, eight at a time.

What, more like, kung-fu things?

Not just kung-fu things, but there’s stuff like this Japanese movie called Tampopo which is all about food.

Oh yeah! That’s a great movie. There’s that funny scene in the noodle bar there where [Tsutomu Yamazaki, playing the male hero] flips that fish cake in the guy’s face.

I think that was a vegetable, actually…

A radish?

Yeah!

That’s pretty brilliant… [Brendan wanted to mention this famous Iranian director but he couldn't remember his name.] Next time you go to the video store, you have to ask him about it, because I’m sure they’ll know who you’re talking about.

I’m trying to think what else is going on in Fugazi world… You know our bass player [Joe Lally] just had a baby?

Yeah, Guy told me over the E-mail. Two [members] down and two to go. [laughter]. I can only imagine how an offspring of Ian MacKaye would be like. [laughter].

Yeah [laughter]

He’d probably have Henry Rollins for a godfather. [laughter] [NOTE: Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins grew up together in Washington D.C. and are still friends to this day. Henry used to roadie for Ian's first band, The Teen Idles, and Henry's first recording was a 7" EP with his first band S.O.A., released in early 1981 on Dischord!]

He probably would [laughter]. Those guys are still pretty tight. That’s D.C. for you. D.C.’s like Mayberry R.F.D. [CJ laughing even harder] It is, it’s just a dinky town, you know everybody here. A sleepy southern town… with a massive target on it.

Oh god! We’re not even going to go there. I can’t imagine how it was on the 11th.

Yep.

Oh my god.

It was pretty bad, I can remember it well.

I don’t think anybody’s going to forget it.

Nope.

Speaking of unforgettable, there’s this scene in Instrument that’s one of my favorite scenes, the scene where you’re in Philadelphia at St. Joe’s Gym [in 1988] and Guy’s hopping on the basketball hoop right above your head during “Glue Man”. What were you thinking when he did that?

I was thinking, “God, it’s just like Rites of Spring [a pre-Fugazi band both Brendan and Guy were in in the mid-80's, their only album and EP are still in print on Dischord], which basically when we were in Rites Of Spring, he would… actually, he did that kind of shit a lot! But in Rites Of Spring, it was constantly, there was shit flying everywhere, we would smash all our shit [instruments] all the time, [laughter] and it was jumping off, just, you know. You have to understand, I’ve played with Guy since we were sixteen, so we were always just going as crazy as we possibly could. In our first band Insurrection, definitely that shit came first and music came second. [laughter]. It was like juggling or something – try to play the song while going as crazy as possible. [laughter] That was just… we had so much footage of Guy doing stuff like that, too.

That could have been a bonus section of the DVD in itself! [laughter]

Yeah, I know! Well, we put a lot of shit in there anyway. Nothing Guy does – not that it doesn’t surprise me, but I know that when I’m playing, the most important thing is to keep the atmosphere consistent. When he’s up there in the hoop, you don’t stop and watch him. [laughter]

Even though you’re like, “Oh, shit! I hope he doesn’t fall on the snare drum or something!” [still laughing, even while Brendan continues below]

Yeah, it’s the last thing you think about… actually, what you’re thinking of is, “I hope he falls on the snare drum, that would be kinda cool.” [several more seconds of laughter]. Definitely. But you’ve gotta keep going, you’ve gotta push it.

You do whatever [it takes].

If you’re really gonna attempt to reach a climactic moment in a song, to push it, then you really have to push it. It’s kind of an unconscious thing, and it only works if everybody in your band is shooting for the same thing, which you never know exactly when you get there, but you try to arrive at the same time. And you’re just pushing and pushing and pushing, so behind the drum set, that’s all I’m thinking about, elevating the environment. There’s not much thinking going on, it’s basically pretty primal, I think, what we’re going for. It’s the dance of death, man, you know? [laughter]

I knew about Rites Of Spring and some of the back history of you guys from reading the book Michael Azerrad did [Our Band Could Be Your Life].

Oh yeah. I haven’t read that yet.

I’d gotten the book two days before I talked to Mike Watt on the phone, and he telling me, “There’s this book out that’s got stories on the Minutemen and Black Flag…” and I said, “I know which book you’re talking about, I just got it the other day!” And coincidentally, by the time I was talking to him on the phone – I got the book on a Sunday and I was talking to him on a Tuesday – I was already up to the chapter on you guys.

Oh yeah? Just whippin’ through it, huh?

Yeah. I re-read books all the time.

Do you like that book?

Oh yeah.

Is it one of the better books about the stuff?

I think it’s one of the only books I’ve actually seen about the stuff, ’cause Mike was telling me, people, when they compile rock history, they gloss over punk rock and say, “Oh yeah, punk rock… Sex Pistols and Nirvana. Let’s move on to the next thing.” And you want to grab whoever’s putting this history together and say, “Hello?! You missed about fifteen years of stuff!”

Yeah, that’s really true, but they’re thinking about mass culture, and this was never about mass culture. This was about communities, small groups of people, all playing for people very esoteric music that other people will appreciate, that people cultivated and fed on the same wellspring and aesthetic will understand. That’s the most interesting music.

This year would have been [John] Coltrane’s 75th birthday.

Yeah, that’s right. Herbie Hancock’s going to be downtown doing a big concert on [Coltrane's] birthday. When is his birthday?

September 20th, I think.

Oh, so it’s just a few days away then… [oops!] Oh, no, we’re in October now. I missed the show. Son of a bitch.

I know. I missed Mike Watt last night in Philadelphia.

Oh, is he on tour?

Yeah.

Is he playing in D.C.?

Let me see. My computer’s on. He should be there soon ’cause he’s in New York tonight… [On the tape, you can hear the keys clicking on my computer keyboard. I end up misspelling the URL to Watt's homepage.] I just spelled it wrong – and I’ve been touch-typing since I was seven.

[Overhearing the keys clicking] Yeah, you’re fast, huh?

Yeah, I’ll be at my day gig and my boss’ll see me and he’ll be like, “How do you type so fast?” [laughter] [Brendan inquires as to where I work, initiating a little more small talk. Meanwhile, I'm looking up Watt's tour dates.] Oh, he’s gonna be in Baltimore on the 15th and in D.C. on the 16th at the Black Cat.

Great! That’ll be awesome. The Black Cat just moved three doors down, but [now] they’ve got this great huge space that’s really nice. Very pleasant place to play, very pleasant place to see a band. Not that your readers will be there checking it out – but I don’t know, you know? Actually, I don’t know who your readers are, but…

[page 8 missing] [CJ's Note: At this point, I was asking Brendan about the ship's bell that was part of his drum kit. He mentioned that Guy had found that bell for him after years of trying to use other things as percussion during their days in the improvisational band Happy Go Licky.]

… I don’t, … no. Not really. To me it’s more like going back to the Wire live record, you know? Or some of the more super-experimental shit that was going on – Einsturzende Neubauten and stuff, all the more experimental noisy stuff…

Yeah, like Einsturzende Neubauten banging on a bridge tunnel and stuff. [An early Einsturzende Neubauten single, "Stahlversion" ("Steel Version"), was a recording of the band members drumming on the hollow underpass of a steel bridge in Berlin. Check out the CD 80-83 Strategies Against Architecture.]

Or Sink Manhattan – ever hear of them?

I might have heard of them.

Yeah, they were sort of like that, they were brilliant. It’s sort of a reference to that sort of thing, and it’s also atmospheric, trying to bust the genre a little bit.

You push everything so that it doesn’t sound like the last record or whatever else is going on.

Yeah, that’s the idea. And it’s also a feeble attempt to try not to get bored playing drums. [laughter]

Well, how bored could you be when Guy’s usually in danger of toppling the drums over? [laughter]

I know, don’t worry, I’m just… [several seconds of laughter] … being facetious. [laughter] I wouldn’t say it’s boring to play drums. What I mean is, you’re limited to the four or five different things you have to play, so it’s kind of cool to break it out a little bit and bring some trash in there. Just bring some reality back to it. Perk your ears up.

AKB48′s self-played performance of their forthcoming single “Give Me Five” under the assumed name/side project Baby Blossom is getting a lot of attention in the J-Pop blogosphere. Despite the raw playing and the questionable sound reinforcement (the result of either no proper soundcheck the day of the performance, or the soundman not taking into consideration how different the room was going to sound with an audience full of people as compared to when the only people in the building were AKB48 and their road crew), they still made quite an impression on me. As someone that has been playing a variety of instruments his whole life, I definitely want to critique and give some serious suggestions to the girls because there’s a lot of room for improvement.

For those that don’t know, I’m a trained musician. I play several different instruments (guitar is my main one, and I presently own five that are all named after J-Pop singers) and there’s a bunch more that I’ve tried but could never get a good enough handle on (trying to teach myself alto sax at age 19 resulted in way too many references to Horatio Hornblower and goat calling from my otherwise supportive parental units) and I’ve played in several different bands for over a decade after my graduation for high school – in fact, it ended up being my main income during the waning years of Reagan America when the only other place that was offering steady employment was the Armed Forces (who had already turned me off when they were relentlessly trying to recruit myself and my other classmates during my junior and senior years of high school and then for months afterward). It’s this musical background that has been a blessing to my activities as a writer and blogger, especially since, as essential brother Ray Mescallado said once, I “aspire to quality music writing” (one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten on my work – thanks again, man.)

Anyway, having watched and listened to the live performance of the song, here’s my notes:

The four girls playing horns were basically the weakest link in the chain. With only a few months of experience on their instruments, they sounded not much different than the brass players in your average junior high or high school marching band. That having been said, brass and woodwind instruments are not the easiest instruments to learn. I attempted to learn trumpet in 6th grade, as well as my aforementioned attempt to try alto sax almost a decade later, and only realized one thing – I didn’t have the lung power to get away with playing a horn properly.

The keyboardists and percussionists involved were a bit inaudible, but I blame the soundman for that, and in all fairness, I won’t critique them.

Yuki Kashwagi did a very impressive job behind the drum kit – I don’t think she even missed a beat. If she found herself in a working rock band after graduating AKB48, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Minami Takahashi did fine playing lead guitar, but her silence for the last few bars of the second chorus before the solo was typical of the beginner. There was a couple of obvious missed notes, but the only thing that grated on me with her playing was her rather bizarre and uncomfortable/unnatural-looking left hand fretting technique. Continued woodshedding and a bit of study with some good guitar instructional videos would help tremendously – they certainly did when I picked the guitar back up after a couple of years of hardly touching it!

Yuko Oshima fluctuated a couple of times on bass but she held her own very well, while Atsuko Maeda showed a lot of confidence playing rhythm guitar.

It’s being openly hoped by AKB48 fans that the AKB48 members involved will continue with this Baby Blossom side project in live performance and maybe even in the studio, and I share those hopes. Quite frankly, it would suck if they stopped playing after pulling off what they did the other night!

Please visit:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cjmarsicano/resonant-blue-limited-edition-first-printing

for further details.

Alternate short URLS:
http://tgml.co/resonantbluekickstarter
or
http://www.resonantblue.com/kickstarter

Most updates will be at the project’s own blog and the Kickstarter page rather than here or at MILO.

It takes a special band to be able to just pick up where they left off. The Stooges did it with The Weirdness (despite “meh” production from Steve Albini). Mission of Burma did it with ONoffON and kept it up for two albums straight since then. The New York Dolls did it with One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This (and then blew it with Dancing Backwards In High Heels). From the sounds of this first single, Van Halen may very well be doing the same trick next month on their new album A Different Kind of Truth – their first album since David Lee Roth made his long-overdue return to the band.

If you felt like you were left hanging after the reconstituted original lineup did “Me Wise Magic” on the Best of Van Halen album in 1996 and then left Diamond Dave behind in favor of “Gary Jabroni”, hang no more. Dave is in fine – no, excellent – voice, and Eddie is completely sober, cancer-free, and grinning from ear to ear. There’s some keyboards in the mix, but the two components important to truly classic Van Halen – David Lee Roth’s vocals and lyrics and Eddie Van Halen’s guitar – are upfront and in sync.

The proof is in the pudding. Go put in your iTunes pre-order now and tide yourself over with the single. Need more convincing, or just another glance at the video? Here you go:

I can deal with incoming goofball singles like the one coming out at the end of the month, “Pyoko Pyoko Ultra” (c’mon, it’s a parallel of “Hyokkori Hy?tanjima”, for chrissakes, even if it sounds more like a Berryz track than a MoMusu one).

This slew of personnel changes, though… enough already, man!

Risa Niigaki just became the leader of the band last September… and now she’s going to graduate at the end of the Spring tour? A translation of the statements from both Risa and Tsunku haven’t been translated yet, as far as I know (Hello! Online broke the news around 7:30 this morning; it’s 11:30 am as I frantically type this out on my iPad, mere minutes after waking up on a rare Monday off from work), but I’m sure the speculation is running rampant as to why we’re getting another personnel change so soon (and thus being denied at least one full album with Gaki-san as leader).

Like I said when Tsunku dropped the tenth generation members on us the day before Takitty’s graduation: Morning Musume are still my favorite band but wait a minute…

Let’s face it, folks: The Stable Nine lineup had us all spoiled. Some of you complained because that lineup was so stable, and now some of those same people are no doubt complaining because it’s the other way around now.

So who is actually going to be leader after this spring? Sayumi Mischchige, who is cute and has improved her singing quite a bit since she first came around, or Reina Tanaka, who’s already gotten a bit of bandleader experience as part of both Aa! and High-King? Come to think of it, in both of those units, Reina was the titular head of units that had predominantly younger members… Hmmm…

Although I’m still in the middle of writing the first intended post for it at the time I’m writing this, The Groove Music Life is introducing a new sister site: MUSIC IS LIKE OXYGEN.

What is going on here is simple. Starting January 1, 2012, TGML is going to concentrate primarily on editorializing about what’s going on in music – starting with this blog’s original genre-specific focuses and going from there. MUSIC IS LIKE OXYGEN will be a review-exclusive site, and the reviews will include back catalog as well as new releases.

Both of these sites will mark a serious increase in my writing activites that will also include the long-delayed launch of the crowdfunding campaign for my first book, Resonant Blue, on January 9, 2012, and the completion of my long-in-work novel Here Is The Wonderland.

Enough discussion, though… check out the new site for more details: