“Like many of his peers, Havens was a songwriter…But Havens also knew a great contemporary song when he heard it, and made his name covering and rearranging songs by Bob Dylan and the Beatles. ‘Music is the major form of communication,” he told Rolling Stone in 1968. “It’s the commonest vibration, the people’s news broadcast, especially for kids.’Richie Havens, folk singer, troubadour, and opener of Woodstock, 1941-2013.
“Bob radiated a passion for justice, and with joyful fervor he inspired everyone around him to share his belief in, and commitment to working for, a more democratic and just society. Through a long and varied career, Bob took on many roles and causes – but all of the chapters in his remarkable life were connected by his essential decency, kindness and compassion.”Bob Edgar, former Congressman, campaign finance activist, and president of Common Cause, 1943-2013.
“I’m a HUGE fan of Arrested Development. Once I heard that each episode in the new season was going to focus on a different character, I thought it would be fun to create a series of art doing the same.” In anticipation of Season 4, artist Josh Cox creates a series of Arrested Development throwback album covers. I probably would’ve more explicitly riffed off this for the above one.
“With Calexico taking the reins as house band, the benefit concert (for children’s music education charities) featured a veritable who’s who of R.E.M.’s 1980s independent peers (the dB’s, Feelies, Throwing Muses), a healthy smattering of acclaimed newer acts (Kimya Dawson, Keren Ann, Guster), a couple of their Athens compatriots (Apples In Stereo, Vic Chestnut)…After Patti Smith sang ‘New Test Leper,’ Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe came out to join her for a finale of ‘E-Bow The Letter.’ This was to be the last time that the three remaining founding members of R.E.M. performed together in public.”
In Salon and excerpted from his new book A Perfect Circle, Tony Fletcher chronicles the last days of R.E.M.. There’s a touch of the hagiography that accompanies music books like these — I’m a pretty big R.E.M. fan, but, as I said when the band retired, both Collapse Into Now and Accelerate seem like relatively uninspired U2-style conscious-comeback albums, and, in terms of the last decade, I prefer the band’s more experimental work on Up, Reveal, and Around the Sun. Still, worth a read if you’re at all REM-inclined.
“Well I hope I don’t die too soon, I pray the lord my soul to save. Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live long enough to savor. That’s when they finally put you in the ground, Ill stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.” The soundtrack for today was written decades ago: I went with Elvis (who talks about this song here), but could just as easily have gone with Morrissey or Pink Floyd or Sinead O’Connor or a whole host of others.
“Britain no longer ‘makes’ much of anything, and when those lost jobs were replaced, they were replaced with low-wage, no-security service industry work…Really, it’s hard to argue with former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who remembered Thatcher on Sky News yesterday: ‘She created today’s housing crisis. She created the banking crisis. And she created the benefits crisis…In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact that she was fundamentally wrong.'” (Last quote also birddogged by Dangerous Meta.)
‘Many music critics still believe in magical black people: “Oh, they’re making crazy, avant-garde music in Chicago, and it’s called juke”,’ he says. ‘But at the same time, the privilege of being a black man with a middle-class background at the start of the 21st century is that I can do whatever I want: it doesn’t have to feel representative. I was nerdier than people wanted DJ /rupture to be.'”
“Like her older sisters, Patty learned to love music as a child (she also became a good tap dancer), and she did not have to be persuaded when Maxene suggested that the sisters form a trio in 1932. She was 14 when they began to perform in public.”Patty Andrews, last of the Andrews Sisters, 1918-2013. “‘I was listening to Benny Goodman and to all the bands,’ Patty once remarked. ‘I was into the feel, so that would go into my own musical ability. I was into swing. I loved the brass section.’“
