Dub Side of the Moon

Like many, many people -- including, supposedly, one out of every five households in the UK -- I have a copy of Pink Floyd's masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon. And like the vast majority of those people, I don't listen to it much anymore.

Instead, I listen to an album called Dub Side of the Moon, by a NYC pickup group called the Easy Star All Stars. For those of you who aren't familiar with this 2003 album: that's right, this is a dub-reggae version of the Pink Floyd classic. It is also a masterpiece in its own right. It has been on the Billbaord (reggae) charts for 100 weeks, an echo (pun intended) of the original's unequalled 724-week chart reign.

Dub Side of the Moon is not, not, not a cheap tribute album. It is not a group of well-known artists getting together to pay tribute to one of their influences (e.g., Two Rooms - Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin or Common Thread - The Songs of the Eagles), although it does feature well-known reggage and blues musicians like vocalist Ranking Joe, the harmony group Meditations, and guitarist Corey Harris. Nor is it the work of a smarmy parody act (Dread Zeppelin), nor is it a paint-by-numbers emulation (Beatlemania).

Dub Side of the Moon is, finally, the delivery of a pregnant idea. Dub music has a fair bit in common with progressive rock, and fans of the latter often share an affinity for the former. The spaciness, shifting textures, rhythmic juxtapositions, and emphasis on instrumentals over vocals are common to both. I remember listening to the productions of the UK-based dub wizard The Mad Professor in the early 1980s and thinking about how similar it sounded to British art-rock. I may have even segued from the Mad Professor into Floyd on my radio show back then.

On this album, the original material is treated with respect as it is transmogrified into dub language. Michael Goldwasser, the producer, was judicious in the elements he decided to change rather than emulate. For example, marijuana becomes part of the metaphor of paranoia that pervades the original album; hence the cash-register noises in "Money" are now the sounds of bong hits and coughing. David Gilmour's soaring guitar solo in "Time" becomes a Ranking Joe toasting rap: "Time is the master, time can be a disaster."

The sound quality of the album is amazing; it's tailor made for iPods and earbuds, just as the original benefited from big clunky ear-surrounding headphones plugged into your stereo. It is also, allegedly, tailor made for listening while The Wizard of Oz plays on your VCR, just like the original.

I find myself listening to Dub Side of the Moon over and over again. I even saw the Easy Star All Stars perform it in its entirely at a downtown club a couple of years ago; the album has become so popular that the core group tours it internationally. Easy Star Records has followed with a Radiohead tribute called, of course, Radiodread.

Now, I have a request to the Easy Star All Stars: how about a dub version of a certain classic Yes album? One tune in particular cries out for the dub treatment. You could call it "And I and I."

College Radio, 25 Years On

This past week, I went to the CMJ conference at NYU in NYC. Originally a gathering of college radio people, the CMJ Music Marathon is now a huge agglomeration of performances by new bands hoping to get noticed by record labels, radio music directors, promoters, and so on. Oh, yeah, and a conference with some panels. One of which, "2007: The Year in Tech", had me as a panelist.

I spent the vast bulk of my college years at the radio station, WPRB in Princeton, NJ. Now I run the alumni board that oversees the station, but I'm not involved on a day-to-day basis. Two weeks ago, WPRB had its first ever on-air fund drive; I went down to help out, take phone calls, and even do my first radio show in over 12 years. That, combined with soaking up the atmosphere of CMJ, gave me a glimpse into the college radio scene nowadays.

CMJ -- it originally stood for College Music Journal, now it's just... CMJ -- first appeared during my undergrad years of 1979-1983. For the first time ever, it gave college radio DJs an easy way of finding out what their peers at other college stations were playing. It was a great source of information. Around the same time, and not coincidentally, punk and new wave were emerging -- and college stations were virtually the only ones that played that music. CMJ collected college radio playlists and produced charts, which record labels began to notice.

This had a major effect on the rock music industry. In fact, it was probably the biggest source of internal change until 1992, when automated SoundScan retail reports superseded retail managers' payola-fueled "take our word for it" sales reports -- resulting in the "sudden" vault of Grunge (Nirvana) past Urban Contemporary (Lionel Richie) to the top of the charts. With CMJ charts, record labels quickly understood why bands like the Police, Clash, U2, Talking Heads, and REM were selling healthily, and they took action: they signed bands, and the major record companies acquired punk and new wave labels like Stiff and Sire.

Over time, CMJ began to carve up the college radio sound into charts representing narrow -- and basically trendoid -- micro-segments like "American Stars & Bars." These were very effective both in sending signals to college DJs about what's hip and giving A&R people at record labels blueprints for their next signings.

CMJ was the serpent in the college radio Garden of Eden. The good news was that record labels finally began to take college stations seriously enough to provide them with decent record service (plus concert tickets and other bennies). The bad news was that college DJs began to look to their semi-weekly issues of CMJ to find out what they should play; as a result, music played on college radio began to homogenize, and much of the creativity got sucked out of the medium.

Nowadays, many college stations actually pride themselves on playing the CMJ Top 20. XM Satellite Radio even has a station called XMU, which plays it too -- though with no blown segues and no announcers saying "ummm" and "uhhh." Much of the music of the CMJ Top 20 sounds similar to what we played on college radio in the early-mid 80s. First it was called punk, then it was new wave, then it was alternative rock, then more simply alt-rock, and now it's indie rock.

But it's largely the same sounds. During a lunch break in the CMJ conference track, a band called La Laque played. They sang in French and had a female lead singer, but otherwise they might as well have been called Les Nouvelles Tetes Parlantes. The guitarist not only looked and jerked around stage like David Byrne, he even played the same vintage Fender Mustang guitar that Byrne played during the Talking Heads' early days.

All in all, college radio today strikes me as much the same as it was 25 years ago. There are little differences. Some DJs plug their iPods into the studio mixing board instead of bringing a crate of albums in; this increases the chances of musical serendipity but decreases sound quality. The ubiquity of email, IM, and cell phones makes it easier to fit station management duties in with a class schedule, but it reduces station hanging-out time that leads to stronger commitment.

College radio perseveres because it has come to be identified closely with a type of music whose fans know is available there. Just as there was a rite of passage during my high-school days when you moved from Elton John to ELP and from Top 40 to progressive FM radio, today's rite of passage from Avril Lavigne to Animal Collective often involves a college radio station (as well as various MySpace pages).

Of course, college radio doesn't just play indie rock. It also perseveres because it offers two things that commercial radio does not. One is what Peter Gabriel has called a curatorial function: as the Internet makes music more ubiquitous and easier to get for free, the value is shifting to those who can help you discover music you don't know but would like, or who can juxtapose different music in new and exciting ways.

In the 1960s and 70s, FM radio used to be a tastemaker. Now commercial radio is more of a taste reflector. One indie label guy I met at CMJ told me that his most successful artist, a folk-pop singer-songwriter, got her big break doing background music for TV, including the theme song for a prime time network series (I forget which one). Only now is commercial radio starting, slowly, to play her music. This is completely backwards from the way it used to be. College radio is virtually the only tastemaker left on broadcast radio.

The second is the human element. In commercial radio, with its automated music formats and generic, disembodied jocks, the human element has passed to talk radio -- which partially explains its staggering rise from the fringes to the top during the last 10-15 years. College DJs are refreshingly, unabashedly, unapologetically human.

Many college radio people today talk about whether or how the Internet threatens the medium. The human element in radio is inherently non-scalable, and it's what's missing from net radio a la Live365.com. Many of the most successful college stations simulcast online. WPRB does this and got a significant number of pledges during its recent fund drive from Internet-only listeners.

Tastemaking is also not all that scalable online. The sheer volume of music-geek blogs, and the fact that most of them don't last long before they are abandoned or discredited (as losers or as record-label shills), makes them a rather unreliable source. Recommendation engines like Pandora can be great but have significant limitations. College radio continues to emerge as a (user-)friendly, often reliable, and self-editing source of tastemaking information.

Back at the CMJ conference, someone from a new Internet-only college station asked a question to panelists: how can we get an FM license? My question to him was: why would you want to? He couldn't give me an answer other than duh, it's obvious. His lack of eloquence spoke volumes about the contiuning viability of college radio, even in the Internet age.

Deep Purple and Jethro Tull: Their "Other" Albums

Quick: name two early-70s albums by British hard rock bands with proggish tendencies that get played to death on classic rock radio. That's right: Jethro Tull's Aqualung (1971) and Deep Purple's Machine Head (1972). Now: name any other album that either of those bands recorded.

Can't do it? Not surprising. That's the power that tightly formatted commercial radio has achieved over the past 20 years or so. No doubt that those albums were those bands' best, but the overfamiliarity of tracks like "Smoke on the Water," "Highway Star," and "Space Truckin'" (Purple), and "Aqualung," "Cross-Eyed Mary," and "Locomotive Breath" (Tull) dull their value almost as if they were the advertising jingles that surround them.

Those two bands had other great albums. For Jethro Tull, my vote goes to Stand Up (1969), the band's second LP. Aqualung, Tull's fourth, was the first album that singer/flutist Ian Anderson dominated; the previous three were really band albums. The difference is readily apparent in the mix: Anderson's vocals are less assertive and much less pretentious, and his flute is more of an ensemble instrument than a source of solos; Martin Barre's guitar is more of a source of creativity in general, not just hooky lead lines.

Stand Up is a wonderfully eclectic yet unassuming collection of tunes. "New Day Yesterday," the opener, features a heavy guitar riff pasted on top of an odd meter. "Nothing Is Easy" is swinging and jazzy, as is the album's best-known track, "Bouree," a reworking of Bach's Bouree in E Minor. Other tunes like "Back to the Family" and "Fat Man" add light touches without being precious in the manner of Aqualung's "Mother Goose." Incidentally, Stand Up was Tull's only UK No. 1 album.

Deep Purple started out with a different lineup than the one that recorded Machine Head, which is known as Deep Purple Mark II. But Mark II's pre-Machine Head albums, Fireball and Deep Purple In Rock, were nothing special. Machine Head magically pulled all of the band's raw materials together into a coherent style and milked it for almost all it was worth.

I say "almost" because the true excellence of this now-all-but-fogotten band (not even listed in the latest edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide!) was onstage. Made In Japan was released in a hurry to the Japanese market in 1972 to capitalize on the breakaway success of Machine Head. Its popularity led the band's label, EMI, to release it in the US and Europe as well.

Made In Japan is one of the greatest live rock albums of all time. Deep Purple plays for the crowd in Osaka as if its life depended on it. The album is guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's crowning career achievement, and Jon Lord's performance on organ -- Jimmy Smith bluesy one moment, Mike Ratledge noisy the next -- shows at least as much risk-taking experimentalism within the blues-rock format as Keith Emerson showed with The Nice and ELP. Roger Glover and Ian Paice pound away like crazy. Ian Gillain's astounding shrieks show that he was most definitely not just a creature of studio artifice, and at times (such as during "Strange Kind of Woman"), he sounds like he is actually having fun.

Made In Japan's greatness derives from the fact that these were not just recreations of studio tracks from Machine Head and earlier albums. The extended improvs, many of them jousts between Blackmore and Lord in the time-honored tradition of jazz "cutting contests," show true fireworks far more often than self-indulgence.
This is just one of those albums that must be listened to at ear-shattering volume or the entire point is lost.

Further evidence of Purple's vitality as a live act is in the Mark II band's reading of "Mandrake Root," a track from the Mark I band's 1968 debut album Shades of Deep Purple. Mark II really made this track its own on stage, though it doesn't appear on Made In Japan. To get it, seek out the otherwise inferior In Concert, originally released in the early 1980s.

Ironically, Made In Japan was probably the first live album released as "pure product" to capitalize on a band's momentum, as opposed to The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East, the Grateful Dead's Europe 72, and the Who's Live at Leeds, which served to document those bands' primacy as live acts. The pure-product greatest-hits live album became the rule after Made In Japan: The Remastered Edition, give or take a few exceptions such as Cheap Trick at Budokan that prove it.