Detroit in February is cold. Not necessarily a place you want to visit. But on a windy and bitter Thursday night, music hungry deadheads converged on the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Dark Star Orchestra was in town. And the audience got what they came for: two sets of well articulated, passionately played Grateful Dead music. A little bit of summer for a short 3 hours to help us through the tail end of a Michigan winter.

It was my first time at the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Despite the cold and the wind, the line into the venue was practically around the block at its longest, right after they opened the doors. In reality, the long line wasn’t actually to get in. It was to get a wristband if you wanted to drink (the show was 18 and over). At least in Michigan, people are willing to tolerate a little blast of cold if it means they can get their drink on the rest of night.

I got in early enough that I got to see the venue floor relatively empty. Like any place with a bar and live music, it wasn’t the cleanest place in the world. And it’s pretty drab inside. No balcony, no architectural touches to marvel at. To top it off, without a balcony or a graded ground floor, there are really no good sight lines to the stage unless you’re pretty close to the front.

That said, once the music gets going, the Majestic is a nice venue. The sound is pretty balanced, not a lot of reverb off the walls, and it accommodates a crowd of 1,600+ while keeping easy access to the bars, which line the back wall and one side of the venue. Never a long line when you need a thirst quencher.

The set lists for this show are outstanding. There’s not a “I think I’m going to go get a beer” song in the bunch. The band kicked off the first set with Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” a common opener for the Dead. This was followed by a rockin’ “Sugaree,” then Bobby’s country masterpiece, “Mexicali Blues.”

With those song selections, it felt like a 77 show to me at that early stage. Maybe that’s because I had been listening to the 1977 Mosque show, which was just released as Dave’s Picks, Vol 1, in my car on the way to the show. In any event, that turned out not to be the case. It was actually a show from 1973 – March 22 at Utica Memorial Auditorium. Just weeks after Pigpen died, and during Mickey Hart’s hiatus from the band. It was a transitional year in Grateful Dead history. Pigpen was gone, the repertoire was expanding in several different directions, and they were still adjusting to Mickey’s absence.

Both set lists had a strong country flavor to them, beginning with “Mexicali Blues” as the third song in the first set, which also included the George Jones classic “The Race is On” and Marty Robbin’s “El Paso.” The second set rounds things out with “Big River” plus “Me and My Uncle.”

And it wasn’t just a country celebration, of course. The first set crescendoed with a “China Cat Sunflower -> I Know You Rider” sequence followed by a “Playin’ In The Band” that left the crowd exhausted and ready for the set break. And the second set was dominated by a rocking “Truckin’ -> The Other One -> Eyes of The World” sequence, which wound down with a soothing “China Doll.”

“You Ain’t Woman Enough” was a particular treat. It was the biggest surprise of the show. I’ve always enjoyed Donna’s singing, but you don’t see her take the lead vocal spot very often. With Dark Star Orchestra, it’s always a treat when Lisa Mackey (who plays the Donna Jean Godchaux role in the band) gets center stage. So I’m glad they picked this particular show to cover. Really an inspired choice.

The band, as usual, was outstanding. Only one of the drummers — Dino English — played the show, since the original show was sans Mickey Hart. The arrangements are tight when they need to be, and they know how to inhabit a jam. And they’re good at bringing the crowd with them, which, to be fair, is pretty easy since we’re all a bunch of easily excitable deadheads, and we know all the cues, and all the lyrics.

This show was early in a 25 show tour for these guys. They tour relentlessly. Always on the road. I don’t know how they do it. Take a look at their tour schedule. Granted, some are 2013 dates, but still… These guys are one of the hardest working bands on the jam band touring circuit. And that’s saying a lot. They are extremely tight. Go see them if they’re coming around your way.

Photos by Mike Vasquez. See more here.

Asia - Alpha

When we last left off, I was saying that the Asia album you want is the one with “Heat of the Moment” on it. Well, this is not that album. But from about the first 15 seconds of Alpha, I’m thinking this one might just be a keeper.

The opening track is a fast-tempo, synth-driven rocker, “Don’t Cry,” that sounds so familiar I must have heard it a million times on the radio when I was a kid. Or maybe it just sounds enough like REO Speedwagon that I think I’ve heard it. John Wetton could win a Kevin Cronin sound-alike contest in a heartbeat, I think. This is not a good song, really, but it hints at being something I might want to listen to again.

The next track, “The Smile Has Left Your Eyes” opens with a synth piano riff that’s similarly cut from the Top 40-friendly, REO ballad playbook. This is not good music in any way, shape or form, and it’s so thin and weak sounding from a production standpoint that I wonder what the hell the guys recording this album were thinking. There’s just no depth to the sound and very little bass.

Thankfully, this album seems to move pretty quickly. Indeed, for a group of guys hailing from prog rock bands, it’s pretty amazing that six of the 10 cuts on this lp clock in under the magic four-minute mark. Clearly they were trying to make pop music here.

The third track on the “alpha” side of Alpha, “Never In A Million Years” at least has some nice guitar playing on it, and it’s this – Steve Howe’s contribution – that makes me like this record better than Astra.

The next track still hasn’t solved my problems with the production any, but “My Own Time (I’ll Do What I Want)” does have a nice chorus and for some reason, it’s getting me to thinking about the similarities between Asia and Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Both were “supergroups” composed of guys who were really successful in other bands. Neither ever lived up to their promise. But the big difference between CSN and Asia is that by the time Asia showed up on the scene, the whole supergroup thing had already been played out. CSN had lost their way and other assemblages of star power had fizzled, like Blind Faith and Bad Company. I don’t know much about the history of Asia, nor do I really care, because it just seems like this was a bad idea from the start. I suppose as far as bad ideas of the early 1980’s go, there were far worse ones, like Reaganomics and the Cadillac Cimarron, but I digress.

“The Heat Goes On” is the rocking-est song on the first side of the album, and again, it’s Steve Howe who really shines amidst this lot of really mediocre songs. But I can’t really tell if it’s the songs or the recording, because I can’t really hear anything other than a blast of synthesized noise, even while I sit and intently listen. Picking out the instruments is damn near impossible, and there’s absolutely no sound stage to this record. I may as well be listening to it on a clock radio, rather than my stereo.

The “Beta” side opens with “Eye to Eye,” which is probably the best track on the album. It’s a legitimate hard rock song, and Wetton actually sounds kind of angry here. There’s a proggy sort of keyboard part with a change in tempo that’s backed up against a cheesy Beach Boys-style chorus, but it all kind of works. I really like this song, and it’s the first track that I’m really wishing was actually recorded well.

But that’s the thing, all of this album just sounds like crap. Checking out the liner notes while listening to the slow ballad, “The Last to Know,” I see that the album was recorded at Le Studio in Quebec, on two 24-track tape machines (Two? Really? Who in the hell needs 48 tracks?), and then mixed digitally. The result is like trying to stuff 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. And a really bad bag, at that.

Digital gets a bad rap among audiophile types (yes, I’m sort of one), but the more I delve into this subject, I realize that it’s not digital itself that sucks but how digital recording and playback are poorly used and implemented that’s the problem. Clearly this is an example of an album that, because of being digitally mixed, sounds bad, even on an analog playback system. I’m not listening to a CD, which would probably just compound the problems with the compressed and brittle sound, but a good old-fashioned record. And it still sucks.

“The Last to Know,” turns out to be a great epic track, which grows into something that I wish I would have slow danced to in middle school. The next song, “True Colors,” however, just tries too hard and winds up sounding like a bad soundtrack cut from movie about an amateur sports team. “Midnight Sun” might as well be album filler, a slowish song about who the hell knows what, but at least Howe gets a solo on it.

I’m really tired of listening by the time the album closes with “Open Your Eyes,” the only truly long song on the album, at 6:26. But it’s not the big delicious prog rock mess it should be. It’s just a bad pop song with an electric piano and guitar “interlude” that doesn’t belong – but does waste a good minute of your life.

Runout Groove: There’s a pair of 24-track master tapes out there begging to be remixed in analog with more Steve Howe. I’ll keep this around for comparison, just in case that ever happens.

Geffen GHS 4008, 1983

Asia: official reunion website, allmusic.com, Wikipedia, Amazon
Original photos copyright 2012 Jeff Sabatini

The second thought immediately following this was “Who on Earth would release this?”

Even today, Trout Mask Replica stands out as a left-field landmark, an impressive opus that may not sound like a masterpiece upon first listen, but its creative seeds begin to plant themselves immediately afterwards causing each subsequent listen to reveal an additional layer of complete brilliance.

So it goes without saying that the record company that had the impossible foresight to allow such a document to grow to fruition must most certainly be run by a special person.

The label was originally called Bizarre and it eventually transformed into Straight Records. The men responsible for these forward-looking labels were Frank Zappa and his manager Herb Cohen. Together, they drew up a contract with Warner Brothers for Zappa’s material, and they secured a vanity label with the company so that Frank and Herb could offer artists an outlet for their creativity.

From Straight To Bizarre: Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and LA’s Lunatic Fringe chronicles the origins of Zappa and Cohen’s record company all the way to its ultimate collapse amid bad feelings and obligatory lawsuits. It’s recommended to any fan of Zappa or Beefheart that’s interested in learning more about this very creative time for both of them and the strange business plan that Zappa hatched in turning documents of L.A.’s self-described freaks into recording stars.

What’s striking is how patient Zappa seems to be with these people, some of whom have clear mental issues that far outweigh any attempt at assisting their artistic endeavors. Others are just plain opportunistic, part of the scene because they invited themselves and invented a second-life persona that was either hiding their real history because of how awful it was or how bland it looked on paper.

For some reason not explained on film, (none of the interviews presented in this feature Zappa) Frank felt these enigmatic characters deserved documenting. He began on a quest to transform a paranoid schizophrenic named Wild Man Fischer who spent his days selling his stream-of-questionable-consciousness songs for a dime, essentially panhandling his lunacy for tourists and passers-by.

For most of us, these characters are minor annoyances on our way to work, but to Frank, Fischer was part of the landscape of this social freak culture he was attempting to document. Fischer thought he’d sound like the Beatles when Frank finished, but when Zappa presented an album with not only Fischer’s primitive compositions, but his crazed existence in the form of field recordings, he got mad.

The Wild Man–true to his name–flung a flower pot too close for comfort at the head of a very young Moon Unit Zappa, trying to process how An Evening With Wild Man Fischer wasn’t as big as Meet The Beatles.

After that event, Fischer was never allowed in the Zappa house again and his debut record has never been re-released to this day because of bad feelings. I verified this online where the lowest priced copy of An Evening With I found on a recent scan of eBay (VG rating) had a starting price of $20 with better quality copies ranging from $50-$100.

The GTO’s get ample screen time on From Straight To Bizarre with Pamela Des Barres and Miss Mercy spouting on about meaningless stories of getting high with the Magic Band and defining what exactly constitutes being a groupie. Out of all of the label’s releases, the GTO’s Permanent Damage may stand as the most unnecessary record ever made, but according to the film, Zappa tolerated their limit talents and unprofessional behavior in the studio.

Thankfully, a great deal of time is spend on Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica and the power that he exerted over the band during this period. It’s clear from Magic Band members John French (Drumbo) and Bill Harkleroad (Zoot Horn Rollo) that the Captain initiated a regime of cultdom that French later referred to as “Masonesque.”

You get the sense that Zappa himself was aware of this treatment, yet gave a wide birth between being concerned with their welfare and allowing his old friend Don Van Vliet to have what he wanted most: total creative freedom. In his defense, Zappa did give the Magic Band a hot meal every so often out of pity.

During the period where they were considered a band, Alice Cooper also maneuvered into a contract with the label based on an audition that Vince Furnier misheard to take place at nine in the morning at the Zappa cabin in Laurel Canyon instead of Frank’s preferred time of nine in the evening.

Frank also caught an Alice Cooper gig that witnessed half the audience leaving in disgust, which meant that Zappa simply had to agree to sign them based on principle alone. By the time of their third album Love It To Death, the band had finally found a new producer who captured their essence into a palatable offering, led by the enormously successful “I’m Eighteen.”

With that record in 1971, the logo of Straight Records was all that was left before the Zappa/Cohen project was phased out of discussion along with Zappa’s own contract with Warners.

I haven’t even touched on signings like the a capella gospel vocal group The Persuasions, Tim Buckley’s Starsailor release, as well as Mother’s member Jeff Simmons’s solo album. They’re all included in the discussions during From Straight To Bizarre, which makes the film a bit heavy at over two-and-a-half hours in length.

You may get a bit winded by all of the talking heads throughout the feature, helping to assist in the film’s girth and you may get very sick of the original musical music they use each time the conversation focuses on Beefheart. There are samples of some of the label’s artists, but as a matter to save money, the producers must have bargained a lower number to someone familiar with Beefheart’s repertoire to come up with a cheesy facsimile.

Cheap tactics aside, the film does prove to be a good reference point for any up-and-coming Zappa fan looking to see how far his influence extended into the late sixties. It’s also a nice document of one of the most successful avant-garde record companies that ever benefited from a major record label and a reminder of how different the system was when it came to harvesting talent beyond the pool of commercial ambition.

Trailer: Frank Zappa – Straight To Bizarre

Note: Amazon pulled its listing for some reason (Google cache) but you can still order it from MVD or Chrome Dreams UK.

Who would’ve guessed? I can only thinkf of a handful of good musicians whose parents were famous artists. The Nelson twins? Nope. Wilson Phillips? Nope. Arguments could certainly be made for Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainright, and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Maybe even Jacob Dylan. But it’s rare enough that when the apple falls fairly close to the tree, we notice.

Based on “What Other Guy” Adam Cohen seems to have inherited his dad’s deadpan delivery of wickedly honest lyrics. “I can draw you with my eyes closed / See you with nothing on but the radio / I know how many years of French you took / Your favorite movies, your favorite books.” He’s even got the senior Cohen’s knack for subtle arrangements featuring acoustic guitars, tasteful strings, and delicate female background vocals.

The album was released back in October in Europe and Canada but has been held up for a US release until this April. I’m looking forward to hearing the whole thing.

I hope Adam — and everybody else! — adheres to Leonard Cohen’s Seven Immutable Laws of Business, especially number three: “There’s nothing you can do behind your desk that can’t be more effectively accomplished with a beautiful, long-haired, chain-smoking woman lying naked next to you in bed.”

Video: Adam Cohen – “What Other Guy” (live)

Video: Adam Cohen – “What Other Guy” – Official Music Video

Adam Cohen: web, Facebook, Twitter

“I don’t give a fuck about you too,” deadpans Howard Devoto on “Final Analysis Waltz” from the first new Magazine album in something like forever. The reality is that no one retires a band after four records only to reprise it over three decades later. And I don’t care how ambivalent Devoto claims to be; there has to some need to create with his old band members and some desire to connect with those longstanding fans for one last hurrah.

So yeah, I’m betting that Devoto does give a fuck.

Good luck trying to find any hint of appreciation from Magazine’s frontman as they weren’t very good at throwing a party, choosing instead to turn Devoto’s brief hints of bullocks during his time with the Buzzcocks into brooding passages of post-punk pathos by the time they were all said and done.

The concern then is that Devoto clearly found a certain amount of positive energy during these past thirty years to make Magazine’s silence somewhat explainable, but I’ll be good goddamned if No Thyself is just as clinically depressed as their first run.

There are some names missing from the latest lineup: original guitarist John McGeoch passed away in 2004 and bassist Barry Adamson left after the initial reunion shows in 2009. Those that remained and those that were added have still managed to turn No Thyself into a nice bit of modern bent while adding nicely to Magazine’s brief yet respectable output.

I’m hesitant to mention a troubling bit of lyrics–the likes of which my Swedish grandmother would say “Ish”–for fear that it officially qualifies me as turning a bit prudish as I grow older. But here goes: There’s a part in the song “Other Thematic Material” where Devoto gets quiet graphic concerning male ejaculate–which, given Howard’s quirky and unstable vocals–become quite uncomfortable as he continues to expound on that x-rated topic.

But that same creepiness works wonders on tracks like “Hello Mr. Curtis (With Apologies),” where Devoto addresses the early parting of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain by declaring “I’ve made my decision to die like a king…like Elvis…on some godforsaken toilet.”

No Thyself is a refreshing reminder that Devoto still isn’t willing to compromise Magazine’s worthy nameplate with safe topics and timid approaches, no matter how inappropriate they may be. Its unique blend of Devoto spread finger jazz piano chords and guitarist Noko’s tremendously angular guitar work, and it’s all worth a new cover shot.

It was within a couple of hours of his win for Best New Artist that Justin Vernon found himself the subject of an Internet meme. Or rather, his nom de plume, Bon Iver. It probably wasn’t what he had in mind when he clumsily accepted his award but a good portion of the Twitterverse was asking, “who the fuck is Bon Ivor?” Enough that it’s inspired a Tumblr blog based on many tweeters’ mishearing the name.

While a gang of dopey Twitter geeks wondering who Bonny Bear is and why he beat out J Cole (but really, who is that?)is one thing, there’s something far more disturbing out there. Something that chills my blood and unsettles my soul. There are maybe as many of these dopes asking: Who the Fuck is Paul McCartney?

Now I know that our attentions wane and shift over the years and generational differences can leave gaps and voids between us. But aren’t some things just…known? Aren’t there some facts, events and people who endure and transcend these differences? Surely, Paul Fucking McCartney is one.

It was a few years ago that Sab astonished us all with a report that he was working with an intern who had no idea who Kurt Cobain was. While that was (and is) shocking to me—not only because of Nirvana’s place in the greater cultural hierarchy, but because he hadn’t been dead that long—the idea that ANYONE doesn’t recognize the name of one of only two living Beatles is simply mind blowing.

And yet here we are, watching the constant flow of the Twitter stream wash away the few remaining features of our collective memory. What we’re left with is a fluid and a completely forgettable shape-shift of conversation. And these memories lose their meaning…oh wait, that was the other one.

Let me start with the prerequisites:

1. It’s sad when people die

2. As music fans, we often attach personal feelings to people we’ve never met but who created something that touched us deeply

3. Whitney Houston was very talented and inspiring to a lot of people

That said, I have to be honest: I have never, ever in my life liked Whitney Houston’s music. Actually, that’s me being polite about the dead. Let me try again:

I have always fucking hated Whitney Houston’s music.

As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s I still have vivid memories of the radio being dominated by incredibly slick (yet, somehow ultimately cheap-sounding) pop music that seemed to have subject matter limited to the storylines of teen romance novels. Lots of songs about secret romances or unrequited emotions or jilted lovers or illicit hook-ups. I get it, those are some universal themes. But they kind of run out of steam on the second or third listen. Unfortunately for me back then, the second or third listen of a Whitney Houston song came somewhere in the first 45 minutes of your day. Whether it was on your mom’s kitchen radio, the Kraco in your dad’s Plymouth Voyager or on MTV…she was everywhere. Like a stalker. It was scary.

It started off innocently enough with her cheeky 1985 single “You Give Good Love.” It was harmless and good fodder for jr. high boys to embarrass their female classmates. “Hey, Melissa. You give good love!” High-fives all around. But the joke was on us because it was just the first volley. In less than two years she’d hit us with the double barrels of “The Greatest Love of All” and the ubiquitous “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” All school dances were destroyed. Whitney owned. Still, this was harmless pop. It was annoying and obnoxious in its unbridled girl energy, but it wasn’t destroying lives.

And then war broke out.

Ten days into Operation Desert Storm, Houston detonated a bunker buster with her rendition of our National Anthem at Super Bowl XXV. I worked at Blockbuster Video at the time and it was mandated by Corporate that we play the video (being sold as a fundraiser benefiting military charities—honorable enough, I must admit) at least once every hour. ONCE. EVERY. HOUR. When you’re working doubles that means more than 12 times a day. While everyone is lost in a nostalgic haze of that rendition today, I was pummeled with it day in and day out while suburban moms asked me where they could find “Ghost” and their kids begged me for another bag of our free caramel corn.

But that wasn’t Whitney’s last shot. She was about to go nuclear.

I vividly remember when her rendition of Dolly Parton’s simple declaration “I Will Always Love You” stormed the charts. Like a siren blaring in the night, I couldn’t escape her pitch-perfect caterwaul. When, in the third act of the song, she modulated up another step into the stratosphere I thought my head would explode. Remember, this song topped the charts for 14 straight weeks and remained in the Top 40 for 24. That was my life for the months and months that the song was on constant replay in America.

So while I sympathize with those who are celebrating Whitney Houston’s career and talent and truly mourn the loss of her voice, I can’t say I am with them. Godspeed, Whitney, but can we please—PLEASE—not revisit the great Whitney Houston blitzkrieg? Do it for the children, who are our future after all.

For example, I clicked on a news link once that brought me to a website that was locally related to the article I was reading. From that website, I noticed another article mentioning how a local resident was caught molesting a farm animal.

If you’re a normal, red-blooded American, you can probably guess where my mouse pointed. Of course, I wanted to read about the guy from Alabama that was messing with a pony.

Instinctively, I clicked the story hyperlink, only to be immediately met by my company’s automatic tattle-tale IT security warning window, advising me that my website of choice was not allowed as the word “bestiality” was not related to any job duties within the organization and that my attempt to access such a site would be duly noted.

Fear raced as I began to look for excuses to try and explain to the IT police and human resources why I tried to click on a link to a story about a dude caught with his pants down in the horse stable.

Would I be forever known as the guy that got fired for looking at bestiality porn? Would it become something of legend, replacing the truth until my termination story was due to my own encounter with a farm animal on company property? I should note that my employer is close to a community college with an active agricultural program, so the chance encounter with livestock and farm animals is entirely possible.

Nothing ever came from my bad choices in internet news sites, but I am a bit more selective when it comes to browsing the internet on my work computer.

I visit Yahoo because it seems like a nice homogenized place where people can gather across the country, read incredibly fluffy bits of journalism, and then comment about the inordinate amount of liberal staff members that Yahoo has, spreading their icky little socialist propaganda all over their website.

If that isn’t fucking ridiculous enough, the amount of time all this worthless shit takes to load on my work computer is. The Clash were right, so I mutter “workin’ for the clampdown” as I eat my chicken bacon ranch wrap from the cafeteria while the Yahoo homepage loads on my screen.

All of this so I can read about why we care about Donald Trump’s announcement of his GOP endorsement.

But it’s taking longer to load on this day as I notice that the hang up is due to some Flash advertisement that’s attempting to load before I can even see the story links.

Suddenly, an image of Tommy Lee, that pony-dick drummer from Motley Crue, slides across my screen, followed by the corpse that is Mick Mars, then Nikki “A paramedic saved my life” Sixx and finally Vince Neil, which had me worried that his image might prompt a security warning for attempting to access chicks with dicks website.

But no. All of this Motley Crue Flash activity was not promoting the new album by the Crue, nor was it to remind me that the band was going on tour again, probably performing the exact same setlist they played on their last one.

It was for Kia.

For a band that really hyped up their image as Harley-Davidson riding bad boys, it seemed strange that the band would choose to cash in with South Korea’s second largest automobile manufacturer.

The power to surprise, indeed.

It wasn’t until I saw the actual television ad that I got the full impact of the commercial.

The Cliffs Note version goes like this: Middle age white schmuck consumes enough anti-depressants and Vicodin to believe that he is still the same badass that he was in the 11^th Grade when he spent all of his money earned at Burger King on an ’84 Ford EXP with 98,000 miles and a factory cassette deck.

Fast forward some twenty-five years later and this same sad bastard is using his rapid eye memory believing that a Kia Optima is somehow his “dream car for real life.”

I’m sorry, but where I come from one of our hometown heroes drove a ’69 Plymouth Superbird and any Asian car was referred to as a “rice burner.”

No, there would be no convincing my blue-collar brethren that anything with a Kia nameplate, and shame on Motley Crue for trying to suggest otherwise.

If you haven’t heard one of Nikki Sixx’s endless recounting, “Kickstart My Heart” is the story about that aforementioned paramedic who continued to apply shocks to Sixx’s chest after he long expired from a heroin overdose.

Now it seems that Sixx is due for another zap–or at least a head-exploding roundhouse kick to the head from Chuck Liddell–to remind him that these decisions of product placement are only as good the current model year.  By Super Bowl XLVII, the Crue will be less known for their history of rock’s premier bad boys and more for their love of fuel-efficient family sedans.

Had the middle-aged sleeper really strived for the life of the Crue’s storied decadence, he would have crashed that Kia into the Hanoi Rocks tour bus, stolen the pixie dust from Mr. Sandman and Hoovered up all that glittery blow off the ass of one of those scantily clad chicks in the NASCAR stands.

Because if any self-respecting Crue fan even considers signing a down payment check for any model of Kia, they need to be reminded of how they’re also signing off on their own do not resuscitate order.

Which is exactly what Motley Crue has done with this commercial and what I have done with my lunch break.

Ad: “A Dream Car. For Real Life.” — 2012 Kia Optima Big Game Full Commercial

The break was nice. It gave us time to migrate from MovableType to WordPress. We also switched hosts from Hostrocket to Dreamhost. And then switch back to Hostrocket after Dreamhost couldn’t power our decade-worth of content with their measly 8MB of PHP memory.

Our break also gave us some time to think about why we do this whole Glorious Noise thing and whether or not to continue on with it. When it comes down to it I realized that I enjoy sharing good music, interesting news, and critical opinions with the people who read this site. It’s easy to get bummed out when comments are non-existent, when pageviews are low (or are only high for stupid stuff), and when ad revenue dries up.

But then I think back eleven years to when we started this thing and we didn’t have any of that business. (Remember when enabling comments on blogs required separate software? BlogVoices, RIP!) Then again, we don’t have the novelty factor anymore. Plus now most of us have kids, real careers, etc. But we still care about music, musicians, and the music industry so we’re going to keep this going for the foreseeable future. As long as it’s fun.

I’m excited about Sab’s new column, My Vinyl Solution, where he’ll be listening to his entire record collection in (more or less) alphabetical order. We’ll be rolling out a redesign over the next couple of weeks. And we’ll try to come up with some other fun ideas to keep this interesting to our readers and to ourselves.

I’m off to drive to Chicago to see Jeff Mangum right now, so I’m signing off. But I’ll leave you with some inspirational thoughts from Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and MC Ren.

Previous birthdays:

• 2002: Happy Birthday to Glorious Noise!
• 2003 :Terrible Twos: Happy Birthday to Us!
• 2004: Happy Birthday! Three is a Magic Number!
• 2005: Glorious Noise is Four Years Old
• 2006 (belated): The Black and Orange Ball: GLONO’s Fifth Birthday Party
• 2007: Happy Sixth Birthday to Glorious Noise
• 2008: And if the Devil is Six: GLONO is Seven!
• 2009: Glorious Noise Turns Eight Years Old Today; Eight Years Ago: It started with emails…
• 2010: Glorious Noise Is Nine Years Old
• 2011: Decade: Glorious Noise Turns 10

My Vinyl Solution is simple: I’m listening to my records. As my collection has grown, I’ve realized that I’ve been spending too much time amassing lps, to the point that I have no idea of what I even own. Hence, this column.

Asia, Astra

So the first thing you may notice if you read my last column post, is that regardless of what kind of writer I am, I clearly don’t have a grasp of the alphabet. Or more to the point, I’ve done a really crappy job of organizing my records. Now I could waste a bunch of time going through and making sure that my records are indeed, alphabetized. Or I could spend the time actually listening. Clearly there is only one choice here, and that’s to forge ahead and pull the lp’s off the shelf in whatever order they are in and call it good.

Thinking about the last time I did go through the arduous task of alphabetizing all these records, I seem to recall at least getting them close enough such that all the A’s are together, all the B’s follow, and so on and so forth. That will just have to suffice here. But it also brings up another point, which is that all my jazz albums (and I think blues, as well) are separated out from the rest. Which means this is going to be a very rock-centered endeavor, unless, of course, I mix the jazz in as I go along, which I think I should do.

In fact, since I’ve established that things are only going to progress along in a poor facsimile of order, I’m going to give myself free reign to toss in whatever albums I feel like to mix things up. Besides the jazz and blues, I also have a substantial stack of records that are unfiled simply because I lack the shelf space. Hopefully as I free some up by discovering crap that I have no reason to keep and then getting rid of it, I can integrate these many records that are still living in milk crates.

And that brings us to Asia’s Astra, fittingly enough. Side one kicks off with “Go,” which has an interesting chorus. Yeah right. “Get up and go” is, however, an ominous beginning, because despite my love of arena rock, it’s exactly what I want to do. This album really sounds terrible from the first note.

“Voice of America” may be a tribute to the military radio station, it may not. I really don’t care, because despite liking the chorus quite a bit, this song sounds like it’s about twice as long as it needs to be.

“Hard On Me” is, indeed, hard on me. The synths are just embarrassing. I mean, I could listen to something like Yes’ Big Generator all day long and not get tired of it, and Tony Kaye is using gear from the same era, recording in the same sorts of studios, and the sound is somewhat similar. Except that it doesn’t suck.

Which brings up the big question I am asking myself as I try and ignore this mid-tempo ballad, “Wishing,” while resisting the temptation to write another bad pun based on the name of the song. Who the hell are these guys in Asia? Now I’ve never listened to this record before, but I’ve kept it around for a few years since acquiring it, thinking that Asia was one of those bands that I’d be instantly familiar with from years of listening to classic rock radio.

But as this first side ends with the insipid “Rock and Roll Dream” (which rhymes “reality” with “never see”), I’m realizing I’ve never heard any of these awful songs before. And thank goodness.

Despite not wanting to flip the album and debating just cutting it short, side two starts with a song called “Countdown to Zero,” which is actually kind of good. It begins with something that sounds almost exactly like the THX “Deep Note,” and for the first time I am motivated to actually pull out the sleeve and look at the liner notes, which are as uninteresting as most of the music. “Zero” at least turns into a perfect ’80s Cold War paranoia song, worthy of being included on a mix tape right next to Sting’s “Russians.

It’s here though that I’ve had it. Clearly this record is going to Encore in the hopes of generating some trade credit. The remaining songs, “Love Now Till Eternity,” “Too Late,” “Suspicion,” and “After The War” aren’t as bad as the truly atrocious first side, or maybe I’m just growing comfortably numb. At least this album was not released during the CD era in the ’90s, as then I could have had an extra 25 minutes to slog through.

Runout Groove: This is not the Asia record with “Heat of the Moment” on it. That’s the one you want.

Geffen GHS 24072, 1985

Asia: official reunion website, allmusic.com, Wikipedia, Amazon
Original photos copyright 2012 Jeff Sabatini