The Creation Of Music - Depends On The Venue

Click on the post title, and you will be transported to www.davidbyrne.com, where you will find an excellent entry in his on-line Journals entitled "Valentine's Day." But the post is not about the greeting-card holiday.

Rather, it's about a talk the singer/songwriter/artist/all-around intriguing guy gave called "Creation In Reverse", a theory about music, delivered at a recent conference in California called TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design). His thesis: the creation of music is as dependent on the venue in which it is heard as much as any other internal/external forces at work.

As someone who has dabbled in writing music for over twenty years, I found it fascinating, both as an idea as well as a thumbnail history of the evolution of music. Check it out!

Joe Walsh Vs Joe Walsh

Guitar maestro and talented singer/songwriter Joe Walsh issues the old cease-and-desist to a politico candidate in Illinois who happens to share his name. And who is illegally utilizing one of Joe's tunes as a campaign ditty.

It's funny to me that this kind of thing keeps happening over the years - Reagan using Springsteen, Tom Petty and Jackson Browne getting co-opted. Is it me, or are the offenders mainly conservative/Republicans?

In any case, life's been good to musician Joe Walsh and he's refusing to walk away, calling time out, becoming the bomber; stealing songs may be okay in Illinois, but it's not the Rocky Mountain way! What is this candidate Joe Walsh doing, living a life of illusion?

At a James Gang reunion show I saw a couple of summers ago, Joe mused on running for President. Why not a rock star musician in office? As former Texas gubernatorial candidate and singer/songwriter/author Kinky Friedman has famously said, "How hard can it be?"

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2010/01/joe-walsh-vs-joe-walsh-the-rock-star-wrestles-with-a-tea-party-copyright-infringer.html

The Flaming Lips at Red Rocks

I've always had a soft spot for The Flaming Lips. They hail from Oklahoma City (my hometown), and I'm just a couple of years older than lead Lip Wayne Coyne. While I was growing up on the west side suburbs, Wayne and his family were living around the NW 10th and Pennslyvania area of OKC. And while I was learning to play guitar around the age of 13, just a couple of years later, Wayne and his brothers were doing the same thing.

But, unlike nearly all the wanna-be musicians I knew (including me), Wayne stuck to his dream of becoming a rock star. It took him a while - something like fifteen years of hard work, no money, keeping that assistant manager's job at Long John Silver's for a long time - but the release of "The Soft Bulletin" and "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots" turned The Flaming Lips into bona-fide international rock stars.

Their sound is a cool mashup of bubblegum, heavy metal, electro-pop, sixties outer space soundtracks and lounge-core crooning. But the songs are incisive, artful, painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny - usually all in the same tune. Lead singer Wayne Coyne's wavering relationship to the melodies anchors the band's futuristic, often pounding sound with a coy, frail humanity.

(Fight Test, All We Have Is Now, Race For The Prize, A Spoonful Weighs A Ton, Do You Realize? - all great songs that belong in some sort of songwriter's hall of fame!)

Sunday's show at the legendary Red Rocks Ampitheater was a tightly focused sensory onslaught that touched on all the Lips' musical strengths, from clanging pop metal to spacey instrumentals to unabashedly heartfelt sing-alongs. Accompanying the music was their trademark stage/light show, complete with tons of confetti, bullhorns spewing smoke, giant balloons, the human hamster ball and the usual brace of completely amateur, crazily costumed stage dancers.

You can check out multiple videos shot from the audience on You Tube. But better yet, take in a show - there is nothing out there like a Flaming Lips concert.

(I took some photos - a few of them are at the top - but gave up after a while and just enjoyed the circus! A more in depth review from yours truly is available here: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll)