Facebook people, as usual, you have to come to the http://way.net/waymusic page for the links to work.

I had an entry in the wiki for way music for the mess, but it locks every

one out, which is useless.  Just heard from Robin Henson, who took great photos of us, and Adam Dowis, who played drums in the initial incarnation of  of the band and was also a partner in crime from the outset with his brother Nick.   Here is a fuzzy recording from the vault with Adam on drums: Kevin’s Sleazy Funk, featuring a somewhat buzzed Anarchy Liquors Kevin hitting on someone in his inimitable style.  Also notable ‘cuz we would pass out percussion junk from a big bin for everyone to beat on for this.  More tunes linked below.

Here is the Mess entry from the non-working wiki:

The aptly named Mess of Daytona Beach were Palmer Wood on vocals and rhythm guitar, the sorely missed Corey Levin on drums, Greg Drais on bass, and Rich Rath (me) on lead guitar. Palmer and I wrote nearly all but the covers, and we worked together really well.

mess in the studio

The Mess played as the house band at a place called the Concrete Jungle on A1A right across the street from the ocean for about six months in 1983-84. The owner called it CJs, named after his daughter or wife or something, but hey, who was he to tell us what our bar was called. He went out of business about a month after we stopped playing there.

For a short while, CJs was the place to be for alternative music. Our friend Jonathan spun tunes, and we would play, once or twice bringing in special guests as well, I think there was a zine, other towns knew about CJ’s and came to visit. People danced, fought, heckled, drank, made out, made up, broke up, played pool, and danced some more.

Here is a live thing from a quiet night at CJs, an instrumental of a bunch of TV themes and stuff.   This had one of my favorite wall of squall moments in it, where for about fifteen seconds of Peter Gunn we ran everything on eleven and a half before returning to your regularly scheduled programming.  Here is a sloppy but fun version of Palmer’s GI Joe.  Here is a dubby thing that we got when a drunk Jamaican guy came in one night and asked if we played reggae.  He then sang something about “lie cold dead in the market” and Palmer changed it into this bastardized version of what I think is an actual Jamaican folk or reggae song, or maybe it was Louis Jordan’s “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” who knows…anybody?.  We had fun with the echoplex on this one

We left because we were packing the place up every weekend and some weeknights, but he’d only pay us $100 a week (for all of us, not each) for playing six nights…oh yeah, and all the Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap we cared to drink …urgggh.

We then went “on tour” of central Florida, playing memorable gigs in Jacksonville Beach, Tampa, and Gainesville, before spontaneously combusting while trying to find a Spring Break gig in Daytona.

There are many stories, but I’ll save them for another time. If you have any you want to share (no slander plz!), then leave stuff in the comments on this page.  Post any good stories you remember.

I’ll be playing at Off-Art-After-Dark this Friday (Oct. 26) from 5 to six with my laptop-computer mangled guitar stuff. I’ll probably then sit in with Laulani and Dave the next set too. Once it is dark, there will be a video projector and I’ll set up my participatory synesthetic music machine thing, the PRISMM, which turns your movements into music.

I just finished reading an interesting article and discussion over at Peter Kirn’s excellent Create Digital Music. I was too late to the party to make a comment there, so here ya go. The point of the article is that we are being ahistorical when we consider music piracy as having no precedent, with Peter showing how the record industry itself arose from the partial destruction of the musical performance business that it displaced. I am very interested in this long view (or listen) and am writing about it (among many other things) in a book that is way overdue that will be called either A Brief History of Hearing or Hearing History/History of Hearing so far. It should be out from University of Illinois Press soon after I finish writing it!

A book that covers the first part of Peter’s point quite well is Jim Kraft’s From Stage to Studio. He approached the advent of the recording industry as a labor problem, and it did put a lot of musicians out of work — there was an orchestra or piano player, usually union, in every movie theater before talkies for example. Others are also right that recording did make music – recorded music anyway – accessible to new people while it was putting most musicians out of work. Read the liner notes to the Harry Smith Anthology sometime if you want to see in action how that worked. The business model was to make as few recordings sell as many copies as possible. That one-to-many model has been wrecked by the Internet. For the cultural logic of why that is so, see Jonathan Sterne’s excellent article, “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact” [pdf]. As recorded music rose, it also pretty much killed off the culture of amateur musicianship, which was pretty advanced, really flowering in the nineteenth century in the US among other places. Why bother when you could hear an expert play it? The whole idea of music as something you consume, like a fast food, rather than make, like a sandwich or dinner, is a product of the recording industry. I also know from reading and from my friends in the symphony (now there is a phrase I couldn’t have imagined myself writing thirty years ago) that the technological advances from MIDI onward have had dire effects on the ability of classical musicians to make a living. To give one example, movies seldom use orchestras any more. In contrast, for a musician like me, it has been a great ride. A thousand or two people from all around the world have heard my weird stuff who otherwise wouldn’t have, using the same system of tubes that is “destroying music.” I’ll take it, and so will lot’s of people stuck in “consumer” mode too, obviously.

The print analogy Graham Metcalfe made is apt beyond his point that a lot of scribes got put out of work (repurposed, actually: I think monks had job security even if the pay was not so good).  Not only did it downsize the manuscript “business”  (not everything is all about business and profits, even now) but it took the better part of a century to figure out what had changed, as most of what they printed that first century were Latin manuscripts, only toward the end figuring out that you could write them from scratch in a language everyone in your country could understand instead of just a few monks and scholars.

Same with recording. At first it was all about making the recording sound like a performance. Records were sold for sounding just like Enrico Caruso to the extent they could, and that was the focus of the technology. It took decades to figure out such things as sound on sound and synthesis to get to the point that deadmaus made in the interview: now the “live” show struggles to sound like the recording in commercially focused performance, in fact that is an impossibility without employing recording or sequencing (how is Rihanna, shy of Tuvan throat singing, supposed to sing with herself?). We are still in the period when, as Marshall McLuhan said, the content of the new medium is the old media that it devours. Take Google books for just one example (or less controversially, Amazon OCRing everything but keeping it from us).

I see the present possibilities as heralding a return of the amateur musician (me for example!). Because the expense and distribution problems made access to recording dear, record companies made money. Those problems are solved now, that economy of scale is no more, and all the PR and new laws in the world are not going to put that genie back in the bottle even if the US could extradite Mr Dotcom from New Zealand. It has been a great ride for me, even if Metallica’s world is crashing down around them despite Chris Dodd ‘s best efforts (including, it seems, blocking web sites that notice).

BTW, or perhaps PS, because this drifts off the topic of Peter’s article, whenever music industry shills advocates mention “from the artist’s point of view” (the rest of this is a commentary on that link), I laugh bitterly. “Artist” and “copyright owner” are not synonymous. Those advances that the record companies so generously give so many artists? They go to the recording studio, touring expenses, lawyers, producers, and publicity, seldom to the artist. Tell Robert Johnson that, or any number (nearly all) the artists that the record industry has ripped off blind. Plenty of musicians besides Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) and Vic Chesnutt died young or took their lives even when the recording industry was at its peak, so the idea that piracy killed them is, well you can figure that one out. As the industry knows, it is good for business (oops, they got caught). And the idea that the free culture movement is a corporate plot while the recording industry is for artists, well, maybe if you put “con” before artists. Corporate minds have difficulty imagining that anything can be done by people outside of corporate intent. They don’t actually control the world or the state yet though, though they have in the past. That is called something else, but I don’t want to Godwin myself.

Utterly shark infested waters that musicians used to have to swim in to get heard. I’ve always been playing (forty years now) cause I have stuff to play, just now a few people actually can hear me if they choose. The music business as it was, was never for us musicians anyway. It only takes a few years in it to figure that out out. Protecting content creators my ass. For every musician who makes it, there are thousands as good or better who languish because they never got the breaks. Those musicians now want to understand their own skills and success as special, which they may well be, and in need of protection therefore, which they are not. Artistry has always been about the dance of creative destruction. It has real implications, both positive and negative, which the recording business knows historically.

Just posted a loop of Monisha and me prepping and cooking dinner  It is all knife chops, wok sizzle, spoon drops and bowl thunks.  Feeling a need to break out of the soundcloud impression that I specialize in acoustic slide blues.

The title of the post and the sample set is from a Frank Zappa song, Dangerous Kitchen.”  The song is a bit lame, so instead of going there, check out this 1974 made for tv video of “Inca Roads” instead.  Please at least get to the three minute mark where the fast cut claymation brain melt begins along with some amazing guitar. All years before MTV. And he steadfastly claimed he never took drugs to get this trippy.

Not a big Zappa fan but love this.  In the same department of people I like one or two things by is Captain Beefheart’s last musical offering to the world.  Rejected by MTV as too weird, it is now in the Permanent Film and Video Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC according to the vid description.  And if MOMA does not convince you of its value, maybe the fact that I think it might be my favorite video of all time will.  :)  My description of it would be if Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys were slipped some acid, they shot Bob, and dragged the rest out to the desert and then threatened them under death to play the blues for Captain to sing to as if their lives depended on it…but cheerier.

Hope ya like the loop. Lots more music on the blog, and as always, at WayMusic.

Here we are holding down the Sunday jam at Thomas Square for (de)Occupy Honolulu: Michael, Laulani, Dave and Laulani, who is trying to video while singing backups and playing ukulele, and myself on slide and singing.  Michael plays upside down and backwards, Jimi Hendrix style, and David has an endless stream of classic folk songs and his own originals.  Michael and Laulani took turns laying down the Hawaiian songs beautifully, some of their own, some classics.  We are there at Thomas Square, corner of Beretania and Ward, just like in the song, every Sunday, along with Food not Bombs, at 3 PM until dark.  I won’t be able to make it this coming week, so I hope five more will take my place!  I’ll be back the following week though, after taking a break to Molokai.

Extension of “99 percent blues,” acoustic with slide guitar and my sweet new Gibson acoustic on rhythm.  The new verses reflect the 8 raids on the Thomas Square Occupy Honolulu encampment.  Still there though!  Come down Sunday afternoon for Food Not Bombs and a jam with Laulani Teale and myself.  Bring yer instruments if ya gottem and some munchies.

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OK, so what’s a blues song without some words? I finished my tribute to Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House” by cutting some vocals dedicated to the Occupy movement, and the ninety-nine percent struggling to wake up from the nightmare the one percent is inflicting on us every day with corruption, oppression, and greed.  Oh, and if you want a blues song without some words, here is the instrumental version.

The directions to the camp are in the song. Beretania and Ward is the location of the Occupy Honolulu camp at Thomas Square. Thomas Square was the site where on July 26, 1843, Admiral Richard Darton Thomas returned the Kingdom of Hawai?i to the Hawaiians after the first illegal takeover, by the British. King Kamehameha III said “Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ??ina i ka Pono” (meaning “the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness”) in his speech at the ceremony marking his restoration. The sentence has become the state motto of Hawaii, incorporated into its seal. The second illegal overthrow was of course the one under which Hawai?i eventually became part of the United States. That is why we cross out “occupy” in our name, to show solidarity with the already occupied kingdom, otherwise known as the most heavily militarized state in the Union.

Come down and show some love for Occupy Honolulu if you are in town!

Here are the lyrics:

99 Percent Blues

Copyright 2011, Rich Rath

Creative Commons Commons Share and Share Alike type 3 license

(based on Jimi Hendrix’s Red House and a couple hundred other blues songs)

There’s a red house over yonder
Bank’ll get me one of those

There’s a red house over yonder

Bank they got me one of those

But I couldn’t get no bailout money

And the bank, well it foreclosed

I was standing on the corner

of Beretania and Ward

Holding signs there on the corner

of Beretania and Ward

I got the 99 blues

And that’s all I can afford

That’s ok I still got my guitar if they don’t take that away.

Police say get off the corner

You can’t occupy this space

Police say get off the corner

You can’t occupy this space

But i f they haul me off calling for justice

Five more will take my place

Extra Verses

I got three jobs

I can barely pay my rent

I got three jobs

I can barely pay my rent

I got those 99 blues

It ain’t like the one percent.

Corporations banks and lobbies

Bought the laws beyond a doubt

Corporations banks and lobbies

Bought the laws beyond a doubt

But when we raise our voice in protest

Its a crime to point it out

pale shadow of the right rev. jimi’s “red house”
version 2, better than yesterday’s

Version 3, da best one.  There is also a vocal version, 99 Percent Blues,  dedicated to Occupy Honolulu.  This is the instrumental side.

There’s a red house over yonder,
That’s where my baby stays.
There’s a red house over yonder,
That’s where my baby stays.
I ain’t been home to see my baby
In 99 and one half days.

Here is the last installment of my slide guitar recording from Sierra Madre.  I think it is the best sounding one yet.

 

Here is the second installment of the Rogue guitar, this one called telephone blues, cuz of the ending.  And the pic is me serenading my nephew, Kieran (in the car seat) with Monisha driving.