tagged w/ Capitol Records
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'Dougie' rapper M-Bone dies in drive-by
By Alan Duke, CNN
May 16, 2011 2:19 p.m. EDT
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Rapper M-Bone (right) was killed Sunday night after a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Someone in another car shot M-Bone twice, police say
His group, Cali Swag District, recorded "Teach Me How to Dougie"
M-Bone's real name was Montae Talbert
Los Angeles (CNN) -- Rapper M-Bone of the group Cali Swag District died Sunday night in what police said was a drive-by shooting in his hometown, Inglewood, California.
M-Bone, whose real name was Montae Talbert, was sitting in a car in the 400 block of North LaBrea Avenue when a car pulled up next to his and someone fired two rounds that struck the rapper in his head, Inglewood Police Lt. Steve Overly said Monday.
Talbert, 22, died later at a hospital, Overly said.
Preliminary reports on the model of car that was involved have not been confirmed, he said.
Cali Swag District's biggest hip-hop hit came in 2010 with the song "Teach Me How to Dougie."
Greg Miller, the rap group's representative, said Talbert was "the victim of a random act of violence."
The rapper "was an inspiration to his family, friends and fans," Miller said. "He was a hardworking, passionate artist and dancer who will be sorely missed."'Dougie' rapper M-Bone dies in drive-by
By Alan Duke, CNN
May 16, 2011... more
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Los Angeles Times...
Library of Congress builds the record collection of the century
The sounds of everybody from Duke Ellington to Jelly Roll Morton to obscure surfer dudes are preserved at a Library of Congress facility in Virginia. Access is limited, but that is about to change.
By Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times
May 8, 2011
Reporting from Culpeper, Va. ——
PART ONE...
About an hour south of Washington, D.C., deep beneath rolling hills near the verdant Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, lies a storehouse filled with bounty.
At one time, during the Cold War, that treasure was cash — about $3-billion worth — that the Federal Reserve had socked away inside cinderblock bunkers built to keep an accessible, safe stash of funds in case of nuclear attack.
Now what's buried here, however, is cultural rather than financial: The bunkers are a repository containing nearly 100 miles of shelves stacked with some 6 million items: reels of film; kinescopes; videotape and screenplays; magnetic audiotape; wax cylinders; shellac, metal and vinyl discs; wire recordings; paper piano rolls; photographs; manuscripts; and other materials. In short, a century's worth of the nation's musical and cinematic legacy.
This is the Library of Congress' $250-million Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, a 45-acre vault and state-of-the-art preservation and restoration facility on Virginia's Mt. Pony. It's here that a recent donation from Universal Music Group, nearly a quarter-million master recordings by musicians including Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby, is now permanently housed. Some staff members busy themselves daily cleaning and gluing fragile 100-year-old films back together; others meticulously vacuum dust from the grooves of ancient 78 rpm discs, which are washed before being transferred to digital files that can be accessed by scholars, musicologists, journalists, filmmakers, musicians and other visitors.
As part of the Library of Congress, this trove is available to anyone, free. But because of the complexities of copyright law, access is restricted to the library's reading rooms in Washington and Culpeper. Library officials, however, are poised to unveil a new program that will significantly expand public access to a big chunk of the library's goods, even if it won't provide carte blanche availability to everything stored there. A news conference is scheduled for Tuesday to announce the details.
The library's main storage facility induces a chill, literally: It's kept at 50 degrees and 35% relative humidity to prevent materials from degrading. It's even frostier at the opposite end of the property in the vault for volatile nitrate film, which is cooled to 35 degrees.
The long hallway also can spark images of the closing scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," although it's not a single airplane hangar-sized room full of crates packed with who-knows-what treasures. Instead, the second-floor hallway leads past 17 vaults, each of which yields shelf after shelf filled with platters of vinyl, shellac or wax or magnetic tape in various formats: open reel as well as audiocassettes, four- and eight-track tape cartridges and digital audiotapes. There also are a good number of vintage wax cylinders as well as metal master discs.
The breadth of the library's stock is impossible to summarize. But in addition to copies of every published recording registered for protection in recent decades with the U.S. Copyright Office, the library has acquired personal collections from classical music giants such as Leonard Bernstein, composer Aaron Copland and pianist Wanda Landowska, in some cases including never-released test pressings, as well as every 78 rpm disc recorded by jazz titan Jelly Roll Morton.
It possesses tens of thousands of lacquer discs from NBC Radio, including the network's complete archive of World War II coverage; documentarian Tony Schwartz's trove of audio recordings from the streets of New York; and half a million LPs, among which are dozens of surf and hot-rod music-themed discs that Capitol Records issued in the '60s to capitalize on those crazes, including "Hot Rod Hootenanny" by Mr. Gasser & the Weirdos, with cover art and songs co-written by fabled car designer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.
The sound vault is so extensive that when Universal Music Group's gift was announced, Gene DeAnna, who heads the recorded sound section, didn't bat an eye. The new donation, which takes up a mile of linear shelving space, is one of the largest single gifts to the library ever. But it represents only about a 1% expansion of the audio collection, which typically grows by 120,000 to 150,000 items per year, about two-thirds of which is sound recordings. And within are essential recordings of the American experience.
When producers at Sony Music's Legacy division were working on the new box set "Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings: The Centennial Edition," for example, they tapped the library for some metal masters and shellac discs that were better than what the label had in its own archive.
But records and tapes aren't the only musical recordings here. Preservation specialist Larry Miller pulled out some rare wax cylinders about 4 inches in diameter, much larger and thicker than the standard 2-inch cylinders that proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries until flat discs took over.
"Back in those days, there were patent wars," Miller said. "Everyone was trying to not pay money to someone else for use of a particular format." Like the Beta-VHS videotape wars in the '70s and '80s, or the Blu-ray versus HD-DVD battles more recently. "It was a higher fidelity version and had longer playing time too," DeAnna said. "It was kind of like the Blu-ray of its day."
Universal's donation upped the total 2010 acquisition for the recorded sound division to more than 300,000 items. The final truckload of recordings that had long been housed in Universal's vault in Pennsylvania was scheduled to arrive in Culpeper on Wednesday.
The question is how many people will have access to it.
Beyond the library's mission of physical conservation and restoration of its vast archive, providing public access to it is both a driving goal and key hurdle these days. Physically converting aging films or recordings to contemporary playback media is a breeze compared with navigating the copyright clearances that would permit broad access.
It's a byproduct of copyright law, which characteristically lags several steps behind changes in technology. This reality is particularly challenging when it comes to music: Although music compositions have been under the purview of federal copyright law since 1831, sound recordings didn't get that protection until 1972. Before that, ownership of recordings was determined by state and common law — something the 1972 federal law didn't change.
And there's the rub for DeAnna. The shift to digital technology that makes streaming access possible will inevitably push the boundaries of current copyright law. Deanna added that, if nothing else, academia should have access to the music.
"We should be able to have Internet streaming access on secure sites — and more than one, not just our reading room," he said. "We should have partnerships with universities around the country — we should have at least that" ability to allow researchers and students remote use of the library's materials.
CONTINUED...Los Angeles Times...
Library of Congress builds the record collection of the... more
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Exclusive: Rock 'N Roll Treasure Revealed
By TARA WALLIS-FINESTONE
Updated 8:12 AM PDT, Mon, Sep 13, 2010
The British invasion. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones: Their music, their fashion and their swagger. Rock 'n roll's first super groups took America by storm in the 1960s, changing the cultural landscape of American youth.
Now almost 50 years later, like a mirage emerging from a desert oasis, a Southern California woman has answers to questions that rock 'n roll's fans asked for decades.
"I was just in awe of all these beautiful people," said Patti Daley, 64. "They were just our friends, it was amazing."
The answers lie within boxes that Daley has stored for decades underneath her bed, in her home two hours east of Los Angeles.
Inside the boxes are a treasure trove of old photo albums full of rare Polaroids of icons in rock, plus John Lennon lyrics, and letters and cards from members of the Beatles. These are items the public has never seen, until now.
Perhaps the rarest set of photos she owns are two Polaroids of Paul McCartney playing piano inside Lennon's beach house in 1974. It was their first meeting since the Beatles breakup in 1970.
"It's incredible, incredible, a lot of these things are things we've only read about," said Chris Carter, host of the nationally syndicated radio program "Breakfast with The Beatles."
"I saw a picture of Mickey Dolenz climbing up a hill, a picture of Keith Moon on a shag carpet," added Carter. "You know these are rock icons and these pictures no one has ever seen. And they are not published in 25 Beatles books. These are really first time viewings for these pictures."
Amazingly, Patti's treasure includes more than just photos. She also has handwritten cards from George Harrison and John Lennon, plus personal notes from now legendary recording sessions, all signed by the musicians who were there. But the potential motherload are several song lyrics from Lennon's "Walls and Bridges" recording sessions, including what is believed to be his hand-written lyrics to his only number one song "Whatever Gets You Through the Night."
"I came to acquire those after sessions," Daley remembered. "John would come in and put the lyrics on a podium. And he would just leave them there for me to pick up."
Daley also has a copy of a letter John Lennon sent to record executives in 1976. Although it might not be worth a lot of money to collectors, it's significant historically.
In the letter, Lennon was angry with Capitol Records about the cover art selected for the Beatles' first greatest hits album "Rock 'N Roll Beatles." Among other things, an animated Lennon accuses the record executives of trying to ruin the image of the Beatles.
Daley was the ultimate rock 'n roll insider. She said the love of her life was a well-known session guitarist named Jesse Ed Davis, a man many consider one of the greatest unsung guitar heroes in rock 'n roll.
"He was the most subtle, tasty guitar player when rock and roll was really happening," said Daley. "Everyone loved his playing and sought after him to play on their records."
Legends like all the Beatles, members of the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and the Faces, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and more all enlisted Davis' skills on his trademark Fender Telecaster.
Daley said, "I still hear him on the radio, I listen to the old stations, it makes my heart smile."
For more than a decade, she toured the world with Jesse and her young son Billy, not only baring witness to, but also documenting, what is now a legendary time in pop culture.
A mother armed with a Polaroid camera, Patti took candid, one-of-a-kind pictures of icons in rock.
"I just kept my Polaroid camera on me all the time in my purse, and when I'd see a good shot, I'd take them candidly," said Daley.
The photos are incredible: From a young Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts in the early 1970s, to several shots of a care free Ronnie Woods before he joined the Stones, to a series of Beatles photos after the breakup -- many taken during John Lennon's "Lost Weekend."
In 1973, Lennon separated from his wife Yoko Ono and began an 18-month relationship with his secretary May Pang. It was a relationship that Yoko reportedly initiated. And the couple spent quite a bit of time at a rented beach house in Santa Monica. Lennon later referred to this time as his "Lost Weekend."
"It's always desirable to have material from somebody who was part of an inner circle, somebody who was really a witness to history," said Dr. Catherine Williamson, director of Books and Manuscripts at Bonhams & Butterfields auction house in Los Angeles.
Williamson said, if authenticated, Daley's treasure could be highly desirable not only to collectors, but also potentially to museums.
As for Daley, she is not sure what she will do with her treasure. She admits, though, that it was an incredible time in her life, and now she wants to share it with the world.
She said, "I feel very privileged to have met the people I have met and heard the music I have heard."
Editor's Note: NBCLA will have a series of reports this week on this "Rock-N-Roll Treasure." On Monday, we bring you more never-before-seen photos from John Lennon's Lost Weekend. Plus, what Patti Daley remembers about that day in 1974 when Paul McCartney and John Lennon first got together again to play music.
First Published: Sep 12, 2010 5:26 PM PDT;jif=21880287104703;dcove=r;
Exclusive: Rock 'N Roll Treasure Revealed
By... more
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I passed along on twitter yesterday a piece on NewTeeVee once again lamenting the sad state of record label affairs that block embedding of many music videos. Videos are often also geoblocked, meaning they're not viewable in many non-US countries.
The indie rock band was but a blip on the mainstream music scene until 2006, when it made jaws drop with the viral smash video for Here It Goes Again. Four dudes took eight treadmills and made one of the most joyful and exuberant music videos of the 2000s, and its online success (currently approaching 50 million views on YouTube) created a worldwide audience for the band.
However, last Friday OK Go premiered a stunt-heavy music video for the new single This Too Shall Pass, featuring a cast of 200 — including the Notre Dame marching band — who perform the tune in one take, with some fun surprises along the way. Alas, though, the video has so far only acquired about 10,500 views, which is surely disappointing to the band, yet easily explained: The video is geoblocked by Capitol Records in many international locations, and embedding in all regions has been disabled.
That's, sadly, business as usual for major label releases these days, as we lamented last year in this blog post.
So I'm both amused and encouraged that OK Go's own singer, Damian Kulash, took the time to comment himself on NTV's blog:
We’re incredibly upset that the youtube versions of our videos can’t be embedded. Just one more example of major labels accelerating their own demise. We (and every individual band out there) have exactly zero leverage in this particular battle, however. So we post to other sites as well. The TTSP video will be on vimeo today. This kind of fragmentation means we’ll probably never see the likes of 50 million hits on a single posting ever again, but who cares?
Here it is on Vimeo:
OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.I passed along on twitter yesterday a piece on NewTeeVee once again lamenting the sad... more
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Capitol Records has announced plans to reissue twelve Radiohead singles later this year. The singles, which will be reissued on limited-edition vinyl and will feature the original 5″ CD artwork, are due out April 21.Capitol Records has announced plans to reissue twelve Radiohead singles later this... more
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Since Radiohead left Capitol, the label has taken every chance they could to exploit the back catalogue (From Pablo Honey to Hail to the Thief). From a box set with no unreleased tracks to "collector's editions" of the first three albums to vinyl reissues, Capitol has pressured the fans to buy the same material again and again (to be fair, the recent vinyl Radiohead EP series provides the best Radiohead fidelity ever). Now Radiohead strikes back with a digital store of their own on their w.a.s.t.e site.Since Radiohead left Capitol, the label has taken every chance they could to exploit... more
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Capitol records will be re-releasing the three albums, including b-sides, rare cuts, and expanded versions. The new cuts, called "Collectors Edition, will be released August 25th. Really, the perfect addition to any Radiohead-head's collection.Capitol records will be re-releasing the three albums, including b-sides, rare cuts,... more
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