You’ve described yourself as very shy when you were younger. How do you think shyness affects creative people?
Richard Thompson: It’s a funny thing. I can never tell who’s shy and who isn’t. Danny Thompson, a bass player I’ve worked with, will say, “I’m really quite a shy person.” What? He’s always the loudest person in the room!
A lot of shy people end up on stage. Being on stage has done me a lot of good. It took me a long time—I used to kind of hide in the back. Even though you’re shy, there’s this thing in you that wants to get up there. I remember being six years old and getting up at a party and singing something. This is me, a kid with a bad stutter, but somehow I get up on stage and do this.
In 1996, David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest was a critical and popular success. The new movie The End of The Tour recreates the author’s tour for that book. This NPR interview was originally broadcast March 5, 1997.
“A lot of the impetus for writing “Infinite Jest” was just the fact that I was about 30 and I had a lot of friends who were about 30, and we’d all, you know, been grotesquely over-educated and privileged our whole lives and had better healthcare and more money than our parents did. And we were all extraordinarily sad. I think it has something to do with being raised in an era when really the ultimate value seems to be – I mean a successful life is – let’s see, you make a lot of money and you have a really attractive spouse or you get infamous or famous in some way so that it’s a life where you basically experience as much pleasure as possible, which ends up being sort of empty and low-calorie. But the reason I don’t like talking about it discursively is it sounds very banal and cliche, you know, when you say it out loud that way. Believe it or not this was – this came as something of an epiphany to us at around age 30, sitting around, talking about why on earth we were so miserable when we’d been so lucky.”
This fascinating 1958 documentary titled “How Film Is Made”, documents the production process and birth of photographic and cinematic film, was initially uncovered as part of a heritage in the Netherlands. Although its exact source and purpose are as of yet still unknown, it may have been an instructional film for new employees at Kodak’s factories world wide, and was probably used as a promotional film for the general public as well. It’ll make you long for the days when you snapped a photo and had to send it away and wait a week to get back.
After Chelsea’s last match of the season, Josh Turnbull, a little boy takes a soccer ball and runs as fast as he can towards the goal. When the crowd notices him, they start to cheer him on as if it’s championship match. Nice one.
U2 has opted to cancel its planned concert Saturday in Paris following Friday’s terrorist attacks and state of emergency.
U2 and Live Nation, along with HBO who were due to live broadcast the Saturday concert, are fully resolved to go ahead with this show at an appropriate time.
Speaking from Paris the band said on their website:
“We watched in disbelief and shock at the unfolding events in Paris and our hearts go out to all the victims and their families across the city tonight.
We are devastated at the loss of life at the Eagles of Death Metal concert and our thoughts and prayers are with the band and their fans.
And we hope and pray that all of our fans in Paris are safe.”
This is part 39 of an ongoing series where the kind folk of the music business reveal their favourite album of all time.
Ask people in the music industry the seemingly simple and straightforward question, “What is your favourite album of all time?” and you’ll find that it’s not always easy. After all, my industry peers listen to hundreds of albums a month – thousands of songs during that time. Because the question isn’t the best album of all time or the one that’s made them the most money in sales, or the most clicked-on review, but the one release they personally can’t live without, that one title they have two copies of in several formats, in case one breaks. It’s also about that album that for them has the best back stories and the one that has the most meaning in their lives.
Anand Harsh, The Untz Van Morrison, A Period of Transition This vinyl lives on my turntable. Beer spattered, and scratched all to hell, the thing barely plays anymore, but “The Eternal Kansas City” blares just as brightly as it ever has with the full chorus, blustery horns, and Van Morrison’s shredded vocal nodes. This is the late-night sing-a-long in my house when everyone is long gone and only the bleary old drunks like myself remain.
Aaron Z. Lee, Graphic Artist at the Lifestyles Center, Adjunct Professor of Illustration & Graphic Novel The Faint, Wet From Birth It came out the fall of my first semester of college and it had a great combination of strings, electronic beats and punk attitude. It’s been a pleasure to listen to it around October and it’s the perfect autumn/Halloween album.
Joe Bucciero, AdHoc Gareth Williams & Mary Currie, Flaming Tunes Sensitive, weird, makes aural-contextual sense alongside the best of Rough Trade, Xpressway, and Siltbreeze but ultimately resists proper analogy. Try hearing this when you’re in high school, steeped only in then-contemporary indie rock and its Our Band Could Be Your Life forebears, and ever looking back.
Beth Blenz-Clucas, Sugar Mountain PR Carole King, Tapestry It’s the very first LP I ever purchased. Carole’s album had been out for a few years before I discovered it, but tracks from “Tapestry” continued to get play on the FM stations in Chicago, where I grew up. I was just emerging from a childhood of piano lessons and the sappiest of ’60s pop music, as well as my grandmother’s eclectic collection of albums (everything from Sergio Mendes Brazil ’66 to Sinatra). She let me pop LPs into her wood-paneled hi-fi, and it felt good. But Carole King offered something entirely different. When I first heard the entire album at a friend’s house, I knew I had to own it. I showed up at my local record store, handed it over a wad of babysitting dollars, and marched it right home to play each side over and over and over again on my portable record player. I was joining the 25 million-plus people who were listening and loving those songs during that decade. Much later, I discovered the huge impact of Carole King on popular music, but on that first day, it was all about discovering songwriting. Underlying all of these songs was a sense that women could truly do and think anything. That was big stuff in the 1970s.
Bob Waters, Program Director & Morning Show Host, WTPA FM, Harrisburg, PA XTC, English Settlement Growing up in Reagan’s America (in what was already a conservative part of the country), I was surrounded by conformity and right-wing traditionalism. I was starting to form my own ideas and ideals and values, which were far different from those I’d been inundated with. English Settlement was like a liberal manifesto. It made my soul smile. It was, in every note, every moment, every way possible, liberating.
Eric: I was going to start this interview off by telling you Lee Harvey Osmond’s bio, aka Tom Wilson aka One of Three Rodeo Kings aka that large, melodic growling man from the former Junkhouse has a new record. This record is called “Beautiful Scars,” as in: “Man, that scar is beautiful,” or “She has a beautiful scar right here…” or “My scar is beautiful. It reminds me of that time I didn’t die.” And it goes on. And it’s a great bio. But when I was growing up, Junkhouse was probably one of the most intimidating bands I’ve ever seen because if you know what Tom Wilson looks like, you know exactly what I’m talking about. But if you’ve ever spoken with Tom Wilson, he’s like a Caramilk bar, hard on the outside, and a real softie inside. Tom: Awe baby, I’m one sweet filling. Eric: What makes you decide to put a Lee record out, as opposed to calling up Colin Linden (along with Stephen Fearing who make up Blackie And The Rodeo Kings) and everybody and getting that band back together. Or Junkhouse? Or putting it under your own name. How do you decided when you’re writing where it’s going to go? Tom: I think I decided around the age four that I wanted to be an artist of some kind. I didn’t know what that meant and I didn’t want let the world to tell me what that meant. But the one thing I did understand about being an artist, even at the age of four, was that it wasn’t something that you do so that you could sit around waiting for other people to tell you what to do. I guess I had some…I guess I had some authority issues at the age four. So now I’m like 56, so you can imagine the authority issues I have now. Eric: It must go deep. Tom: Yeah, basically being an artist is the ability to be able to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it. Like the fact we put Lee Harvey Osmond together about six years ago with members of the Cowboys Junkies, and the Skydiggers, and the Sadies, and Hoxy Workman, and Oh Susanna, and Brent Titcomb, and members of Junkhouse. That was just like, a bunch of people getting together who are able to treat music and play music without ego. So that’s actually how I end up making Lee Harvey Osmond records is being able to surround myself with people who can play music without showing off.
Eric: The brand new album is called Beautiful Scars. Your lack of respect towards authority, How deep does the pain get? How deep does the anger get? How deep does the disrespectfulness get? Because sometimes you have to go through the pain in order to get to the other side. Tom: Wow Eric, you know what, that’s a brilliant question. I don’t know how old you are Eric… Eric: I’m 45 and I probably have the exact same authority issues as you do. I just choose to go in another direction because I can’t play an instrument and kick out the jams like you can. But I can hang out with people like you until you tell me to go home and live through you a bit by doing publicity and spreading the word. Tom: Here’s the deal. When you get into your 50s, you actually become the man that you always wanted to be. We fight throughout our lives to kind of stand up to other people’s levels of bars, you know what I mean. We try to reach other people’s bars, which is unfair. If we’re able to learn we can only be ourselves, we’d probably have a really happy first 50 years of our life. Instead of landing in your 50 and actually after having to have gone through, you know, drug addictions, and divorces, and a long 40 years on the road, you realize that you can only be yourself. And once I realized that I’m about the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. Eric: And when did you realize that? Tom: I realized that in the last four years or so. Eric: What made you realize that? Tom: It was the fact I actually looked in the mirror and my face was actually starting to come into place. It’s almost–it’s almost like we morph over our lives. We look at ourselves in our teens and we just looked fucked up right. You know what I mean, we got pimples and we got–our eyes aren’t quite right with our face. And that kind of thing, we’ve got weird hair growing on our faces. By the time we get into–by the time we get into our fifties our face almost looks like it’s coming into place. It almost looks like our eyes, and mouths…It’s like we actually become handsome after 50 years. The same thing is going on inside and the thing we carry with us is our beautiful scars. Beautiful scars is being able to own what has hurt us and not have to hold it up as an example. We don’t have to cross and crucify, we don’t have to hang it or burn it anymore in public. We can actually live with it inside of us and it’s a part of us now.
Eric: Tell me about the song Bottom of Our Love. There has to be a story behind it. Tom: It’s a song I wrote for Miriam Toews, the author. I dedicated it to my friend Gary. He put on a Speedo bathing suit and got a pistol and robbed a Royal Bank back in the late 70s. And my advice was that you shouldn’t really rob banks in Speedo bathing suits, it never works. The other thing is that, it’s about a little bar that I used to play as a teenager that he used to hang out in. So, Bottom of Our Love, it’s a factious disaster. Eric: If Canada ever has a music Mount Rushmore, you would have all four faces. I would put you right there without anyone else for each of the bands you’re in. Tom: Yeah, well my head is so big already. I found out I was adopted a couple of years ago. So I grew up thinking I was like an Irish guy, my whole life. Ends up, I end up being a Mohawk. I’ve been through, once again, 53 years of thinking I was one person and I end up being this other guy. So you know… Eric: It’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore, Tom Wilson. Tom: It’s hard to know, isn’t it?
Forty years ago, over the course of 15 minutes on a rainy November night in London’s Charing Cross Road, four obstreperous youths with spiky haircuts and their famously troublemaking manager changed Western culture forever. Danny Kleinman, guitarist of the now defunct Rock & Roll band Bazooka Joe, tells the story of the first Sex Pistols gig.
Sony has announced that it will stop selling Betamax tapes in March 2016 – over forty years after the ill-fated video format was first launched and 13 years after the company last made a player.
“Sony will end the shipment of Betamax video cassettes and micro MV cassettes in March 2016,” the company said in a Japanese-language statement on its website.
“As a result, the recording media of the Betamax format in our company, and shipping of the recording medium of the micro MV format, will come to an end.”
Sony launched Betamax in 1975, a year before JVC’s rival the VHS cassette.
