Tuesday, 15 March 2011
Ernest Ranglin - Fireside Chat @ RBMAR
Ernest Ranglin's first instrument was the ukulele and his musical hero was the American jazz guitarist Charlie Christian - but he went on to preside over the birth of ska and its mutation into reggae. Without him, Jamaican music from Prince Buster to Bob Marley might have sounded very different. Born in rural Jamaica in 1932, it's an entire half-century has elapsed since Ranglin began his recording career for Chris Blackwell's Island label in 1958. Ernest is respected and renowned the world over and was awarded the Order of Distinction from the Jamaican Government for his contributions to music. He has collaborated with Prince Buster, Mille Small and Monty Alexander amongst innumerable others and career milestones include 'Rivers of Babylon' with the Melodians and playing guitar on 'It Hurts to be Alone' with The Wailers. In recent years he's made some fine records under his own name that have explored reggae's links with African music, including 'In Search Of The Lost Riddim', recorded in Senegal with Baaba Maal's band, and Alextown, a jazzy collaboration with South African township musicians. We were indeed honored when Mr Ranglin agreed to spare some time to come and chat by the Fireside with us.
Ernest Ranglin & Monty Alexander - Confucius - Telarc
Charlie Parker - Bebop - Essence
Ernest Ranglin - Liquidation - K&K
Prince Buster - Madness - Rhino
Millie Small - My Boy Lollipop - Island
Ernest Ranglin - Dr. No Go - K&K
Sound Dimension - Heavy Rock - Soul Jazz
The Melodians - Rivers Of Babylon - Mango
Ernest Ranglin - Surfin - Soul Jazz
Ernest Ranglin & Sound Dimension - Straight Flush - Soul Jazz
Ernest Ranglin - Satta Massagana - Island
Prince Buster - Wash Wash - Sequel
Ernest Ranglin - King Tubby Meets The Rockers - Island
Ernest Ranglin - Below The Bass Line - Island
Ernest Ranglin & Jackie Mittoo - Jericho Skank - Soul Jazz
'Steal your face right off your head' - The making of the Stealie logo
This is the logo that Bob Thomas and I designed for the Grateful Dead in 1969
How it came to be:
In 1969 the Dead were renting a warehouse in Novato, California. I was sound man for the band at the time, and lived in Oakland. Bob Thomas, an old friend of mine had just moved from LA to the Bay area and needed a place to stay, and we needed someone to look after the warehouse, which had had a problem with break-ins.
Bob was a superb graphic artist whose work is now familiar to most Deadheads in the form of the Live Dead album cover and the Bear's Choice cover, on which the popular Dancing Bears appeared.
The Dead in those days had to play in a lot of festival style shows where the equipment would all wind up at the back of the stage in a muddle. Since every band used pretty much the same type of gear it all looked alike. We would spend a fair amount of time moving the pieces around so that we could read the name on the boxes. I decided that we needed some sort of marking that we could identify from a distance.
I was in the habit of driving from Oakland to Novato in a little MGTF which had plastic side curtains, which were not very transparent, due to aging of the plastic. One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white bar across it, the top of the circle was orange and the bottom blue. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment.
At the warehouse I told Bob the idea that I had, and he made a quick sketch. A mutual friend, Ernie Fischbach, who was visiting with Bob, said "Give it to me, I'll show you an easy way to put it on the boxes." Whereupon he proceeded to cut holes in a couple of pieces of stencil paper. One was a circular hole, about 5 1/2 inches in diameter, and the other was a part of a circle 5 inches in diameter. But it was a half circle with a jagged edge. Then he held the stencil to an amp and sprayed a circle of white paint. Then with one side up, the red half circle went on top of the dried white paint and after wiping off the red and turning the stencil over, the blue was applied. This was the first version, and we put it on to all our gear. It helped make it easier to find our stuff in the crunch. I still have an old toolbox with one of the stencils on it.
A few days later I was talking to Bob and suggested that perhaps the words "Grateful dead" could be placed under the circle, using a style of lettering that would appear to be a skull if you saw it from a distance (I guess I was influenced by too many posters of the time). Any way a few hours later he came down from the loft with the design we know and love.
In 1992, Bob decided to produce hand-pulled prints of the logo as a hardwood block engraving, but first he cut a test block in pine, to see how the design looked as a woodcut. He liked the test block so well that he decided to pull 50 prints, signed, numbered and hand coloured them. He gave the last of the prints to me (a few months before he died) to help sell them. Most have now been sold. Please write if you are interested in getting one of the ones left, the money goes to his family. This was one of the last pieces he did. Here is a scan (trimmed down a little). The print is on heavy, off-white watercolour paper 14" by 17".
Owsley Stanley @'thebear.org'
The logo with lettering by Rick Griffin as used on 'Steal Your Face'
Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD
No one did more to alter the consciousness of the generation that came of age in the 1960s than Augustus Owsley Stanley (who passed away March 13, 2011). Long before the Summer of Love drew thousands of hippies to Haight-Ashbury, Owsley was already an authentic underground folk hero, revered throughout the counterculture for making the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street. Yet today, at seventy-two, he is all but forgotten.Almost forty years to the day after he blew minds at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, with a brand-new batch of "Monterey Purple," Owsley is checking out of a motel in nearby Carmel. Three years ago, he underwent extensive radiation for throat cancer, losing thirty pounds in the process. He is moving so slowly that someone from the front desk comes to the room to ask if he ever intends to leave. Ignoring the inquiry, Owsley roots through his bags for a large state-of-the-art conical burr grinder and a white funnel-shaped device to heat water so he can make coffee from beans he grew and roasted at home in Australia. As the water boils, he packs up a Braun food mixer and the vast array of other gadgets he carries with him.
He puts on a pair of old bluejeans that are now several sizes too big and places a brown Thinsulate stocking cap on his head. With his dark-brown goatee and a gold hoop dangling from his left ear, he looks like an older, careworn version of the Edge from U2. Unable to swallow solid food since the cancer treatments, he laments that he can no longer enjoy dining out with friends. Suddenly, his eyes redden and he is nearly reduced to tears. Quickly regaining control, he says, "But, hey, I'm alive, right?" Without waiting for an answer, he stalks out the motel-room door.
In the Oxford English dictionary, the word "Owsley" is listed as a noun describing a particularly pure form of LSD. But manufacturing acid is not the only accomplishment on Owsley's résumé. He was the Grateful Dead's original sound man and their initial financial benefactor. Without his technical innovations — he was one of the first people to mix concerts live and in stereo — the band might never have emerged from the San Francisco scene. And because he had the foresight to plug a tape recorder directly into the sound board during Dead shows, the music the band made at the peak of its power has been gloriously preserved in recordings still being issued in the series titled Dick's Picks, for which Owsley continues to receive royalties...
Continue reading
Robert Greenfield @'Rolling Stone'
This article appeared in the July 12-27, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone.
JPBarlow John Perry Barlow
Those who oppose incorporating Sharia into US law will doubtless resist codifying Christian law as well.
$10 drug now $1500 after FDA grants monopoly
A progesterone hormone injection, used to prevent preterm labor, used to be $10 a shot. Now that the FDA has assigned an exclusive right to create the easily-made formula to one company, KV Pharmaceuticals, the price has risen to $1500. Almost all of it is pure profit, and KV Pharma did not develop the drug or pay for its trials: the taxpayer did, via the National Institute for Health. It is said to be the only drug proven to prevent pre-term birth, and an expert cited by ABC News suggests that the profession was snookered into supporting the assignment as a quality standardization measure.
@'boingboing'
@'boingboing'
Secrecy and Darkness Surround Mysterious $900m Piracy Report
Anti-piracy reports that are commissioned by the entertainment industries are suspicious by definition, but the mystery that surrounds a recent study goes far beyond that. Despite being widely covered in the press, no journalist has actually seen a copy of the report. Even worse, the company that produced the in-depth report was registered only four months ago, and appears to be carefully hidden from the public.
To convince the government that harsher anti-piracy legislation is needed, a coalition of Australian entertainment industry outfits – under the umbrella name Australian Content Industry Group (ACIG) – commissioned a study on the economical impact of Internet piracy. Although by itself this is nothing out of the ordinary, the lack of transparency and shadiness that surrounds it is stunning.
In late February the report in question was first mentioned in a speech by Attorney General McClelland, who was speaking at a conference on future directions in copyright law. At the time the public were not yet aware of the report’s existence. Journalists too remained in the dark.
The same could be said for the Australian Content Industry Group. The copyright coalition, which doesn’t have a public website, was virtually unknown at that point also. The group consists of a variety of entertainment industry outfits, most prominently Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), but until then had only appeared in a few recent government consultations.
That’s some background on the report, now let’s fast forward two weeks.
On March 6th, Australian newspaper The Age published a series of articles on Internet Piracy. Interestingly enough, the aforementioned report was at the center of the series that quickly made headlines. In particular the hit piece “Nation of unrepentant pirates costs $900m”, written by freelance journalist Neil McMahon, was picked up by dozens of other news outlets.
Curious about this seemingly influential report that dominated the headlines last week, we decided to take a good look at the company that conducted the research — Sphere Analysis. However, this was easier said than done.
Like the Australian Content Industry Group, Sphere Analysis doesn’t seem to have a web presence. With no website and no employees, not even a single reference to the company could be found. How could this be? Wouldn’t it be logical that such a big report would be written by a renowned company?
To us it seemed a little suspicious to say the least, so the first question that came to mind was: Who are behind Sphere Analysis?
With help from the Pirate Party, we found that Sphere Analysis is a business name registered to the ‘Sphere Property Corporation’. This company, which again has no web presence, appears to operate in the real-estate business. Not the type of business you’d expect to write an analysis of Internet piracy on the Australian economy.
Interestingly, ‘Sphere Analysis’ was registered less than four months ago, which means that immediately after it was registered they got this major contract. So who are these people?
To find out more about the company, calls were made to several numbers associated with Sphere Property Corporation but again without results. All calls went to so-called ‘virtual offices‘, where either the company name didn’t ring a bell, or where the person who answered the line was not allowed to give out information.
Additional research eventually led us to an alleged employee of Sphere Property Corporation, Phil Nott, who lists himself as a Real Estate Consultant on Linkedin. No other employees were found and Mr. Nott has two Linkedin profiles, each with just one connection.
Aside from dealing with real estate, Sphere Property Corporation also seems to be connected to the investing company Sphere Capital Advisers and the recruitment business Sphere Associates.
None of the above companies has a website of course, so that’s pretty much where our Sphere Analysis trail ended.
Now that our interest in the report had been pushed even higher, we wanted to know how Sphere Analysis concluded that illicit movie, music and games downloads cost the industry $900 million a year as well as 8,000 jobs. Aside from a few key figures quoted in The Age article, the full report was unfortunately nowhere to be seen.
But we were not the only ones left in the dark. The journalist who wrote the original article for The Age confirmed to TorrentFreak that he wasn’t provided with the full report either. His article was based on information he was given by ‘someone’ he didn’t want to name without permission.
In an attempt to get a copy of the report, we then began emailing several outfits that fall under the Australian Content Industry Group, but without a response. In addition the Australian Pirate Party submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Attorney General’s office, but that is still being processed.
So here we are. After a week of sending emails, making phone calls, and digging through all kinds of information we were unable to get our hands on the full report. On the contrary, the mystery surrounding the report is even greater because of the vagueness surrounding Sphere Analysis.
This is worrying, especially when the Attorney General clearly indicates that it influences future legislation. The Pirate Party, who helped us in our quest for information, agrees.
“Where such reports or studies direct the policy direction of our governments, there is a democratic imperative that the information is made available transparently, that the methodologies are sound and adequately reflect reality,” said Pirate Party’s Rodney Serkowski.
“The Age article inferred that the Attorney General was basing the government’s policy direction on these research figures. This is a very, very shaky foundation for public policy — especially when there is a growing consensus that the institution of copyright requires radical structural reform, lest it becomes irrelevant,” he added.
And then there’s the issue with hiring the brand new and unfindable Sphere Analysis to conduct such an important report.
“This study, carried out by a virtually unknown entity with access only being granted to one journalist is highly dubious, even for the copyright lobby. Any study that gets reported as fact should be made available to the general public. The fact that it is not casts a question over its contents,” said Pirate Party’s Simon Frew.
So, will Sphere Analysis step forward immediately with a full copy of this apparent policy-setting report either to us or another news outlet? Is transparency the way forward or are we to blindly accept spoon-fed ‘statistics’ from faceless groups, regurgitate them as fact, help build credibility where none has been earned and then work the whole thing into law? That can’t be the way forward.
Ernesto @'Torrent Freak'
Hmmm!!!
Wisconsin's Governor Wins, but Is He Now Dead Man Walker?
The Wisconsin State Capitol had taken on an eerie quiet by late Friday. Gone were the throngs of protesters who had occupied its marble floors like it were a summer campground. The midnight honking of cars circling the white building had ceased. The chalk outlines around fake dead bodies etched with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's name remained in dismembered parts, not yet completely washed away by hoses.It was the governor, however, who had walked away the legislative victor in the showdown. On Friday, as angry protesters chanted "Shame" and blew horns and vuvuzelas, Walker took up a dozen pens, one at a time, to sign into law a bill that not only takes away the ability of unions to bargain collectively over pensions and health care but also limits pay raises of public employees to the rate of inflation and ends automatic union dues collection by the state. It also requires public unions to recertify annually. It was a coup by Wisconsin Republicans against the labor movement in one of its strongholds.
The governor allowed himself a moment to reflect on how his signature might play historically. "Some have asked whether this is going to set a national precedent," he said. "And I don't know ... but if along the way we help lead a movement across the state for true fiscal reform, true budgetary reform to ultimately inspire others across this country, state by state and in our federal government, inspire others to stand up and make the tough decision to make a commitment to the future so that our children across all states don't have to face the dire consequences we face because previous leaders have failed to stand up and lead, I feel that is a good thing." He also attempted to be magnanimous toward the thousands of protesters who had gathered in Madison since he first announced his legislative intentions on Valentine's Day. "I think we've had a civil discussion," he said. "It's been passionate, but it's been civil along the way...
The governor allowed himself a moment to reflect on how his signature might play historically. "Some have asked whether this is going to set a national precedent," he said. "And I don't know ... but if along the way we help lead a movement across the state for true fiscal reform, true budgetary reform to ultimately inspire others across this country, state by state and in our federal government, inspire others to stand up and make the tough decision to make a commitment to the future so that our children across all states don't have to face the dire consequences we face because previous leaders have failed to stand up and lead, I feel that is a good thing." He also attempted to be magnanimous toward the thousands of protesters who had gathered in Madison since he first announced his legislative intentions on Valentine's Day. "I think we've had a civil discussion," he said. "It's been passionate, but it's been civil along the way...
Continue reading
Dawn Reiss @'Time'
Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae (BBC Documentary)
The rocksteady era of Jamaican music in the mid-to-late 1960s is considered a golden age because rocksteady's sweet, soulful vocals, romantic but often socially conscious lyrics and prominent basslines gave birth to reggae, which went on to capture the world.
This documentary chronicles the coming together of rocksteady's surviving vocal stars - artists like the Tamlins, U-Roy, Ken Boothe, Leroy Sibbles from the Heptones, Judy Mowatt, Dawn Penn, Rita Marley and Marcia Griffiths - and some of the island's greatest players, to celebrate their greatest 60s hits, perform a reunion concert and celebrate that golden era. Think of it as a kind of Buena Vista Social Club for the great 60s architects of Jamaican music. It is also a beautiful portrait of Jamaica.
In 1962, Jamaica gained its independence from Great Britain. There was celebration, optimism, economic growth and opportunity. Recording studios popped up all over Kingston and a generation of great singers and players emerged playing the tuneful, mellow music that became known as rocksteady - tunes like The Tide Is High, Rivers of Babylon and You Don't Love Me Anymore, No No No, which were so successfully celebrated by UB40 on their Labour of Love albums. By 1968, Jamaica's economic bubble had burst and social unrest took to the streets. As poverty, violence and political upheaval spread, rocksteady became politicised, upped its tempo and began to evolve into the music they call reggae.
(BBC)
via
♪♫ Pickers' Local 608 - There Is Power In A Union
About twenty of Madison, Wisconsin's bluegrass musicians, as the collective Pickers' Local 608, gathered at Audio For The Arts on Sunday, March 6th 2011, to record their version of the Billy Bragg song There Is Power In A Union, with special featured guest banjo man Bill Evans! Bluegrass Local 608 includes members of The Oak Street Ramblers, The Malt Liquors, The Cork n' Bottle String Band, The Pints, Spare Time Bluegrass Band, Northern Pikers, and others... Keep fighting the good fight!
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