Jimmy Guterman's blog

Etta James died today, and I’m listening to my favorite album by her, the spectacular Tell Mama, which Chess put out in 1968. Conventional wisdom states that the great rhythm-and-blues singer never recorded an album as massive as her talents. As usual, such conventional wisdom is grounded in an iota of fact and then turns out to be completely wrong.

As it did with all of its female singers, Chess Records had much trouble placing James. They tried her out on big-band ballads, straight blues, and the uptempo rhythm-and-blues hits with which she had scored in the fifties, like “Dance with Me Henry.” But no matter what the style, she wasn’t generating any hits, though many individual tracks were sinewy and harrowing.

Producer Rick Hall believed in James enough to fly her down to Fame Studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a place where soul smashes were being cut every day, it seemed. The idea was to get a rough, smoldering album out of her—very much in the mode of Aretha Franklin, who had recently broken out of a similar rut with churchy soul. The result, Tell Mama, is the only soul-bandwagon record that can stand with Lady Soul’s classics from the period.

The big rhythm-and-blues hit on Tell Mama was the Clarence Carter title track, a compressed explosion of affirmation and generosity. The acknowledged standard is “I’d Rather Go Blind,” in which James takes standard better-dead-than-unloved banalities and exposes them as true. Turn the volume as low as you like; she’ll still overtake everyone in a loud, crowded room. Even the album’s giving songs sound generated by hurt; James sings as if she knows that alleviating someone else’s sorrow won’t lessen her load one bit. R.I.P.

This will be short.

One of the few good things about death is that it shuts you up. Death is both incomprehensible and inevitable; it’s hard to capture that terrible combination in words. So last night, when the first reports arrived that Clarence Clemons is dead, I did what I often do when I’m trying to figure out what I’m thinking: I tried to write. I thought about his great early triumphs like “Kitty’s Back,” his defining numbers like “Jungleland,” his move to a new sound starting with “Bobby Jean” and climaxing in “Land of Hope and Dreams,” the roles he played onstage. But nothing came out of my fingers. It was time to think and listen, which I’ll do today as well. Today I’ll keep my mouth shut, I’ll be grateful for his work, I’ll celebrate Father’s Day, and I’ll live.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart,” a 30-year-old song by the British post-punk band Joy Division, is in the air. Or, at least, it’s in my air. Yesterday a colleague posted a video of it to his Facebook page. Last week a friend sent me a clip of a live version of Arcade Fire and U2 attacking the song. Peter Hook, the bass player on the original, is touring with a new band that’s playing pretty much all Joy Division songs. (I contributed, too, with this silly excuse for a post on BoingBoing back in October.) And this morning I happened to be listening to yet another version of the song while I checked on the news and learned that one of Bernie Madoff’s sons just killed himself the same way Joy Division singer Ian Curtis did. Not quite a trend, I know, and the dots connect only in my idiosyncratic head, but everyone’s head is idiosyncratic and isn’t that what blogs are for sharing anyway?

Why does this song have such a hold? I don’t cherish most Joy Division songs the way I do much of the 1980s work of New Order, the smart, austere band that emerged out of Joy Division after Curtis hung himself. Although drenched in punk, much of Joy Division’s work was grandly overdramatic (think Jim Morrison with a better rhythm section), but on “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the band transcends pretty much every limitation. Sure, it picks up added weight when we learn what Curtis did to himself while love was tearing him apart, but the song doesn’t need any rock’n'roll myth to burn into your memory. The lyrics are pretty clear: routines bite hard, ambitions are low, resentment rides high, emotions won’t grow, and all that happens before the first verse is over. By the time the song reaches its peak — Curtis singing “Desperation takes hold” with corrosive resignation — you’re so far into the song that you don’t even notice its grip tightening around you.

Musically, the record is that rare of-the-moment British pop song from 1980 that doesn’t sound dated. The song breaks open with a jagged bass line, an ethereal synthesizer both soars over Curtis’s singing and mocks it, and drummer Steve Morris introduces that astounding snare-shot overdrive move that every ’80s band, from the Pretenders to Modern English, U2 to the 10,000 bands that tried to be U2, picked up on, eventually turning it into a cliche, almost as bad as Auto-Tune is nowadays. But on “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the innovation is fresh. The whole damn song is. It’s a tale of romantic disintegration put across with an energy that makes something new out of the singer’s hopelessness. Thirty years later, there’s still nothing like it.

Eric often sends me links that crack me up, so my first response Friday afternoon when I saw he forwarded me a parody response by Mick Jagger to Keith Richards’s recent autobiography was to prepare for a good laugh. The alleged response, called “Please allow me to correct a few things,” is, in fact, written by ace rock critic Bill Wyman, who has the novelty of sharing a name with the Stones’ two-decades-gone original bass player. Wyman, who once received a legal demand by the bassist to change the name he was born with, seemed uniquely positioned to write a cutting fake retort.

Then I began reading and realized this was No Joke. As a longtime Stones devotee (read Late night thoughts about the greatest rock’n'roll band in the world for one recent example), I’ve often wondered what the surviving original members really think about each other, how they work together, what their work means to them as they’re aging. Wyman has clearly spent way too much time pondering this, too. I’ve never talked to Mick, but Wyman’s faux-Mick response feels true to my imagined Jagger. The tone of the essay veers from hurt to self-righteous, apologetic to withering, the voice always taut. Fake Mick hates Keith as much as Real Keith hates Mick; this essay shoots down RIchards’s book Life but doesn’t forget to point the gun inward from time to time.

Yet, more than anything else, Wyman’s version of Jagger is full of love for Richards, regretful that money, drugs, and narcissism tore them apart, grateful for what they had together before they devolved into mere business partners. He knows how much he owes Keith (“Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone?”) and how Keith’s work can still touch him, no matter how far they’ve both fallen (“When a song is beautiful–those spare guitars rumbling and chiming, by turns–the words mean so much more, and there, for a moment, I believe him, and feel for him.”) This is idealized stuff. It’s unlikely that Real Mick’s response to Keith’s book, if there ever is one, will be as tough-minded and vulnerable. Wyman conjures up the Stones as we want them to be at this late age, but even we diehards know that’s just our imagination running away with us.

UPDATE: Wyman has written a postscript to his terrific piece.

UPDATE 2: BoingBoing has reprinted this post.

The Call had pretty much everything a rock’n'roll band would want: a taut and original sound, support from masters (the Band’s Garth Hudson, who you’ll see in the first video clip below, was a de facto member of the band in the early ’80s), and, in Michael Been, a distinctive and original songwriter and singer who could take on matters of the heart and politics with similar authority and surprise (vocal similarities to David Byrne didn’t hurt, either). What the Call didn’t have, unfortunately, was hit records, although that didn’t stop Been from having a long and diverse career, including a small but important role in The Last Temptation of Christ and having one of his songs (see second video clip below) made the theme song of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign. (I worked briefly with Been in ’91 when I wrote the liner notes and helped compile a set of the band’s best work for Mercury.) Been died on Friday, of a heart attack, at a rock festival in Belgium, where he was serving as the sound man for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, a group that features his son Robert.

Been has fascinated me for years: for the quality of his work, for his ability to continue doing engaging work even after it was clear that he was not going to be the rock star he deserved to be, for his kindness and openness when we worked together, and for his ability to unite, in a fashion, his personal and professional worlds by working with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. He seemed, from a distance (we spoke maybe three times in the past decade), a full man despite his being a credible rock’n'roller, something none of us see all that often.

“The Walls Came Down”

“Let the Day Begin”

UPDATE: The free download is over. Thanks for participating.

A few years ago, I produced The Sandinista Project, in which 36 performers each covered one song from The Clash’s Sandinista! It was a fun and crazy project. Last summer, on Joe Strummer’s birthday, I made the record free for a day. The free download was a great success although what I learned from the experiment was more mixed.

I’ve been having a wonderful time on Boing Boing during my guestblogging residency and I’d like to say “thank you” by making the record free again, for a limited time. Instead of making it free for one day, which slowed the hamsters running the guterman.com servers to a crawl because everyone downloaded at once, I’m going to make the record, along with digital images of the packaging, available until midnight U.S. eastern time on Sunday night, so you’ll have plenty of time to download this before it goes away.

The more you find out about someone, the more interesting that person turns out to be. Jim Duffy is a perfect example of that axiom. I met him when he was an ace copyeditor for The Industry Standard and begged him to join us on our quixotic post-Standard attempt at independent publishing.

But that’s only part of what he can do. He’s a smart, swinging, surprising pianist, bandleader, and songwriter. He’s recorded two records, the fine Side One and the new, even better Mood Lit. He was kind enough to contribute a smashing version of Mose Allison’s “Look Here” to The Sandinista Project, a great performance also included on Mood Lit if you’re one of the billions on the planet who has yet to buy or steal The Sandinista Project.

As you’d suspect from such a tasteful player and writer, he has great taste in other people’s music too. He was the first person to direct me to Dengue Fever, a band who longtime readers know I rave about, and he has another recommendation, The Black Hollies. Let’s let Jim make the case:

Just saying hello again, and to perhaps tip you to a band I like, plus a thought about how music is consumed these days…

The Black Hollies, from Jersey City, may have a misleading name. They don’t sound like the Hollies, but they do sound like the Yardbirds, or the early Kinks, or the pre-Tommy Who. They stepped out of a time machine, from the era when bands had long hair but still wore suits — 1965 or ’66, but not ’67. They’re young-ish guys, too, playing vintage gear. My girlfriend Amy and I first saw them as an opening act, and they were way better than the headliner.

We’ve gone back to see them a couple of times, and they put on a tight, well-put-together show, one song right into another, and they have a lot of good tunes. In fact, on their first album, Casting Shadows, I like every single track.

So, first of all, check out the Black Hollies. Second, even in this era when so much music is available for free, if I like a band, I want to buy something, and I don’t think I’m alone.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw them play an early set, and the cover charge was very low. And they wailed. They played a set that gets you rocking and puts a smile on your face. When the set was over, I wanted to buy something. So I’m at the merch table, talking to the guitar player (I don’t know these guys at all), and he, very wisely, starts talking and talking about the band’s wares, how they make their records and so on. So I buy the band’s new album, Softly Towards the Light, on vinyl, for $10. And it’s a fine record.

What’s the point? In this day and age when music is given away for free, and when there’s so much of it that you can’t possibly get to it all, then when you find something you like, you don’t mind paying. Or at least I don’t. I’d rather pay for something, to feel like I’m supporting it or participating in making it happen, in some small way.

Not a very original observation, but a data point, at least.

Keep ‘em comin’, Jim.

Chuck Berry is the greatest lyricist in the history of rock and roll. His unprecedented synthesis—blues (especially the jump-band variety), country, and swing funneled through his wry, nonlinear mind—extended ideas about what the new teen form could encompass. Berry took over rock and roll moments after its birth, and anyone who has subsequently picked up a guitar with the desire to write a rock’n'roll song that described real life knows that Berry provided most of the tools. He also coined the word “motorvatin’,” which counts for a lot.

His Chess recordings have a bit of fluff toward the end (Owen and I have already weighed in on “My Ding-a-Ling”), but not much. Those records showcase Berry in his prime, all train-track guitar lines and images of “coffee-colored Cadillacs.” Berry’s prime musical foil is his St. Louis compatriot Johnnie Johnson, a pianist with a blues background whose rhythmic style was so flexible and skeptical that it influenced Chuck’s fret work, not to mention his lyrical world-view. Piano and guitar hop over each other throughout this set, like grinning duelists. Detractors often claim that Berry’s songs “all sound the same,” but they’re referring only to the jump-start guitar introductions that were Berry’s duck-walking trademark—though even those were immediately distinguishable to seasoned fans. There’s a tremendous variety of styles on his Chess tracks: Listen to “Havana Moon,” “School Day,” “Dear Dad,” and “Have Mercy Judge” and hear a performer able to thrive in blues, rhythm and blues, straight rock’n'roll, and his own fusion of them all. The only thing that’s the same is the high quality.

Like Jerry Lee Lewis, Berry alternated between adult and teen topics as surely as he moved from adult to teen beats. Sometimes he could call up lines like the hilarious hyperboles in “No Money Down” (by the end of the song, he has an entire furniture store installed inside his new car) that rang true and immediate to both. Berry’s conversational singing is a major part of his appeal—everyone can understand what he is singing, although some couplets like “it’s way too early for the Congo/So keep a’rockin’ the piano” (from “Rock-and-Roll Music”) have defied attempts at explication for half a century.

Berry presented himself as a guy next door with a penchant for pungent and detailed singing, writing, and guitar-playing. He always considered himself an artist (he allowed none of the usual “It’s junk because it’s for kids” crap), and the most amazing thing about his wildly imaginative work is that there’s no condescension. Although the kids in the audience couldn’t comprehend the singer’s child-custody anguish in “Memphis,” Berry wrote the tune in such an open-ended way that everyone could be included. Everyone could be included: that’s Chuck’s genius in a nutshell.

“They took a light from a honky-tonk/Put the gleam in your eye,” Carl Perkins howls on “Honky Tonk Gal,” one of his many amazing performances on The Classic Carl Perkins, a stellar five-CD boxed set that includes all his recordings for Sun Records and those shortly thereafter. (I just pulled out that box for the first time in many years.) With such a line, Perkins neatly encapsulates rockabilly’s concerns and fears.

Rockabilly, that reckless, primal thrash of honky-tonk country-and-western, is all about conflict—between rural and urban, between barroom adventure and home comfort, between the headfirst sin of Saturday nights and the heartfelt repentance of Sunday mornings. The honky-tonk gal Perkins adores is both his joy (she’s hot stuff and knows it) and his pain (she’s no longer a demure housewife). She’s the conflict of rockabilly personified.

Perkins treats this dilemma the way any self-respecting rockabilly cat would: He blazes out fiery riffs and drives through the quandary in fifth gear. He’ll deal with the consequences of his rampage tomorrow. Even lost in the thrill of taking his Gibson guitar for an unexpected joyride, he knows that somewhere down the road there will be a price to pay. Rockabilly is about release, but its release always has limits—that’s the form’s country birthright. That’s also what makes Perkins, a pure rockabilly performer then and always, different from Elvis Presley or Roy Orbison, rockabilly cats who expanded into straight pop and, in doing so, uprooted themselves. “You could never take the country out of Perkins,” veteran Sun-reissue compiler Colin Escott wrote in one of his many expert liner-note essays, pinpointing what set Perkins apart from Presley and what prevented him from achieving Elvis-like success. Presley, for all his indisputable greatness, sold out for pop success in every way imaginable. Perkins, even in his most banal countrypolitan settings, never surrendered.

This massive set has no fluff. Perkins’s gracious, quavering tenor carries some magnificent country ballads; among the most noteworthy are “Turn Around,” his first professional recording, and “Let the Jukebox Keep on Playing,” the most understated expression of honky-tonk regret and paralysis in post-Hank Williams country music. But Perkins’s meat is his rockabilly, “Blue Suede Shoes” and all that, in which he repeatedly drives full speed to the edge of his world, leans over the cliff to enjoy the view for a brief second, and then, as he knows he must, pulls back and carefully heads home.

“Rockabilly sure takes me over the edge,” top Stray Cat Brian Setzer countered when I threw that idea at him a long time ago, in suburban Massachusetts. “It’s the most menacing music. Heavy metal is kid’s stuff compared to it.” Yes, but Setzer and the many legions who adopted pompadours in the late seventies discovered the music and the accoutrements, not the culture. It’s no accident that most of the rockabilly revivalists came from northern urban areas. To them, rockabilly is Gene Vincent’s leer and Eddie Cochran’s shake without regard for the honky-tonk imperatives behind them. The Stray Cats, since reduced to beer commercials, can afford to shoot over the edge; Perkins and his contemporaries, who didn’t have the luxury of growing up in a society that had already been liberated by rock and roll, had no such romantic alternative.

Yet on “Dixie Fried,” his greatest uptempo composition, Perkins comes as close as any rockabilly performer to going over the edge and living to tell about it. His guitar flashes like the barroom-fight switchblades his tale chronicles; his voice dances with the wobbly exuberance of his brazen, drunken protagonist. “Let’s all get Dixie fried!” he screams, shattering any pretensions to caution, or civilized behavior. The violence escalates and the song smashes to its head-on conclusion, not with the law, but with the inevitable. Perkins may have the gleam of the honky-tonk in his eye, but his eye is fixed on home, where he prays his honky-tonk gal has returned.

Sure, Paul Kelly’s influences keep popping up. Kelly sometimes seems like a rock-critic-invented mixture of Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Graham Parker, Bruce Springsteen, and a half-dozen other significant white male rockers, but this is not why he is so little known in the U.S. (I don’t think that Post, one of his early records, ever came out Stateside. Please let me know in the comments if I’m wrong.) Maybe his eclectic arrangements (Kelly seems to be a big fan of Sandinista!) and leanings toward literature (he named an album after a Raymond Carver story) have seemed forbidding to many. Yet there is nothing dense about Kelly, a Woody Guthrie fan who aspires to similar plainspokenness. His gestures and observations are tiny, unexpected, perfect motions.

Post is Kelly’s third album. He normally records with a band, once called the Messengers. Before then its members answered to the Dots and the Coloured Girls, but Post is a solo acoustic album that emphasizes the dark side of life. Before you start yelling Nebraska, know that the pessimism here is more specific than the broad-minded Springsteen would ever allow. (Also know that Kelly gives himself the marvelous luxury of occasional accompaniment, however spare.) Many of the songs here are lyrically grounded in the first stages of recovery from drug addiction. “White Train” and “Blues for Skip” are explicitly about heroin, and all sorts of junk—drugs and otherwise—thwart the soft vocalist throughout the record.

The soft singing is never intended as quiet comfort. The singer in “Adelaide” rethinks his childhood, all detail and foreboding (“Dad’s hands used to shake but I never knew he was dying/I was thirteen, I never dreamed he could fall”), and when he stumbles into the present as if it is a bad dream, he tosses off lines like “I own this town” to convince himself that someone is listening to him. In “Incident on South Dowling,” a junkie helplessly watches his lover overdose before him, and then he ponders the layout of the tiny apartment they shared. Precise observations, punctuated by tragedy.

The meanest song on Post is its truest. A self-satisfied rock-god-in-training sings “Look So Fine, Feel So Low,” the tale of an up-and-comer living off the kindness of an innocent (“She buys me things/She wants to take care of me/And all I gotta do is sing, sing, sing”) while a millimeter under the surface he detests her (“She’s so easy to impress/When she asks me dumb questions/All I gotta do is say ‘yes, yes, yes’”) for his predicament. Kelly’s character signs in a voice so drenched in derision he is oblivious to his inhumanity. The title lines are attempts to show remorse, but the kid is kidding. What the kid doesn’t know is that revealing himself ensures his eventual eviction. He looks so wise, but he’s really a fool. These deceptively complex characters are the folks Kelly wants to write about, and their multidimensional nature is part of why their stories don’t ring on radios from coast to coast. Kelly subsequently rerecorded rousing full-band versions of many of the songs on Post, and those takes are often exhilarating. They’re great performances. But on Post, they’re revelations.

Everyone in my family is a fan of Ida Maria, especially Lydia (1, 2) and me (3). As someone who wants to hear new music from her I was delighted when she tweeted recently that she was “sunburned and ready for The Last Tour Ever with Fortress Round My Heart.” That was the good news. The bad news is that this last tour behind her debut is a package tour helmed by the pointless Perez Hilton. Oh well, I figured, in these days of there not being any record industry anymore, you accept help from anyone.

That tour came through town on Monday. Lydia and I couldn’t go, for a variety of reasons, and I’m glad we didn’t. Turns out, as laid out in Idolator, that she abandoned the stage early on in the set, came back after a delay to deliver an apology, most of one more song, another apology, and left again for good. She is now off the tour.

This seemed like a typical flameout from someone who’s toured too much. Nothing new to see, just move along. But then I saw a video of part of the truncated show (start watching it at 2:33):

This performance of “Keep Me Warm,” even as viewed in a tiny YouTube window, is hard to watch. It’s dark, deep, discomforting, and terrifying. She’s crying, she is desperate to sing but sometimes can’t, and after the punk-rock-guitar-break-in-the-middle-of-a-ballad part she is so far gone she holds notes so long you fear they will never end. Her singing is so loud, so raw, so hard for her to do but it’s all she can do until she can’t even do that anymore, that you feel some relief when she finally gives up, although in her apology at the end you know relief is the last thing she’s going to feel for some time.

People who love rock’n'roll sometimes think about authenticity, wondering: was that real? did that feel real? Of course, we consider authenticity in the context of performance. Rock’n'rollers on stage aren’t being real; they’re on a stage, performing. Sometimes they may really feel what they’re doing, but it doesn’t come across that way. Sometimes they may be bored or distracted, but they’re such pros that the performance feels authentic. Either way they’re on a stage, performing. I suspect what I find most poignant about this clip is that I’m watching a terrific performer trying to perform, trying to turn whatever she’s feeling into performance, but she can’t. What we see is something real, someone in trouble.

Ethan Lipton is a wonderful songwriter and performer, one of those sly guys who seem to be entertaining you but in fact is moving you. New York magazine calls him the city’s best lounge act but that captures only part of what he can do. I first heard him at a Pop!Tech back in ’05 and promptly begged him to appear on that Sandinista thing.

Lipton and his band want to record a new album on the Jill Sobule plan: his fans fund it. So, I urge you to follow this two-step plan:

1. Listen to the music on his shockingly un-ugly MySpace Page.

2. Learn about his new project and contribute to it.

You won’t regret it.

Last week I reported that I “just came up with a reissue/tribute idea that could be even less commercially successful than The Sandinista Project.” I’ve done some research and realized there’s no way I’d be able to pull off the new project, so I’m about to move on. But, before I do, I thought it might be fun to share what I had in mind.

In 1976, John Fogerty, the genius behind Creedence Clearwater Revival, recorded his third solo album, Hoodoo. It was a diverse album, ranging from the classic Creedence sound to very of-the-moment disco. For a variety of reasons, both aesthetic and commercial, the record was pulled at the last minute, and Fogerty began the first of his two long silences, not releasing any new music until 1985. I didn’t hear a bootleg of Hoodoo until just before Fogerty’s Centerfield comeback, and it is one weird record. “You Got the Magic,” for example, which snuck out as a single before Fogerty and/or his label put the kibosh on the full album, mixed Fogerty’s usual approach with a production approach that anticipated whole chunks of Saturday Night Fever. There are some low points on the record, but at least two of the cuts — the ballad “Between the Lines” and the rocker “On the Run” — rise to a level with his best work.

This was my idea for bringing Hoodoo back to life: a 2-CD Hoodoo Project set. The first disc would include the original Hoodoo and some non-album Fogerty recordings from the period; the second would be a Sandinista Project-style re-do of the nine cuts on the record, by nine different performers. The package would accomplish two goals: bring to light an unreleased, half-forgotten record (disc 1) and show how strong the songs are when placed in unexpected new settings (disc 2). Seemed like a fun project, a chance to turn on people to something they hadn’t heard, might even come together faster than the four-years-from-idea-to-release Sandinista Project.

But no. Turns out Fogerty still hates either that record or that time of his life, and even if I could get the rights to the record from whoever/whatever owns it now, I’d never want to force out an unreleased album over the objection of a performer who wanted it to stay unreleased. So it’s on to the next thing. Ninth-generation copies of the unreleased record remain available via the usual dubious online sources, and I think I’ll still be able to live a full life even if the country-punk version of Hoodoo‘s “Marchin’ to Blarney” I hear in my head never comes out. Onward!

UPDATE: The free download is over. Thank you for participating.

Happy Joe Strummer’s birthday

Joe Strummer of the Clash would have been 57 today. So today seems like a good day to give Clash fans a present.

It’s been two years. Does anyone remember The Sandinista Project?

In May 2007, Abe Bradshaw and the crazy geniuses at 2 Minutes 59 Records let me put out a borderline-insane track-by-track tribute to the Clash’s Sandinista!, with a different artist performing each of the album’s 36 songs. (You can read Abe’s version of the origin myth here.) We received mostly positive reviews from publications ranging from The New York Times to Pasadena Weekly, although someone told me that Robert Christgau hated it. More important, it was a great experience: I got to work with many of my favorite performers and create something.

The Sandinista Project is free for a day

The Sandinista Project didn’t set any sales records. Indeed, the number of copies distributed by unauthorized file-sharing sites was greater than the number we sold. We didn’t undertake the project to make ourselves any money (it was a charity record) so I didn’t mind that it was available everywhere for free. That’s the record biz nowadays. But it did bother me that so many of the versions available on torrenting sites (yes, I downloaded a few; depressing research) sounded like crap. They were encoded at low bit rates and sample rates, sometimes there were digital skips, and there was never any packaging. Guys, if you’re going to steal from us, at least make us look and sound good. Please.

To rectify this situation, for one day only, we’re offering, without charge, 256K versions (in M4A format, which works in iTunes and elsewhere) of every song on the record, as well as one bonus cut and PDFs of the CD booklet and packaging. So now, if you decide to steal this, it won’t sound quite so bad. You’ll still be stealing, but you won’t be stealing junk. And hurry up: this is a 24-hour offer. At midnight Pacific Time tonight, I’m taking down the big file.

UPDATE: The 24 hours is over; thank you all for participating.

Tim Krekel died today. He was a magnificent songwriter, singer, and guitarist. His career extended back to Crazy Love for Capricorn in the late 1970s, but I met him in the mid-1980s when he fronted The Sluggers, part of the Praxis family, that genius cluster of performers and entrepreneurs in Nashville who casually invented the next few generations of American rock’n'roll. Two of his songs for Jason and the Scorchers, “I Can’t Help Myself” and “Greetings from Nashville,” stand among the most exhilarating and hard-headed American rock’n'roll I’ve ever heard. They will last as long as people care about music: i.e., forever.

One of the great pleasures in making The Sandinista Project was reconnecting after a long, long time with performers I knew back when I made a meager living on the outskirts of the music industry. Tim was one of the first people I asked to contribute to the record, and he responded promptly with one of the collection’s standouts: a swamp-soul reworking of “Version City” (M4A format). The performance captures Tim’s deep knowledge of many kinds of American music (I got goose bumps the first time I heard the horns kick in), his original take on anything you could throw at him, his humor, and his knockout guitar and arrangements. He was an artist and a gentleman, a rare combination.

One of the many reasons I produced The Sandinista Project was to show how The Clash’s music, decades after the demise of the band, could go in new places. Looks like I wasn’t the only one with that idea:

A new wave of Latin stars is paying homage to The Clash in a concert featuring versions of their songs put though a blender of salsa, reggae, Mexican and other flavors. “Spanish Bombs: A Tropical Tribute to The Clash” debuted at London’s Barbican Theater this week. Backed by a 15-piece band complete with horns, congas and cantina-style accordion, guest singers tore through a repertoire of Clash favorites from “London Calling” to “Guns of Brixton” in true fiesta spirit.

(Source: Reuters, This Is Radio Clash, Latin-Style. Thanks, Owen, for letting me know about this!)

Music this thrilling and ambitious can’t help but live on, evolve, and inspire new generations. The future is unwritten!