Who knew that when I moved to Saugerties, New York (think Big Pink) a few years ago that my next-door neighbor would be founding psychedelic art legend Isaac Abrams? Far out. And miraculously, close by. Just in the converted antique auction house loft adjacent to ours. Yes, I’ve borrowed sugar[...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

It’s just another day for you and me and hope and change in Burnout Paradise—but who invited Obama into that fantasy?

By Randy Harward

Perhaps by now you’ve seen GigaOm.com’s report that the Barack Obama campaign purchased in-game advertising on the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise (Electronic Arts). The billboard says, “Early Voting Has Begun” which, as GigaOm points out, is possibly “his subtle way of trying to get [gamers] off the couch.”

Hey, with Somebody’s efforts to disenfranchise voters and flat-out steal elections, and the Rovian motivation of fearful bigoted evangelical voters, it’s worth a shot. Gamers are an increasingly substantial portion of the population. And to speak generally—and risk sounding like Bill O’Reilly when he called The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’s viewers “stoned slackers”—many of them probably prefer their banana chair or beanbag time to more significant pursuits and concerns, like presidential elections.

Gamers aren’t all single-minded burnouts. Many have jobs and families, to say nothing of minds and opinions. It’s possible, though, that their leisure activities leave little time for, or passively take priority over, researching candidates and issues. Gamers probably don’t debate their opponents while during a marathon online World of Warcraft session, or engage the drummer in political tête-à-tête while Guided by Joyces holds forth on the Rock Band virtual stage. And chances are very few of them tune into CNN or MSNBC after powering down their systems. So why not reach out to them in their world?

That is, if we/they can stomach more product placement and ubiquitous-verging-on-ridiculous advertising. It’s bad enough to have in-show advertisements on The Office or in films. Like moviegoers and boob-tubers, gamers probably bristle at real-world advertisements in the fantasy worlds that function as an escape from their day-to-day. Especially when those ads don’t necessarily reflect their views or tastes—hell, even when they do.

I support Obama, but I’d nonetheless be taken aback by a campaign ad in a game I for which I shelled out forty to sixty bucks. Sorry, Mr. Almost Maybe President—I just don’t want to be pitched when I’m pretending to be a street racer instead of keyboard monkey. I want to see fire, explosions, gore and girls—and some far-out recreations of exotic locales both extant and extraterrestrial. I want, for the hour or two I can devote to my hobby, to be unmolested by advertising, whether it’s from you, McCain or McDonald’s. And I for damn sure don’t want to see my fictional band on the cover of Paste when I pass a level on Guitar Hero III. Talkin’ to you, Neversoft. That rag wouldn’t know a rippin’ solo if Hendrix pissed one down on them from the Coca-Cola skybox in Jet Blue Heaven.

Likely, you've occasionally wondered what exactly it is we do here at Outlandos Music (other than blog). The easy answer is that we've been plotting and scheming to remedy a lot of the stuff you hear me bitching and moaning about each week. Actually, the plotting and scheming was over ages ago [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentati on of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

On Friday, September 19th, 2008, there was no gasoline to be found in most parts of Nashville Tennessee. The gas pumps sat eerily abandoned, their nozzles shrouded with plastic bags. The few stations that did have gas, including the Exxon across the street from our hotel, were surrounded by lines of panicked motorists that stretched for blocks. Home of the Brave. I walked over to the station. There was a news van out front. Police and station staff were directing traffic to and from the pumps and explaining to people that they couldn't just turn in because the line started three blocks to the south.

I was a bit uneasy, because we were to play in Harrodsburg Kentucky the following night and I wasn't sure how widespread the gas shortage had become. I had noticed in the preceding days that some stations in both Athens Georgia and Chattanooga were out of regular. Was the whole South out of gas? I called an acquaintance in Bowling Green who said that if I could make it that far I would have no problem. There was plenty of gas in Kentucky. We had nearly a quarter tank, just about enough to make Bowling Green.

The next night, from the safety of Kentucky, I googled "Nashville gas shortage". Not much came up, mostly blogs from Nashvillians. I didn't see any sign of national coverage. The only TV news clip I found was from the Nashville Fox affiliate. The clip reported some violence including a drive by shooting in East Nashville, and widespread hoarding. People were topping off their tanks like okies in the dust bowl. There was a shot of a woman filling a gallon plastic milk jug with gas and putting it in her car. Real smart. She didn't even bother to duct tape the cap. At least she knew to set the jug on the ground when she filled it so a static charge on the plastic wouldn't blow the whole place to Jesus.

Then came a clip of Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn repeating McCain's shrill mantra "Drill here, drill now" and blathering on about how we need to find more oil "under American soil". I guess she hasn't noticed that we are drilling here now, and have been drilling here for some time. I have cousins who work in the oil field in North Texas and they're quite busy these days. They can't keep up with demand though.  Blackburn also called for increased refining capacity. She's right on that one. We do need more refineries, and we need refineries that can handle the low grade "sour" oils  that we're mostly finding these days. It seems that, while we're still finding plenty of oil, the "light sweet crude",  that's easy and inexpensive to refine, is growing scarce. The lower grade oils have sulphur that must be removed and long molecules that must be "cracked" into shorter pieces to make gasoline.  There have recently been some promising natural gas discoveries in North Texas and North Louisiana. Why is no one advocating that we convert cars to run on natural gas? Some public transportation companies run their buses on natural gas, so the conversion shouldn't be that hard. Natural Gas burns clean and requires minimal refining. Or, of course, we could limit our driving, conserve gas? Un-American, I guess.

I noticed in one article I read that Knoxville Tennessee had had a similar shortage the weekend before the Nashville shortage. Interesting, two major shortages in two Tennessee cities on two consecutive weekends, with minimal news coverage. No one seemed to know what exactly caused the shortages. Some theorized that the hurricanes had taken Gulf state refineries off line and that evacuees had burned up a lot of gas. I know what caused those shortages, someone at the back end of the pipeline cut off the flow. Maybe the reason for the shut off was indeed that they had no more gas, but, whatever the reason, someone had to make a decision to push a button, turn a valve, or key in a command. Someone decided which town wasn't going to get their gasoline that weekend. The result was an interesting social experiment that exposed our vulnerability. I'm not referring to the vulnerability of our infrastructure, but rather, the vulnerability of our collective psyche, a much more dangerous vulnerability. Our hysterical fear of not being able to go where we want when we want renders us powerless to any force, natural or human, that would attack the physical infrastructure, and some very unscrupulous politicians are itching to exploit that fear. You can bet they were taking notes on Nashville.

We think we'll die if we can't drive. Some of us might, but most of us won't. Pipes can be fixed, rides can be hitched. We'd better learn to relax. There will be more shortages in the future and we'll have to help each other get through them.We'll have to learn not to fight over a place in a gas line. We'll have to quit hoarding and just take what we need. It's really the only way.

P.S. In my last blog, in my fumbling attempt to channel H.L. Mencken, I referred to Chuck's Fish in Tuscaloosa as a world class restaurant. It isn't world class, the flat screen TV's and SYSCO seasoned fries disqualify it from that category. And the waiter, when listing the desserts, pronounced Creme Brulee, "Cream Brulay". However, the grilled Mahi Mahi was excellent. So was the Malbec.}

SEEING GREEN

By Gabe Dixon

For me it all starts by trying to stay conscious of how my habits impact the environment.  A few years ago, I ran into an old friend at the YMCA. That friend, Stephen Moseley, and his colleague Sam Davidson had just started an organization called Cool People Care which focused on the little things that busy people can do to lead socially and environmentally reponsible lives (a.k.a. "Save the World"). Their philosophy is that "there's no such thing as not enough time."  The idea appealed to me, so I checked out their website and signed up for their daily "5 Minutes Of Caring" emails: 99-word articles that offer practical tips and motivation on how to make a positive impact each and every day. These e-mails are a great daily reminder that help keep me focused.

The band has since worked with Cool People Care by contributing the exclusive song "New Day Revolution" to their book of the same name, and by performing at their birthday celebration and at recent book signings. Cool People Care had a small beginning in Nashville, but they now have partners in 44 U.S. cities and they have started a spin-off site for moms: CoolMomsCare.org. I think Cool People Care is a good analogy for how, by starting with small habits, we can grow them into a larger more impactful way of life.

As for "walking the walk," again, for me it's about trying to stay conscious and take steps in the right direction. When my wife sold her car last year, we made the decision to only use one car instead of buying another. At first it was inconvenient, but it feels normal now. She and I have recently moved closer to town, partially to reduce the amount of fuel we consume and to take advantage of public transportation. We use only non-toxic cleaners and detergents, we used only zero-VOC (volatile organic compounds) paint to paint the bedroom and the back room in our house, and we compost. I am a vegetarian, in large part for environmental reasons:

(1) To produce meat for a meat-centered diet (versus a vegetable-based diet) it requires using 50 times the amount of fossil fuels.

(2) In the U.S., more than half of all water is used for livestock production. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat. On the other hand it takes 2,500 pounds of water to produce a pound of meat

(3) Eating a meat-centered diet contributes to deforestation. In the United States we have cleared over 260 million acres of forest to produce meat. In every quarter pounder we eat, an average of 55 square feet of tropical rainforest is consumed as well, which has obvious effects on animal life.  

I also belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)--I pay a farm at the beginning of the growing season and I meet them at the farmers market every other week to pick up what they are growing on their farm just outside of Nashville.

The band all recycle; we have sworn off little plastic water bottles, bring our own bags to the grocery store, and our own coffee mugs to the coffee shop. I get that it can seem like a lot. Most of us are not scientists or politicians, but I believe that individual actions add up. We all cannot afford a "green" house or a hybrid car, but every day brings opportunities for sustainable living and a chance to develop new habits that will soon become a normal way of life. I'm not perfect, but I do try and take steps in the right direction. It's an ongoing process.

Gabe Dixon Band's self-titled LP is available now on Fantasy/Concord.

Here's what's been keeping me company as of late: Lizzie Grant, Gramma SparkalerTrailerHeaven [sic]. Who is this girl? Un-freaking-believable. Don't let the bad graphics scare you away [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

HAGLER VS. SUGAR RAY, BIDEN VS. PALIN

Don't give her any more room to dance.

Near as I can glean from YouTube, The Marvin Hagler/Sugar Ray Leonard fight took place on April 6th, 1987. No one I knew at that time could believe the outcome. It was supposed to be a bloodbath. Leonard was supposed to do the bleeding.  Hagler had over fifty KO's under his Middle Weight belt. Leonard, a pumped up Welter Weight, had twenty three. Somehow, Leonard won on points.

 A couple of months later, June nineteenth, or Juneteenth , as they say in Texas, anniversary of the day in 1865 that the Texas slaves were finally told they were free, I was hanging out backstage at the Navasota Blues Festival . My lady friend, at that time, was a real good interviewer and had secured an interview with Johnny Clyde Copeland, the headliner at that festival. She and I constituted two of the four white people in attendance. Navasota is a black town in a black East Texas county. Turned out, Copeland's manager made most of his money managing boxers out of Houston. The ranch on which the festival was held was owned by a boxing promoter. The talk back stage went from music to reefer to boxing. Johnny and his guys ribbed me for not being much into pot. I remember Johnny saying, "You got fifteen dollars, you need a hair cut and some reefer, which one you gonna buy? I know which one I'm gonna buy." None of them were at all surprised by the outcome of the Leonard/ Hagler fight. They knew how it had gone down. Johnny's manager explained it very slowly. Hagler's handlers had lost the fight for him long before the first bell. They had rolled over to the Leonard camp's requests for a larger ring and heavier gloves, thus giving more room for Leonard to dance, and taking the sting out of Hagler's punch.

And now the Democrats have agreed to treat Sarah Palin with heavier, softer gloves. The Vice Presidential debates are to be question/answer, not debates at all. YOU MORONS. Palin is deadly when she has a script. Without a script, she's a Valley girl on St. Joseph's Baby Acid, unable to put together a sentence even worthy of Dubya. Had you "vetted" her any better than McCain did, you would have known this long before Katie Couric chased her back into the shadows from which she will only emerge, fleetingly, trout like, to snatch the occasional choice fly off the surface before the election. You are afraid to be accused of roughing up a woman. She's not a woman, you idiots, she's a candidate, and a very dangerous one. She's dangerous because she so . . . so . . . stupid, and she will be President if McCain is elected. McCain is about a million years old and has had four malignant melanomas, the most dangerous type of cancer. It will recur and it will kill him. The stress of the oval office would not be likely to postpone the inevitable.

I can't say I know Palin's personal beliefs, but fundamentalist Christians tend not to differentiate between acts of man and acts of God. They tend to see acts of man as acts of God through man. Man made global warming is just God's plan.  This world doesn't matter anyway. Jews are to be resettled in Israel, so they can die. Democrats are willing to let Palin get her hands on the Armageddon switch rather than risk being seen as bullies. YOU MORONS.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.

"Dude, Have You Been to Berlin Yet?!"
Episode Zwei

YEAR LONG DISASTER

What do Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Mick Taylor, Malcom and Angus Young, Dee Dee Ramone, Phil Lynott and Johnny Thunders have in common? Ax innovators, all, but that's not where I'm going here. Ask any boy or girl and they'll tell you right away: damage and charm. When it comes to rock and roll, we can lock step behind a tight riff, player sight unseen. But to burn our interest even brighter, visual hints of damage and charm are required. Daniel Davies, descended from the stellar Sixties lineage of the brothers Davies of The Kinks, and at only twenty-six years of age, can already riff heavy, rip a solo, and groove live with the unselfconscious command of his collective musical forefathers. 

In support of their debut album on Volcom Records, Year Long Disaster—with Brad Hargreaves on drums and Rich Mullins on bass—has toured the US several times, playing stadium rock arenas with the Foo Fighters and massive venues with Motorhead, The Misfits and label brothers Turbonegro and Valiant Thorr. Recently, they swum the seas to Europe and hit the summer festival and small club circuits. 

See www.yearlongdisaster.com for more details.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 7^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

GOOPS "One Kiss Left"/"Build Me Up Buttercup" (Blackout!, 1994)

The picture sleeve's front cover looks like some kinda Big Daddy Roth Garbage Pail Kid Wacky Pack, with four cartoon band members (three crazy guys, one hot girl) racing along in their flaming monster truck with the license plate "KILL," brandishing baseball bats and barbecue forks, chasing a squirrel so scared its feet have turned into wheels. Back cover has the band all naked (with naughty bits peeking out) on a polka-dot couch, puking and slavering as a gigantic furry rodent splats from the sky and spills its sticky guts all over the room. Six-page black-and-white comic book inside has the Goops "On The Road," driving from party to party and town to town and batting more squirrels around and bathing together and covering obscene Avengers songs on stage while (again) wearing no clothes. Yet even their penises and vaginas manage to seem funny, not gross or prurient. And oh yeah, there's also music! Catchy St. Mark's Place-style middle-class fake-punk garage trash (from back when St. Mark's  Place was still trashy) with gal-singing and guy-guitaring better than passable; in the ‘90s, NYC and L.A. both coughed up a bunch of such bands, while critics ignored them -- maybe because they sang like they wanted a hit, and therefore weren't deemed hip enough. Here, the A-side is a lust song with some semblance of a beat: "C'mon baby, don'cha be that way/I'll do anything you say." But the B-side's the keeper: A kicking cover of the Foundations' 1969 garage-soul classic about being led on by a fickle tease. The Goops build it up, and don't let us down.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=152991456

CLAY HARPER "Prayin' Hands"/"Church On The Corner" (Casino Royale, 1996)

More excellent cover graphics: The front has a colorfully dressed guy, with five-o'clock shadow and his tiger-striped shirt unbuttoned too low, posing just like Roland Bell on the LP cover of The Harder They Come; there's a city and church behind him, and when you flip the sleeve over, you see said house of worship close up, with hands folding in prayer on each side. It's not the only picture-sleeve 45 I've got on my shelf from Clay Harper -- a guy who used to sing for the Coolies, an Atlanta band whose less than 15 minutes of fame had come from putting out an album full of silly Simon & Garfunkel covers in 1986, the same year Paul Simon put out Graceland. A decade later, in 1996, Harper apparently put out one 45 on Casino Royale every month or close to it; I've got 11 of the things, and they're beautiful - soldiers and strippers and factories and devils and sleazy dames with guns and lurkers in the shadows and Blaxploitation movie posters and Kung Fu movie posters and ominous urchins from the street. Most of them credit Art Direction to one Kosmo Vinyl and Art Production to guys named Kerry Hadaway and Brian Joyner. I haven't played them in years, but as I recall, they mostly sound good, too. But I'm singling out the single that came out in June of that year, for the way its two titles are conceptually linked, and because its cover is my favorite. "Prayin' Hands" has The Harder They Come in its sound, too: The rhythm is ‘70s soul-reggae, with a horn break seemingly referencing "007 (Shanty Town)" by Desmond Dekker. Harper has a gruff Dixie white-soul voice - more "pub-rock" than "roots-rock" or "Southern rock," I'd say, by which I mean amiable and energetic but not particularly stodgy or redneck-macho. He sings about a little girl with a crappy life who prays the world her soul to keep and winds up in a better place, which I suppose mean she dies; details beyond that are hard to make out. "Church on the Corner" brackets itself with church organ (credited to "Reverend Oliver Wells"), but Clay confesses that he never liked churches, that he just passes them by without entering, and he's not sure where his antipathy comes from. But a wedding, or maybe that same little girl, wind up changing his mind. A gospel backup singer helps.

http://www.casinomusic.com/vinyl/index.html

HELLA "Stephen Hawking Has A Posse"/FOURTET "Both When I Am Alone And We Both Are" (Ache, 2003)

Hella are a noisy Cali duo whose 2002 debut album likeably reminded me of the very early (hardcore-era) Meat Puppets, but I lost the plot soon after; their track here has a gradual keyboardish opening (played on guitar maybe) giving way to blurry belches of distortion and apocalyptic clangs like tin cans repeatedly toppling off a high shelf. The title suggests theoretical physics might be an inspiration as well. Fourtet is London "post-rock" electronic guy Kieran Hebden, and his cut has more space - e.g., little brush strokes. What they have in common: clattery beat, fuzzy effects, vagueness. And the scratched-up collage on the 45 sleeve is just as blurry, blotchy, and amorphous.

http://www.myspace.com/hellaband

http://www.myspace.com/fourtetkieranhebden

THE HOT ROLLERS Uncornucopia (Flotation, 2007)

A three-song seven-inch EP on nail-polish-white vinyl from three badass ladies, dressed like they're ready to join the Shangri-Las' gang. So: Ratted-hair rock, maybe Seattle's answer to (Detroit's) Gore Gore Girls. "You Don't Satisfy" rides the slime oozing out from beneath the garage door of some service station on a dead-end street; opens with a riff from the Monkees' "Steppin' Stone," drummer Starr Harris screams like the Sonics' Gerry Rosalie, and Lori Campion lets loose black clouds of guitar smoke as her vengeful vemom shoplifts a lyric or two from "Steppin' Stone" itself, then turns into talking as she chides some bad-in-bed clutz that he can't do the deed like some other fella. "Heard About Him" rocks up a ‘65 B-side by British bird Sandie Shaw, ending on a high note out of "Wimoweh"/"The Lion Sleeps Tonight." And raunchy fuzztones blanket everything, including three-part harmonies and (I think) a cowbell, in the raunchier, dirtier, heavier "Outta Control" - about a mean chick from a northern galaxy who has cherry-red lips and bloodshot eyes. She's running wild tonight, she's gonna fuss and fight, and I'm pretty sure Girlschool would be impressed.

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Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Guest post this week from one of my closest pals, musician, painter, fashionista, and all-around wickedly wonderful guy, Karl Mullen: Dear Kate, Thanks for the request to be a guest blogger. This is my first .... though back in the late 70's early 80's as an illegal alien I played in the punk band Carsickness under the nom de guerre ‘Joe Bloggs'. But that was old schooling blogging,....... ‘banging and shouting like a kid gone wrong' ....remember Patrik Fitzgerald? I had his record which was LP size so we used play it at 33 speed until some sober [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentation of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.