David Bowie once mentioned me in a complimentary way from a stage, in New York City, in the later nineties. This was one of the great unlikely moments of my professional life. It was in the did-I-hallucinate-it category. It was in the did-that-actually-happen category.

- Rick Moody on the new Bowie record. It gets worse — about 6,000 words or so worse. Good luck.

I was a kid. I cared about volume. And the tears that flowed as (in Band) we went for the crescendo. From the radio I wanted to hear the big chords, the big drums, the big horns. I didn’t know there was a such a thing as being manipulated by the right pauses — I liked Clive Davis’ ear and Clive Davis’ work and I didn’t know yet who Clive Davis was. Michael Jackson was a world apart, a king, but my regular high school favorites were Prince and Rick James, and by the time I hit college, aside from Run-DMC, Sade and Luther Vandross, I was about Whitney Houston, who in 1978 was singing backup disco for the Michael Zager Band. This was seven years before Davis would re-apply what he’d learned making hit after hit with Manilow to the woman who would become one of the most loved and bestselling artists of all time. Listen to Manilow ballads, then listen to Houston ballads. Check, as we used to say in hip-hop, the technique. If it wasn’t broke Davis saw little need to fix it. The songs Davis made with Manilow and Houston are the songs I loved. Besides, what other way had I to judge? My mother, after all, had to tell me when I was 13 who Booker T. Jones Jr.’s dad was. I thought like I used to think about all songs when I was young — that every artist’s song was purely autobiographical, and so 100 percent meaningful. And if I categorized at all, it was based on what radio station played what. So I thought Barry was rock ‘n’ roll — and not rock in a “white” frame. Rock in a frame marked “real.”

Danyel Smith on Barry Manilow at NPR’s The Record.

This is a sprawling (overused word, I know) piece that, because I’m so preoccupied with other stuff right now, I haven’t absorbed fully, but it is dynamite, the kind of music-critical piece I tend to fall hardest for, blending as it does the personal, the historical, the contextual, the musical, and, perhaps by inference — it is Barry Manilow, after all — and in the best way possible, I mean — the revisionist.  The sort of piece you can tell the writer has kept stored in her head for 20 years.

Rutherford [Chang] has a unique vinyl collection. He only collects the Beatles first pressing of  The White Album.

I met him in Recess gallery where he exhibits his collection.

In this show Chang is creating a record store that stocks only White Albums. But rather than selling the albums, he buys more from anyone willing to part with an original pressing in any condition.

- Rutherford Change – We Buy White Albums at Dust and Grooves

Forget Rick Moody, there needs to be more focus on just how awful Salon itself can be with their music and entertainment coverage in recent years (which I say as someone who greatly enjoys some of their political coverage). One sort of (extremely silly) example of the sort of thing I’m speaking about appeared just moments ago:

HEADLINE

WHAT THE SUBJECT OF THE PIECE, BRYAN FERRY, ACTUALLY SAID

Enjoyed William Weir’s perspective on There’s a Riot Goin’ On (in Slate), specifically in regards to how critical the employment of (newly emerging) automated rhythm tracks were to that album’s overall aesthetic.

Groundbreaking though it was, the drum machine’s emergence in the early 1970s didn’t make a lot of waves — largely because listeners didn’t know what they were hearing. To modern ears, these early machines sound crude; it’s hard to believe anyone could mistake them with flesh-and-blood drumming. But as JJ Cale told Mojo magazine: “The deal is, in those days people didn’t know about it, so they didn’t realize what it was.”

Why is every thing ultimately at its most interesting before it becomes a “thing”? (cf. McLuhan’s idea of “effects preceding causes.”)