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Assembly of Dust

Bob Dylan :: Bringing It All Back Home

I watched Part 2 of Bob Dylan's No Direction Home again last night - if you haven't seen it, get it. It's required viewing for anyone intrigued by the man who has eluded explanation and constantly shifted his style over the years.

I was drawn to the album "Bringing it All Back Home" as yet another critical turning point for Dylan-land. Just when people started figuring him out as an acoustic folk singer, he goes electric and starts ripping up the rock and the roll.

...And then, just when you think he's gone in one direction he closes the album out with a topical-lyrical-genius suite of solo acoustic songs that remind you of the historic roots from which he came yet are of such a powerful and heavy churning gurth that makes your head shake in disbelief at the pure spectrum of available words and ideas that were flowing through this man.

Ending with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - just to fuck with everyone...

Turning points, moments in time, historic segues and places you can point to which unlock a sense of transition and understanding - yeah, Dylan had a ton of 'em and today this one is my favorite...

The Evolution of Dance

a fun 6 minutes...

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Web Rhapsody

Rhapsody has been an incredible web innovation over the last few years. A music discovery and recommendation tool, I've literally found hundreds of bands that I otherwise wouldn't have known about. I appreciate the instant gratification of thinking about a song and then being able to play it within seconds. I also appreciate the fact that for the price of 1 CD a month, I can listen to thousands. Of course this causes some worry about the financial ramifications of the music industry, but since Clive is so excited about units, we shouldn't have to worry.

If you haven't seen the new web version of Rhapsody yet, check it out:

Bob Dylan

Bob Marley

Bob Hope

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"Units"

Dave McGurgan just nailed it.

Yes, it's true. I have a guilty pleasure and it's American Idol. I started watching a few years ago. I watched it for the "marketing tips." How genius is it to have a show where the winners gets signed to your record label. Suddenly you've got a built in audience of 50 million who might buy the album, go see the tour or at least watch the ads and possibly buy the products for the sponsors. It's the ultimate in American Commercialism and Voyerism all wrapped up into one.
"Real" americans competing on 'talent' and giving all of us the chance to 'vote'. Pfft. I really can't believe I'm writing this, but whatever...

Of course the whole thing is skewed and meaningless, but it's fun to watch nonetheless.

Last night they brought out music mogul Clive Davis to accept an award for producing the American Idol albums which sold 33 million 'units'. Indeed, he kept congratulating himself and the show for being a savior of pop music and trumpetted the industry which is clearly gasping for air. If the record business is relying upon a 'reality' tv show to help sell albums then something is indeed seriously wrong.

The irony of the whole thing is in the language used. No one, ever, anywhere, at any time, except for record label execs, uses the word "units" to describe an album. He wasn't talking to us (the fans), he was talking to his peers, in the bubble of the system which isn't known and loved and has crowed him the king. He deserves every bit of praise with that award.

If we were ever looking for a "sharp jumping" moment for the record industry, last night may have been it.

Besides, isn't the album for the most part a dying breed as the digital services are set to splice up the songs and give people the ultimate personalized sampler of the future...

Two things are consistent about the show:
1) Not everyone is good -- Simon Cowell actually knows what he's talking about.
2) Taylor Hicks is the real deal - download these songs.

yeah yeah, i know... the marketing tips...

LinkedIn vs. Friendster

I accept every LinkedIn invitation I get (so long as I actually know the person).

I immediately delete every Friendster and MySpace friend invitation I get.

Why?

I think my impulse reaction has evolved from the fact that LinkedIn is actually providing a service, while having more friends on Friendster and MySpace isn't going to do anything more than take up more time.

More connections on LinkedIn may actually provide a benefit for me and my colleagues (that's business friends to you and me).

I think this is what the next generation of all this "social media" stuff is going to be all about.

Actually providing a resource instead of just being all about flirting.

Don't get me wrong, it's fun to flirt; but with limited time and only so many hours in the day, and my inbox already overstuffed with way too much sp*m (this week all with the subject line "the ccred"), at a certain point you have to eventualy gravitate away from things that are just fun to flip through - like photos of your friends' friends' friend and move more towards things which provide an added benefit resource or service to your life.

We'll see...

A.J. Croce & Michael Bizar

In LA for the day I popped over to Largo to see AJ Croce and Michael Bizar last night. AJ has a new album out and recently contacted us about helping to promote it. Wanting to practice what I preach, it felt like a great opportunity to, yup, go see live music.

Walking into the dark and quiet, sit-down venue I was immediately struck by the attentiveness of the audience. This wasn't your typical stereotyped LA vibe-scene. (Cell phone policy is strictly enforced - hurray!) Best of all - people were actually genuinely interested in hearing the music, which completely shifted the mood of the room towards one of respect and positive energy for the artists and their art. AJ and Michael were already on stage a few songs into their set, and it wasn't long before I was captivated by the interplay between the musicians and the magic they were creating together.

AJ is the son of Jim Croce (Bad Bad Leroy Brown, or my favorite - Operator). Clearly a virtuoso piano player (and damn good guitarist for only a few years on the axe), AJ emanates 'artist' from head to toe, inside and out as he showed off his talent in a way that wasn't pushy or flamboyant, but merely as a treat to everyone in the room, himself included. Taking requests from the audience for any of his own songs plus +insert artist here+ ... could it be that AJ knows EVERY song by EVERY artist? We were truly in awe.

Michael played along on guitar for a majority of the songs, adding layers and riffs to heighten the mood and bring out more character as an ensemble. Like myself, Michael grew up north of Chicago and, unlike myself, played in the band Citrus for many years before moving out to California where he hooked up with AJ. SFers might know Michael from his weekly residence as the Boom Boom Room as Bizar Bazaar.

Michael rips on guitar - and while this acoustic set-up didn't really give him the room to stretch into the escape velocity mind bending opportunities of explosion rock I've come to know and love from him, it did give me a great chance to appreciate his skill and passion of his instrument of choice. It was sweet.

Check out AJ's new album Cantos, it's really good and gives you a real nice feel for the "organic" nature of this man with a solid past and bright future. Plus it's got "Maybe I'm Amazed" on it, which is just sick.

Of course it's all about the LIVE experience.

p.s. As pictured below, Canters Bakery was a solid late night treat.

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Tea Leaf Green Movie

Justin Kreutzmann (yup), is going to Colorado this week to film Tea Leaf Green's Friday show at the Fox Theatre for a movie.

Check out Justin's blog at:
http://rockandreel.blogspot.com/2006/05/tea-leaf-green.html

What's an iPod?

"What's an iPod?"

(overheard at a recent family function from a wonderfully curious wise elder relative)

Now answer the question without using any words that this person also wouldn't understand (i.e. MP3)

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Ran outta 3s

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Marin

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Gorgeous day in the bay

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Kaboom!!!

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Kaboom!!!

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Construction outside my office
getting it done!

BaseCamp

There's a lot to keep track of these days. Any business, organization, group, hobby or project needs a way to manage the various lists and correspondances which flow in and out of the day.

For years I've been managing my product development using a combination of Outlook, Excel, and Word. I dabbled in MS Project once but it took forever to learn and was way beyond my needs in terms of complication. I've continually found myself re-typing priorty lists and relying on email folder to organize myself.

No longer.

Enter BaseCamp - developed by the minds at 37Signals.com, BaseCamp is a simple web-based Project Management system which allows you to create a Project, To-Do Lists, Set Milestones, Upload Files, "Writeboards" (which are shared documents), invite other people to view and collaborative and quickly get a glimpse of the scope of the work that lays ahead of you (and beyond you once you've checked it off).

I've been test running it for the last week and am extremely impressed with the interface, simplicity and flexibility it provides. Of course there could be a few more layers, like comments for specific To-Do items and additional associations/fields here and there (apparently available in the more expensive package), but the simpleness of it lends itself very well to maximum use. It's all Web 2.0 Ajax i-fied, making adding items an instant breeze and even more fulfilling to check-off a to-do list item and watch it magically vanish before your very eyes without the page reloading.

I've started to think about how this can apply to any organization which has Projects they need to manage between multiple people. A band, for instance, could add a Project for their Tour. Each show could be a Milestone since it's on a specific date. Each show has a specific set of To-Do items like Contract, Advance, Publicity and Promotion which all have to get done by different people. Suddenly you've got different people using a centralized system to communicate with each other and watch the progress of your project, something everyone can get behind.

It's free for 1 project with limited access. Check it out and let me know if it works for you. I'm already thinking about ways we can integrate the JamBase tour date database with this using their open API. Geeky good.

5.8.77

29 years ago today, The Grateful Dead played a show at Barton Hall at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

Long debated as one of their greatest shows ever, there's no denying that the second set opens with one of the most anthemic 25 minutes of music that would stur any restless soul.

Stream the show here

5.8.77 Barton Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
I: Minglewood Blues, Loser, El Paso, They Love Each Other, Jack Straw, Deal, Lazy Lightning-> Supplication, Brown Eyed Women, Mama Tried, Row Jimmy, Dancin' In The Streets

II: Scarlet Begonias-> Fire On The Mountain, Estimated Prophet, Saint Stephen-> Not Fade Away-> Saint Stephen-> Morning Dew

E: One More Saturday Night

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Wind Power on the 580

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Stuck in traffic while BART rolls free

The Price of Gas

zFacts.com has a wealth of information for those of us wondering, "Why are gas prices so high, and even more importantly, why are oil companies making even more PROFITS?!?!"

FeedBurner - RSS Stats, The Next Generation

RSS could be the great savior of the web.

For those of you who don't know, RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and is a process by which Blogs and Websites can "Syndicate" their content simply. Simple enough? Yes, it is.

Essentially, any website that publishes news or articles or information in any kind of standard format can publish an RSS Feed, which is a machine readable file (typically in XML format) that someone with a News Reader can "subscribe" to and get updated whenever there is something new.

Think of a newsletter that instead of you sending to your subscribers you simply put on the shelf and update the post-it note on your wall to say that there's a new issue. Everyone's Newsreader is set to check for new items for their subscriptions every so often so if there's something new, they'll get it without you having to send it to them.

The brilliance of RSS really lies in the fact that you're actually "subscribing" to something you want to read. It's "pull" not "push" and that all really means one HUGE thing: no spam.

The beauty and speed of the Blog revolution is that most blog sites have built in RSS feed capabilities. Since blogs are essentially item-by-item journal entries they make for a perfect application of RSS.

The only real downfall of RSS to date is that it takes a little bit of knowledge to get up and running and those who publish RSS are left in a bit of the dark about usage. Since it's not a website that someone visits you often don't know how many people are reading your stuff, if any, and when someone views yours RSS file directly they are typically presented with a page of code that would make any newbie motivated subscriber potentially turn away in confusion if they didn't already 'get it'.

Enter FeedBurner - a simply concept to take RSS feeds and make them human readable, trackable and interactive. Their website is easy to use and understand, quick to get started and fun to play with so it motivates a blogger to convert all of their RSS feeds to FeedBurner feeds. Feedburner has been around for a couple of years but I've finally gotten the full tour and am incresingly impressed with their simple approach to a complicated problem. As a result I've updated the feed for this blog to be the more attractive: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Gadielcom.

The benefits to the reader are immediate. Instead of an XML file, they get a nicely readable page with instructions for downloading a News Reader and Subscribing. For the blogger, they get knowledge of usage and tools for promotion.

The web is an incredible intelligent place, but sometimes the weakness can be that those without PHDs don't have the time or skill to put sophisticated webpages together. It's pieces of software like FeedBurner that actually make it easier to use and will motivate more people to get involved in a more elevated way. Cheers.