Sesame Street Slayer

(thanks, Metal Injection)

Court rules against RapidShare

Finds Rapidshare.com violates copyright law

By Scott Roxborough

June 23, 2009, 01:41 PM ET
COLOGNE, Germany -- A German state court on Tuesday found file-sharing site Rapidshare.com guilty of violation of German copyright law and set damages at about €24 million ($34 million).

In what could prove a key precedent, the court found Rapidshare, and by extension similar file-sharing sites, bear principle responsibility for ensuring copyright-protected material is not illegally posted on their servers.

The ruling was a major victory for German collection agency GEMA, which had brought the suit against Rapidshare for allowing some 5,000 protected music titles to be posted on their site.

Midnight - Into the Night (1977)

"Local Chicago garage hardrock with a Doorsy '69-70 sound despite the release year. Covers all the bases with lots of rocking stuff, some moody introspectives, boogie moves, a doomy Sabbathish attempt etc. Pretty decent for the genre and a cool mid-60s Vox organ sound all through is a plus." (acid archives)

"...very rare 70s hard rocker with organ and raunchy guitar moves like a primitive mix of the Doors and Deep Purple." (BUY IT!)

Train of Thought

Electro Harmonix Work Band - State of the Art Electronic Devices (1977)

"In 1977 Electro Harmonix recorded an LP by Mike Matthews and his work band demonstrating the 'state of the art electronic devices'."

Independence Day Party, July 4, 1979, U.S. Ambassador’s Residence, Moscow

(left to right): Kenney Richardson, Manny Zapata, Charles (Cookie) Cook, Mike Matthews, Willie Magee, Bob Bednarz (standing), Larry De Marco, and Paul Staff.

"At curtain rise, six musicians are standing in front of a luminescent tapestry of atomic spirals, symbols, and words rotating and flashing. The crowd that has gathered to hear them is packed arm-to-arm, scarcely able to move. Everyone is pouring sweat. The temperature seems to be over 100 F. All these neatly dressed people are excited to be here, and hearing the famous Americans. But something between suspicion and curiosity immobilizes their faces, and they stare at the stage with strange eyes. Caught at just one instant, in the permanence of a photograph,this audience appears to be stunned,or horrified,or sleepy,or sad,or perhaps thinking,“you’ve got to be kidding!” Then Willie Magee,who once played guitar in Harlem’s famed Apollo Theatre, motions the Electro-Harmonix Work Band to begin with a certain number by K.C. and the Sunshine Band, in C, all at once 98 decibels of “Shake Your Body” are echoing through Sokolniki Park and nearby Red Square and bringing the news to the better part of downtown Moscow.

Paul Staff in goggles, satin, and American flag motif shirt waits for his cue and then swings in acrobatically from the band pavilion’s dome-like ceiling, narrowly missing the lead guitarist Larry DeMarco’s eye (it bleeds; the show goes on).The president of the company,Mike Matthews, is putting down a heavy lead on the electric piano through the all-time best-selling electronic music accessory, the “Small Stone,” alongside the bass of Kenney Richardson. Charles (Cookie) Cook on drums completes the ensemble. And though the group has never played together before, and has not practiced one song before their performing debut, by the end of this two-week Russia gig all bands members will agree that this was the hottest, most energetic, most memorable music experience of their lives." (more of this story... PDF LINK)

I Am Not a Synthesizer

Kashmir Backdrop Animation

Play Her Off Keyboard Cat

American Eagle (1970)

Not a lot of info about this one floating around the interwebs, but here are some short bios of 2 former band members:

Rob Lowery was lead vocalist for The Galaxies. He joined when he was about 14 and spent 6 years with the group. When he was twenty he went on to join national recording artists, "The Surprise Package" (aka The Viceroys) which was produced by Lee Hazelwood and put out the album Free Up, in 1969, plus several single recordings. After leaving Hazelwood's record company the group changed their name to American Eagle and put out another album titled “American Eagle” in 1972, on Decca records. This album was played throughout the nation and was popular in Germany and Sweden. Although the band never gained the notoriety it deserved, they were the opening act for major rock groups of the time including: The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull. Rob left the music industry in the early nineties to raise a family and began a successful career as an antiques dealer in Seattle (Classic Antiques) and ultimately opening Cafe Neo combining it within the antique store to create a unique dining and antiquing experience. Currently he is the owner of income property in Seattle and Everett.

***

Greg Beck started playing guitar in his early teens. In the music community he is known as, not only a well rounded, experienced player, but also as a very tasteful musician. His passion for music was fired by such diverse influences as jazz/funk guitarist Howard Roberts, R&B grooves by Freddie King and Ray Charles, rock flavors from the Beatles, Stones, and Clapton and a long list leading to varied contemporary artists. As a member of the Viceroys with Fred, Greg was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Together also in The Surprise Package and American Eagle, for seven years on albums and concerts they played and sang along side of music giants for thousands of people.

On the Rack

Joe Walsh - So What (1974)

As he's moved westward -- from the East Coast to Ohio to Colorado to Los Angeles -- Joe Walsh has assimilated one regional rock style after another. Walsh's appealing and extremely well-made third solo album, So What, attests to his varied background. It pits his adenoidal vibrato against Eagles-like California harmonies and plays his bashing, propulsive chording style off against more sedate picking of an apparently gentle soul.

Disregarding a brief, sophomoric goof track, "All Night Laundry Mat Blues," So What goes eight for eight, both in the performances themselves and in the clean way they've been recorded (by Walsh and John Stronach, with former producer Bill Szymczyk responsible for one track). Three simple rockers, "Welcome to the Club," "Time Out" and "Turn to Stone," are distinctive ones as ones by Townshend or Richard, but played more with refinement than sheer raunch.

Walsh originally cut "Turn to Stone" on Barnstorm, his first LP after quitting the James Gang and heading for Colorado. The new version shows how well he's honed his style over the past two years. The first performance relied on power chording for impact; the second shows Walsh playing less but with more awareness of the power of suggestion. The increase in restraint results in an increase in drama. The new version, however, hardly sounds restrained.

On the three rockers, Walsh's chording, leads and slide work harmonically and rhythmically resemble his ear-catching guitar playing on the '73 hit single, "Rocky Mountain Way." But each of these new tracks rates a hit in both material quality and Walsh's use of his guitar and vocal techniques. Simultaneously burly and beautiful (in a functional way), these are three unforgettable rock & roll tracks.

Add to these an inexplicably touching synthesizer performance (by Walsh) of a brief segment from Ravel's "Mother Goose Suite," a pair of harmony tunes, "Falling Down" and "Help Me through the Night," that would make any country-rock group brown with envy, a first-rate, orchestrated pop melodrama, "Song for Emma," and an almost completely instrumental "County Fair," and the result is an unpretentious, playable album. And if the mode in which this music is presented appears through its harmonies and sentiments to be mainstream L.A. rock, there's an important difference: Walsh doesn't need to rev himself up to play rock & roll -- if anything, he has to hold himself back.

In his unassuming way, Walsh has made So What into a nearly classic representation of the forms and textures of present-day American rock & roll. (Rolling Stone, 4/24/75 via superseventies.com)

Time Out

Pilé 43

(thanks, Percy Trout)

Freelance Fiend / Lord of Leafs

Leaf Hound - Freelance Fiend

Lord of Leafs - Skinny Joey

(thanks, now i'm your blog)

Friction - '79 Live (Japan 1980)

"Friction is a late-'70s/early-'80s Japanese punk band formed by their bassist/singer/frontman ("Reck") who spent the better part of a year in NYC during the No Wave heyday. Like a lot of the better Japanese rock bands past and present, they took something great and tweaked it in another direction that still displays their love of the initial inspiration. There is a stripped down Contortions element to Friction (Sure enough, Reck played with Contortions and Teenage Jesus) but they are better described as a noir-ish, No Wave version of Crime. As recognizable as their influences may be, they are inarguably primal, energetic and seminal sounding, and the No Wave influence only informs their jaggedness and angular edge. In the end, these recordings capture the snarly-cool punk rock attitude as vividly as any reissue I've heard. It rocks." (Forced Exposure)

"When this excellent live album first surfaced a coupla years ago, I gots to admit it was a delightful revelation to me to experience Friction sounding as I imagine their leader Reck had originally intended. Indeed, with three decades and several oceans between us, and the dryness of their original studio sound herein replaced by the inevitable sonic spillage of a cheap concert recording, the catchiness of Friction’s racket finally made perfect sense, as Reck’s driving bass melded together with Chico Hige’s drums and Tsunematsu Masatoshi’s splashy-scratchy guitar to create a triple-headed post-punk behemoth. Heck, even Reck’s overly arch J. Rotten vocals now sounded less like Butler Rep’s dental drool and more like a genuine lead vocalist proposition, as really fucking catchy Japanglish choruses – admittedly often of barely more than a coupla duplicated words’ duration – emerged from the dungeonous gloop. But whereas the repeated vocals of songs such as ‘A-Gas’ (‘Gas mask, gas gas gas, gas tank, gas gas gas, anarchy’) and ‘Cycle Dance’ (‘Red light switch, black light switch, white light switch, switch, switch, switch, switch’) added little more than a glimpse of humanoid personality to Friction’s dislocated ‘Cloud 149’-meets-NO NEW YORK muse, elsewhere Reck’s still highly minimalist vocals contained choruses catchily hefty enough to corral momentarily some of the wild atonal funk tableaux into which they had been released." (via Head Heritage)

Big-S