We are not fit to eat his dust. The god-like genius of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth.

 http://www.bigdaddyroth.com

“It was in the winter of my fiftieth year when it hit me: I was really alone and there wasn’t a hell of a lot of time left…”

PM interviewed by novelist and biographer Joe Ambrose at OutsideLeft.

 http://www.outsideleft.com/main.php?upda…

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Separated at birth. The strange tale of Mark Linkous and William Blake.

Perfecting Sound Forever
Greg Milner
(Granta)

He had me at hello. In his preface to Perfecting Sound Forever, music journalist (and occasional political speechwriter) Greg Milner explains in clear and concise language Guglielmo Marconi’s hypothesis of immortal sound: that there might exist an astral history of signals which have aged and decayed beyond our human hearing, but which one day may be Lazarused back to life through technological advances. Thus the maestro’s dream of building a device powerful enough to someday range across time to pick up Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

Flawed science maybe, but a beautiful idea. By rendering Marconi’s vision of the cosmos as a vast repository of dead links that if reanimated could allow us to hear the mating songs of pterodactyls or the Greeks’ lyres, the author pays tribute not just to the Godfather of Radio’s actual technological achievements, but his imagination. It’s this combination of hard fact and philosophy that distinguishes Perfecting Sound Forever from a techie manual or dry academic study.

Milner also posits Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph as seemingly achieving the cosmic no-no of actually creating energy rather than converting it, a tantalising idea, and one that invokes all manner of ideas about music as the devil’s instrument, or at least an alchemical Gnostic force, a notion that still raises its head anytime some loner malcontent goes postal and the moral majorities pick through his record collection in search of a sin eater to pin it on.

All this in a two-page preface. And just when you think Milner can’t crank the conceptual heat any higher, he opens the book proper with an elegant analogy that frames the birth of the cosmos as an eruption of pure noise itself: the Big Bang. In the beginning was not the word, but the sound. Or, as Milner has it, “The first thing the universe did was cut a record.”

If this all sounds about as much fun as a night out with one of Nick Nornby’s friendless stereo geeks, rest assured, the skill is in the telling. Milner proves an assured and erudite spirit-guide through the sonic labyrinth. In early chapters that document the dawn of recorded sound, written with the brio of a steampunk fantasist and the precision of an historian, the author easily elicits empathy for Edison’s sonic fundamentalism, the old man sticking doggedly to his hill-and-dale cylinder method of recording (based on the premise that the least possible degrees of separation meant the highest fidelity of sound), while the marketing boys over at Victrola were pushing the more durable and portable stylus-and-disc option, which the public also favoured because it was user-friendly, and to hell with the niceties of auditory aesthetics.

Later, in a section entitled ‘Pink Pseudo-Realism’, passages that describe the editing possibilities facilitated by magnetic tape – and the wartime discovery thereof – give even the most technophobic reader a visceral charge more commonly associated with an industrial espionage thriller.

Milner takes us on a magical mystery tour through not just the major sonic innovations of the 20th century, but a gallery of often outlandish and colourful figures. Leopold Stokowski for instance, a sort of Salvador Dali of orchestral recording, the flamboyant necromancer who collaborated with Walt Disney on that 1939 masterpiece of synaesthesia, Fantasia. Or the bizarre love triangle that existed between the father-and-son musicologist team of John and Alan Lomax and Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly.

Lomax Senior comes out of it in a mixed light: on one hand here was a man who did immeasurable service to oral traditions that would have died without his efforts to preserve them, on the other he was a purist in the worst sense (along with Pete Seeger, he threw a mighty strop when Dylan went electric at Newport), and wasn’t above joining his charge on stage to share the spotlight, or insisting that the ex-con Ledbetter perform in prison rags rather than the fine suits he preferred. The son Alan seems intent on atoning for the perceived sins of the old man, remaining tight with Ledbetter even when the singer and his father had fallen out. He also presided over some of the most faithful recordings of the man’s music, although Milner clearly regards legendary folk producer Moses Asch as Lead Belly’s most sympathetic steward.

The honour (and sometimes dishonour) roll continues to unfurl over 400 pages: Ampex benefactor Bing Crosby, multi-tracking pioneer Les Paul, Joe Meek, Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange (who pioneered the obsessive piecemeal construction of that classic 80s radio rock artifact, Def Leppard’s 1988 Hysteria, on an SSL console), Tony Bongiovi, Steve Albini, Bob Clearmountain, Andy Wallace: all ubiquitous names on the sleeves of 80s and early 90s rock and alt-rock classics, before the unfortunate advent of the Everything-Louder-Than-Everything-Else folly of modern mastering, when technicians began to set the levels for the car radio rather than the living room.

Milner makes no bones about the late 90s being the absolute nadir of mastering: the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication album is singled out as the most grievous offender in the aural fatigue stakes, with engineer Vlado Meller cast as the dark architect of satanic compression.

But the author is not above poking fun at analogue snobs as well as digital philistines: “On the heels of ‘high fidelity’, the word ‘audiophile’ entered the parlance, describing the men (the ‘hi-fi widow’ was a much lamented figure) whose obsessive commitment to high fidelity seemed to preclude any possibility of actually enjoying their hi-fis. ‘It has broken families and led men to ridiculous extremes in their search for perfect sound,’ Jennis Nunley wrote, accusing the movement of ‘creating a crop of mental aberrants.’

“Two years after Nunley wrote, ‘I give to psychiatry this useful word: audiophilia,’ psychiatry accepted. Dr Henry Angus Bowes, clinical director of psychiatry at Sainte Anne’s Hospital in Quebec, diagnosed audiophilia as a neurosis, characterized by a ‘tendency to become preoccupied with and dependent upon the bizarre recorded sound’ and ‘the urgency of the need and the final insufficiency of all attempts to satisfy it.’ He noted a sexual component to audiophilia, a desire for ’sterile reproduction without biological bother; in severe cases, the audiophile’s record collection becomes a symbolic harem…’”

Perfecting Sound Forever forms the third part of a holy trinity of books about the science, psychology and sheer magic of sound – the other two being Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia – that manage to educate and entertain.

Now that’s what I call a music book, volume three.

(An edited version of the above originally appeared in the Sunday Business Post.)

…reviewed in UK Independent.

 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entert…

“Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…”

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfBzCG4H8…

…is now online. Subjects on the slab include the films Creation and The Soloist, William Boyd’s novel Ordinary Thunderstorms, and the sublime Edvard Munch exhibition at the National Gallery.

 http://www.rte.ie/tv/theview/archive/200…

“I always thought it was our America as much as anyone else’s – circus people and carnival freaks, prisoners and music makers, troubadours, minstrels, hobos and poets and such, we can’t let the goddamn country go down to politicians and corporate madmen and media people and college professors, run it over and ruin it all. It’s ours, our goddamn country. We built the midway, didn’t we? And we make the music that goes on the midway, from sea to shining sea. You know, goddamn, Ronald Reagan died recently and they flew the flag at half-mast. Well, did they fly it at half-mast for Ray Charles? For Johnny Cash? Declare a national holiday? Yet these people, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, they moved and changed the daily lives more than any politician who are just grifters and scum. Wouldn’t even let them in the goddamn midway. So let us now praise the real American heroes, the ones with heart and soul who changed things for the good.”

– Little Jack Horton, quoted in the epigraph of More Miles Than Money - Journeys Through American Music, by Garth Cartwright, published by Serpent’s Tail.