ACRID KVETCHES, MY FIRST VISIONARY DREAM, and THE SONG OF JULIAN McCRAE REVELL
You know, I could totally bitch about how today went.

I've been accumulating gloom points for so damned long now that no one I know (including you, yeah I know I know) would bat a lash at the idea of another acrid kvetch filling this space, especially considering I got no sleep last night & tried in vain to be coherent for a couple of hours before giving up the ghost and passing out early this afternoon, only to wake up an hour or so ago. This would, in most cases, be the foundation of a real bad day. Nothing got done, pah.

But nope. Wednesday morning at about 3:45, Patsy Grace went into labor. (Patsy's a pretty damned good songwriter-artist-painter-den-mother herself, married to Grey Revell, just released her first CD Name Her Lucky, good timing too because well, nowadays she's kind of preoccupied with other way more important things.) I got to the birthing center on West 14th Street, and it was a scene right out of a dream I had a few weeks ago.

There were maybe eight or ten of us who got there to watch the midwives going through their paces in this muted-light very warm-feeling place. Patsy was on the floor beside the bed in one room, with someone rubbing her back. I had brought my guitar, and I played a few songs, as did Brer Brian and Lach and Sanjay and Kirsten Williams (who got roped - okay, by me - into coming at kind of the last minute, being only kind of an acquaintance of Patsy and Grey, and she wound up being as active as any non-midwife there) all played and Jon Berger read a couple of poems, and we stayed all night, even after they threw all the boys out of the room and we went out to the waiting room and kept Grey company and played cards until the sun came up, breaking for errands and cheerleading.

About 8:00 this morning, Patsy got too tired to continue, and the contractions wound up not doing any good anymore. So we bundled her up (she really tried to walk, which at that point wasn't happening) and got her to the hospital, where they spirited her upstairs and filled her with the drugs she was screaming for all night.

And at 10:15, after thirty-one and a half hours of labor, Julian McCrae Revell (7 lbs. even, according to my sources) was born. As of this evening, everyone is exhausted but doing fine.

Welcome to Earth, little fella.

A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR:
TV-HUNGRY DANCE FREAKS WANTED!

Dave of Dave's Place should be more of an institution than he is.

His cable access show (Fridays on Manhattan Cable 57) is a showcase-cum-smorgasbord of talent, kind of like those cheesy '70s shows where they'd have some bad comedy sketches and then come out of a commercial and the host would introduce a band which is clearly playing in some other studio, on tape, possibly in another continent, to the tech guy, and there's no life in the performances. In fact, those old shows maybe turned me off of a ton of bands I might have liked had I heard them somewhere else first (although maybe not - we'd be talking about people like Gilbert O'Sullivan, Andy Kim and, tshah, how could I forget, the Starland Vocal Band, but still).

Dave's Place, the show, is like those boring studio pieces of old except eighteen miles from boring. Instead of an audience, you've got Dave (his last name's a secret, so don't tell anyone), the biggest and peppiest booster of independent music in town, running between the three cameras in the studio and tripping on the wires and telling corny jokes in between the songs the bands play. It's great, it's live, it's often a total mess, sure, but it's pretty damned inspired given what's there to work with, and he's been at it for seven-plus years, and it's kind of his life's work. (It's worth it just to watch the crazy backdrops he puts in bluescreen behind the acts - Mayan temples, then bad supernova animation, then industrial footage of junkyards, then moonscape, then some ultracloseup of someone's foot in 20-foot-tall technicolor, every ten seconds you'll go... ooooooh...)

The reason I'm bringing all this up (I told the people on my mailing list, but I figured it merited mention here too) is I and my lovely band will featured on it this Friday at 8:30, so if you're near the Columbus Circle area on Friday Night and would like to be on TV in a non-threatening and way fun environment, we're going to be hosting a dance party, where we'll be throwing the studio open and we'll be playing our jumpy songs and y'all can, well, jump to 'em. The show ends at 9, so I suspect we'll retire to some local watering hole (or dance hall) to wring out any remaining ya-yas and talk about what the hell just happened.

Conversely, if you're in a place where you can get Manhattan Cable, tune in at 8:30 to see a half hour of said hijinks, and please, call in during the show and harass us and tell the dancers how sexy they look.

Do you want in on this?

SUNDAY WITH STEVE (& RUSSELL) (& JULIA)
Okay, two quick thoughts about the Oscars last night.

1. Steve Martin really ought to become the permanent host of the show. Billy Crystal is fine and all, but Steve's understanding of the whole Hollywood phoniness-into-art culture ethic is molecular, and with humor that dry, everyone wins.

His joke about Ellen Burstyn gaining 30 pounds and aging 30 years for her role ("and Russell Crowe still hit on her!"), and Russell's horrified I'ma-kick-your-ass reaction, won me over instantly, and his banter with Julia Roberts throughout the show was (dare I use this word about an Oscar telecast?) entertaining.

And really. Who else would and/or could do it? Robin Williams? Jay Leno? Think about this, kids. Let Steve do it for a couple of years until someone ... equally appropriate for the job comes along.

You Academy pointy-heads who read this weblog regularly (I know who you are), ignore this voice of reason at your peril.

2. I keep trying to hate Julia Roberts. There's just something about the roles she's taken, how she comports herself, that row of white mosaic tiles in her mouth, that keeps making me want to blow her off completely and not like her, or the movies she's in.

But I can't help it. There's a charm to her I just can't deny. And last night, she was able to take a joke or three (cf. Mr. Crowe, above), and her acceptance speech was really cute, although how she could have been so surprised by what everyone I heard who had an opinion on such things thought of as a de facto coronation for her is a bit beyond me.

Maybe I'll start seeing movies again. Maybe not. We'll see.

THE TYRANNY OF STUFF KEEPS A-DRAGGIN' ME BACK

So I must tell you... last night I went to this charming Oscar Party and had a little revelation.

I now have a tangible description of what success means to me.

This 5th floor studio apartment where the party was (and now I've been in a few really nice places in this town, and man oh man, are they ever schweet) was absolutely stunning. Curved walls, exposed brick, a kitchen you could host a cooking show in, a bathroom bigger than my apartment (the bathtub held 5 comfortably, as did the shower, two steel sinks, huge mirrors everywhere...) a view of the golden lights of Jersey across the bay, a walk-through closet that looked like a bowling alley with coats down one side, and a living room you could put bleachers and basketball nets in.

You know, my whole life I think I've been pretty good about not excessively turning my attentions to earthly and material desires. But you know, if I had a place like that to come home to, I think I'd feel pretty good about my station in life.

Maybe not. See, such a living arrangement is actually attainable. It just takes time, and work, and a few breaks. I can get there from here.

I'M JUST GLAD THERE WERE NO SERIOUS INJURIES
When I first started playing my little geetar, back in oh, '92 I guess, back in the magical days (you remember, don't you?) when Bush was President and the Russians were our main diplomatic enemies and the ozone layer was only getting bigger and computers were becoming obsolete faster than they could be built and everyone was complaining about the scary psychopaths in our schools (so, y'know, nothing like today), I was known a little bit in the Toronto open mike scene as "The guy who broke strings."

People would take pools as to how many times in a two-song open mike set I'd snap the strings on my little $100 plywood Hondo guitar with the action you could drive under and a fretboard that looked like a slalom course. I was new to playing, and I just didn't know better. I'd saw away at the front of the thing like it was some kind of magic trick, while screaming my head off banshee-like. It can't have been pretty.

And I didn't really mind because hey, it was cool to have any reputation, even a bad one, and I was just learning anyways.

Well, fast forward to today. I'm allegedly good now. I've got a couple of records out, I've toured all over the place, done all the requisite rock star crap - stalkers, groupies, private jets, free drugs, abusive interviews, dating Winona Ryder, you know, I haven't missed anything on the great checklist. I even learned how to play the guitar, even.

(It's easy. No, really.)

So last night, the show was fantastic. Great room in South Jersey full of enthusiastic fans of independent music, a couple hundred people who've never heard me before, and I played pretty good, except that I broke two strings in a set. It was close to the end, which was enough incentive to at least poll the audience as to whether I should keep going or give up (I figured I could play "Tiptoe Thru The Tulips" and cut my losses if things got too ugly).

But the strings I actually did break were the two in the middle, which made it really hard to continue. There's not much you can do when the guitar is set up like that. (I guess I could have played some Presidents of the United States of America songs or something.)

I do gotta learn how to play those theaters, though. Jumping Elvis in the Jungle Room, that was fun. This nightclub bidness ain't got nothin on them thar big rooms. There's plenty of incentive to get back into those parties, that's for sure.

Now all I gotta do is not starve to death before I can make a living out of it.

SO JUST WHO ARE THESE EXTREMELY FAMOUS PEOPLE?
After the crap of the last few weeks, this was most welcome: Mary managed to procure a show for me in Camden, New Jersey this Friday, March 23rd opening for a pretty damned good ska-funk-roots-dance band called Entrain. Have you heard of these cats?

Now, I'd never heard of Entrain before yesterday, but apparently they're pretty popular, one of those big college bands the kids seem to like, which leads me to something I've been thinking about.

I used to pride myself on knowing everything meaningful there was to know about modern indie music. I worked hard, I studied the trades, I went out every night, I listened to Brave New Waves and Nightlines (no link - my favorite radio show of all time, and no link! Gah!) as well as the three Toronto College Stations (CIUT, CKLN and CHRY) whenever I could ... I really got into the whole scene, the whole esthetic, and I loved it. I loved listening to new bands, and even when the music started to go sour in my mind (possibly just from overexposure), it was still real cool to go out and see bands, be part of the culture, all that altruistic claptrap, it actually worked that way in my head.

To this day (just as a by way of comparison), I see very few movies. I figure, I'd rather go see some live music. I just never get around to catching a flick (which makes me an ignorant hoot at Oscar Parties), but bands just draw me in.

Anyway, as Mary was describing the gig on Friday to me, she asked me if I knew who they were, and I said no, and she was all, "Well of course you don't know them - you only know old pop acts and New York songwriters."

Ouch. Right in the place where my geek-pride used to be.

See, I am totally that guy from High Fidelity. When that book came out, I got (no exaggeration) four copies of it that Christmas.

But it's true. I lost that I-know-everything edge somewhere in the last few years, and not (I don't think) because the music world got too big and fragmented. I just think I had to shut down my input level so I could actually start making music myself, and appreciating what I'd already heard more fully.

I love how even the most famous and accomplished awtists swear and gripe that their minds are completely open, and they love and respect all music equally. That's bullshit. They may have a more open mind than your average fratboy or boomer, but how can you take in that much stimulus without developing an opinion? I find that baffling. And when pressed, I've never seen someone actually stick to that anyway. Everyone's a snob. Or should be.

Me, I found I loved 60's punk bands, a lot of the late 70's power pop and reggae stuff, rockabilly and old country and western, and anything I felt had "soul," the definition of which has varied over the years but can certainly trace its roots back to the Stax-Volt era and the golden age of Sun Records.

All of these kinds of musics, and many more I dig (or do when I hear them) are very definitely not going too far out of style. So there's hope. But there's not much of it on the radio these days. The openly abusive macho posturing and pot-addled noodling of most of what I've heard leaves me nauseous and scared. So I retreat back into the plentiful pool of music that is all around me.

But I feel bad not knowing what else is out there. There are a million Entrains out there, bands that are pretty damned good but you'd never know unless you hear about them from someone who knows.

So here's my point: if you find someone you like, whether it's a band or an artist or a hot dog vendor or whatever, tell somebody. If you don't speak up, then the stranglehold that the major corporate jackasses have on all of us only gets tighter.

Tell somebody about a band you like. Maybe they'll tell somebody, and they'll tell somebody, and that band can then support itself and make better music for more people, which is how it's supposed to go.

Tell someone when you got good service at some store. Tell somebody if news crosses your path that needs to be passed on. Tell somebody if some artist made something that knocked you on your ass. Tell somebody if you've come across a good idea. A constructive piece of thought, once spread around and acted upon, is the only hope the human race has for getting out of the shit we're in.

Tell somebody when you find something that's moved you. The world needs a good moving, and that ole mainstream culture just ain't cutting it these days.

Tell somebody. Tell somebody. Tell somebody.

(By the way, if you're making the movie of my life, John Cusack would be a fine choice to play me, y'know, just -- putting that out there.)

MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS REWARDS
You know, it's still weird to come back to New York from Toronto and think, ah, good, now I'm home. I lived in that damned town for -- well, basically my whole life up until the end of last year, and while a couple of things were in fact different (and can I get a hell yeah for that), it's really not home anymore.

But oh, it was nice to see a lot of those people. I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that although I have kind of marginalized a lot of that time in my head (I've had to in order to get on with things here), there were a few people there who were important to me, and who I still care about. I miss going to the Cameron on Sunday nights and listening to Kevin Quain play a three song set of his amazing torch songs that lasts a full hour. I miss all-day brunching at Sneaky Dee's (or Kos if I had somewhere to be that day). I love the quiet walks through Kensington Market at 3 in the morning, listening to the anarcho-punk bike courier parties going on in the houses and wondering how many of those people I actually knew once upon a time.

A lot of the things I've had to work to establish in New York were things I had already accomplished, one way or another, in Toronto. Which is something I was able to basically ignore for the last year. Truth is, I owe the place (and, way more to the point, a few of the people in it) a debt of gratitude that I haven't been nearly clear enough in articulating.

YANKEE DOLLA GO VEDDY FAR, CHICO
So I left sweet sunny shirtsleeve Spring weather in New York to climb into a car and go through, of all things, a white-out blizzard in Buffalo (enough with the stereotypes, already!) to get to cold but clear Toronto, which has been fantastic. Unlike the last time I was here, there's actually been a couple of things different now from then (a couple of new clubs, a couple of songwriters that I hadn't met before - you know, signs of growth and stuff.)

Not only have I met everyone I thought I was going to meet, but I've been able to track down all kinds of people I never figured I'd be able to reach on this trip.

And, thanks to the Canadian dollar being at an all-time low, I managed to get a lot of things done with very little money. I got to see Hockey Night In Canada last night at the Horseshoe Tavern (followed of course by the usual St. Paddy's Day bacchanalia, which might not be a reason to live unto itself but is sure a fun way to spend a Saturday night) (and enough with the stereotypes, already!), I've had two great brunches with a million people, gawd, I feel popular or something.

You know, when I'm not in Toronto, I don't miss it at all, despite the fact that I lived my entire life here up till just over a year ago. But coming back is all the your-favorite-old-sweater and old-flame-you-find-you-still-get-along-with analogies, and more.

It's really lovely to be here.

Now I'm going to leave this pay terminal and go walk around on Bloor a little more before my sushi date. Tonight, I'm at the Cameron House and then we get back in the car and this will all be some kind of memory by tomorrow night.

SASKATCHEWAN DREAMIN'
I've just been so overwhelmed of late. I've been real hesitant to talk too much about my neuroses, because talking about them keeps them around, where just getting the hell up out of the muck serves the same purpose.

At least from where I sit, here, you know, in the muck.


When I realized I was going to be leaving Toronto, I was of two minds as to where I was going to go: I could either move to New York and start a band and see how far I could go with the whole rock and roll thing, or I could move to Saskatchewan, drop out of society completely, and write fish-out-of-water semi-allegorical novels for the next 50 years. I figured, I can do that any ole time. Right now, I have to find out how good a songwriter I am. And so I'm here, typing this, as opposed to there, typing something else.

With all that's been going on, I've been thinking about Saskatchewan a lot lately.

I'll see you in Toronto.

TORONTO
The last time I went back to Toronto (okay, the only time I went back), I was expecting some kind of change, at least in perspective. It was about eight months after I left, and I was expecting there to be some kind of sign that leaving there to move to New York was or was not the right thing to do. I had no idea what that would take - I was thinking it might involve an ex-girlfriend, or the club I used to call home, or one of the local papers getting redesigned, or something.

But there was nothing. Everyone I ran into was doing the same thing as when I left, eight months earlier. The Cameron House and Graffiti's were both exactly as I remembered them, down to the same people sitting at the same stools, the same bartender leaning against the same spot on the counter, the same mixed tape playing, even the construction that had been going on at Queen and Spadina was still unfinished.

It was like I had spent a couple of days away, and not eight months. I had no idea I would feel as good about leaving as I did.

Anyway, that was last August, and now it's -- gosh, eight months later. What are the odds of that?

And yeah, I'll be in Toronto this weekend (thanks to Mary, her van and her equally-pressing need for a weekend out of Philadelphia) getting the rest of my stuff and sniffing around for some changes. I'm thinking of maybe getting a brunch together on Sunday. How about Sneaky Dee's, say, noonish?

MORE GOOD NEWS
Oh, and the Auralisland 4th Anniversary Party on Saturday night at the Wrong Way Inn was better than I'd dreamed it could be.

I've never seen the place full before, and I've been there quite a few times. It has a bunch of things going against it: there's nothing to do in there but drink, and you have to drive to get there unless you live in Amityville proper, so it's tough to get non-alcoholics willing to run the DUI gauntlet to come on out most nights.

But now that the place is under new ownership, they've done a bit of remodelling, and I heard talk of installing a cappuccino machine and getting some food in there. That'd get some non-drinkers in there too, which would only help their bottom line. And you know, the place looked and sounded real nice when it was full of screaming music fans.

The party itself was a gas. The music was uniformly strong (I had never heard the Montgomery Cliffs before, and I was pleasantly surprised), Mike Ferrari laid out a white trash buffet (fried chicken, peanut butter & jelly on Wonder Bread, rice krispie squares, crackers & squeeze cheese, and like 8 different kinds of chips, that sort of thing), LT1TV was there taping the whole thing for future broadcast, and the inaugural print issue of Aural Fix came out, and I was in it. Really, how more perfect could the day be?

Oh yeah, I even got to play my stuff in the middle of all this. It was fantastic. I got so many requests I couldn't play them all, I never changed a broken string faster than I did in the middle of my set, and if the show we're putting together on the 31st is half this good, then the New Wrong Way Inn will be a fun place to play for years to come.

KAYCEE'S HOME
If you're at all familiar with her story, you'll understand why I'm so thrilled that this day has arrived.

If not, well, here's the deal. Kaycee Nicole is a 20 year old athlete who has spent the last 7 months undergoing treatment in Kansas for leukemia. She started Living Colours as a way to talk out her fears and deal with the things going on inside her head and outside the hospital. There have been times she's been too weak to write, and times where she's gotten mad and bitter, but mostly she's used her site as a platform for keeping in contact with, and spreading love to, the four corners of the world.

Often graphic, sometimes angry, never less than poetic (and often far, far more), her scary ability to stare into the face of her own mortality and come out beamingly defiant (or at least not completely defeated) has absolutely awed me over the three months or so since I first got to know her.

The scope of her ordeal, and the grace with which she's been able to transcend it more days than not, has been staggering. You think rappers are good at 'keeping it real'? You think your average zillion-dollar-a-year sports phenom has the corner on coming through hard times and ending up on top? You think that just because you're no longer at the brink of whatever cliff you peered over once upon a time, that no one else hurts like you do? Then you probably won't really understand Kaycee's point of view.

I don't know if she's closer to figuring out the meaning of life than any self-described wise ones actually selling their experience out there, but if she wrote a book on what she's learned through this whole episode, I'd buy it in a second.

[I swear to god, if I myself (and literally thousands of other friends of hers) hadn't been watching and pulling for her all this time, I'd be sure there was a chain letter request or something coming at the end of this.]

Anyway. After a intensive (not to mention risky) shot of chemotherapy, she's actually in remission, and this weekend she left the hospital and got on with the beginning of the rest of her life. The world is supposed to be a mean and terrible place where the good guys don't win - these kind of happy developments just don't happen to people I know. Even in the depths of my crappy attitude, a little part of my guts have been just glowing about this.

You know, I don't talk about my friends much here. (That's not necessarily intentional. No attempt has been made to make this page a comprehensive mapping of the inside of my heart. What am I, Proust or something over here?) This space is mostly reserved for personal reflections and the occasional rant, it would seem. But this is truly a special day.

Congratulations, Kaycee, on making it to the front door of the hospital.

Now comes the fun (aka 'difficult') part for you. I (along with the ever-growing legions of admirers you've picked up along the way) am still with you, sweetheart.

I'M FEELING:   gamey
I'm going to Grandma's house, to shower (and play the Auralisland anniversary party tonight). There's been no heat or hot water in the house (one of the downsides to living in a co-op apartment) for a couple of days, so the place has been well-nigh uninhabitable.

Also, well, you should be glad I don't have the Smel-Cam(tm) installed on this page. I don't think sharing with y'all how gamey I feel right now would be prudent. I'd lose what few friends I have left.

I've been feeling the wanderlust recently. This desire to tour is natural, I've been telling myself. My life is a bit of a mess right now, I have no obligations, I'm aware that it's within my means to tour like crazy if I had the kind of effort it requires, it would give me everything I needed, except of course the next few months' rent and this nagging sense of home. Which is, of course, why I'm getting some kind of job where any vacation time won't be forthcoming for months yet. (Q. What am I thinking?)

A. Big picture, dude, big picture. Get the gig, get out of debt, get the next album finished, then you can climb in the car and go.

For what it's worth, though, and right now it's totally worth something, the songs have been coming great. Something about sitting in coffee shops with a notebook and no agenda has really helped things along on that front.

There's some new links on the sidebar, too. While I've been less than amazingly prolific this last month, you ought never to think that you have nothing to read (although I know that the fact that you have nothing to read is exactly what brought you here in the first place). At the risk of sounding like a nut salesman, might I recommend one site a week, just to look at, from the top and the bottom categories, and, and I'll see you in Amityville.

PRESS? PRESS WHAT?
Seems that Mi2N is reprinting my weekly-or-so email missives. This is cool, and they seem like they're a relatively comprehensive site as regards indie rock (and independent music) culture, although it's hard to keep such a huge wellspring of information completely organized, and you could read the same emailer with formatting and whatnot here.

You know, I would have been happy to send them a proper release had I known they were going to print it pretty much verbatim (minus of course the first and last paragraphs, where all the contact info was). I'll make a point of sending them a format they can drag and drop into their pages from here on in.

Still it's sweet of them to notice and care. And I did get an email from them asking for other material, which was neat. (Is this what all that live-and-learn crap is all about? Oh, okay then.) That would be nice. their sister site, Music Dish, has Home Office Records Godhead Linus Gelber on the beat in our scene already, and his pieces are exhaustive and wry, as would befit a Harvard Grad slumming thirty-seven steps below his station in life, here in this cultural bonsai garden of the East Village, all of us artistes and auteurs and mal vivants beautiful, perfect dwarfs.

NEBULA-CRUSHER SEZ: GEMINIS UNITE!
I don't put much stock in horoscopes generally (not that I don't think there's patterns in the universe that might make everyone's lives a little easier if we paid attention to them -- it's more that most psychics are either impossibly clueless or intentionally vague, and I can't tell who isn't. Although I [along with Amber and many other slightly skeptical psycho-agnostic types] completely dig Rob Breszny as a cool writer and a wise and smart guy, I must say), but I just felt like sharing this one (by Benjamin Fasching-Gray, from the as-yet-unwebsited but disconcertingly glossy Shout Magazine):

You used to be strong. You have played marbles with asteroids and comets. You once knocked black dwarf stars together just to feel the gravity waves. You crushed a nebula into a shiny radiation reflector to roast a 45-million-mile-long hot dog. But the counsel of pulsars sentenced you to live on Earth. Your spirit was split up among several thousand people, every one a Gemini. Today all of you live in New York. Get all the carriers of your essence together, and it's possible you could exist again.

Like all horoscopes, fortune cookie messages and guess-your-weight thingies, I don't pretend to understand this, or really think it applies directly. But that doesn't mean it's completely meaningless. It's just that ... well, the Freudian implications of cooking a hot dog that big are a bit ... beyond my comprehension.

DON'T NOBODY KILL LANCE ARTHUR, PLEASE
I can always appreciate a good rant, and this one is frothy and stellar. I wish I had an answer for Lance's hatred of those who abuse their privilege, their baseless assumption that everything and everyone exists to serve them, but really, there is no answer. Not by becoming one of them, not by tearing a strip off of them, not by ignoring them.

The world is a worse place for these dicknoses, and all one can do is be as good as they are bad. That, and maybe let the air out of their tires while they're double parked and getting coffee. (Just a thought.)

Also, I think pissant has two s's.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END
So let's see... Courtney Love's suing her record company because her contract is barbaric and amounts basically to indentured servitude, and she's looking to form a union of recording artists. Um, yeah, it's admirable that she's trying to score a blow for the common good at all, but I'm finding it hard to relate to this on any level that applies to me as an independent performing songwriter.

I know I should, though. Although a union would be welcome, she's not the one to do the uniting. She's got way too many enemies. But in the countersuit, she does have an extremely relevant point:

Love claims major labels, acting together as an illegal trust, force artists to sign unfair contracts that give the labels the upper hand while leaving artists little means by which to collect what they have earned.

Well, as an indie musician in this scene, I've heard lots of horror stories from all the old pros that have been to the major label mountain and prefer the community-based DIY valley. They can easily corroborate the allegations she mentions in her suit, and much, much worse. Courtney has been through a lot of ugly situations and has given up a huge chunk of her fortune to people that are running the music racket, to be sure, but she's come out on top, mostly by being ruthless and doing whatever it takes (including plastic surgery, open warfare and, depending on who you believe, murder) to succeed. Most people I know think of her as a barely coherent self-centered evil bitch who serves only herself. Well... yeah, but I think she's pushing in more or less the right direction, as often as not.

She knows what she's doing, I think. Pulling her catalog (and that of Nirvana, which she controls and wants to issue on Epitaph instead of Geffen, which has been sold a couple of times and now is under the big Vivendi-Universal umbrella) got Universal to sue her, and now with this countersuit, she's giving what she feels is an honest shot to breaking the stranglehold that major labels have had on the revenue streams that their stables of artists produce.

It's about damned time someone did something about this, and I don't know anyone else who'd have both the means and the cojones to do it. The record companies are pooh-poohing it, but let's see how it pans out. Sure, record contract law is the law, and no one's holding a gun to the heads of the artists that sign these contracts, but the stranglehold that the Five Major Labels hold on the airwaves, mainstream press and record store shelves is designed specifically to keep out any small-timers who don't cut the big boys in on the action. It's organized crime, a five-way stranglehold, not just on the world music market, run by the five crime families, which have the RIAA as their (scarily effective) shill in congress, and ultimately paying little more than lip service to the performers that are the blood of the industry, let alone the consumer that is its reason for existing in the first place.

Thanks to the internet and an ever-strengthening network outside the mainstream, more and more good musicians are feeling empowered to not sign those contracts, and find themselves able to work outside the traditional frameworks that have been literally the only way to get their music to the rest of the world. But it's an uphill climb.

Look. I genuinely hope Courtney Love succeeds (I think it's too early to see what kind of case she actually has, so who knows about her odds). I can't think of how to help her, though.

As for the rest of us bottom-dwellers (both music makers and lovers), well, here's something we can do. We can make a point of telling people that there is an alternative to Eminem and Britney and O-Town and all that canned crap. Go out to your local music venue, go to mp3.com, go to your post-Napster P2P downloader of choice, and dig a little. You won't have to dig far, I promise you.

And when you find something that really sends you, tell somebody. Tell somebody that there's a whole nother world out there. A better world. Then go buy their records. Give them, and not the Big Five, your business and time. It may take some searching, but a better brand of music (however you define it) is there. And once you find it, share it. Tell somebody about this cool thing you found.

SOMETHING LIKE THERAPY
So tonight I played a show at Rose's Turn in the West Village, at which everyone there was already on my email list. This is not good, on the face of it, as well, you know, the whole idea is to go find a new audience in another part of town.

But someone did tape the show, and I played nothing but newer songs, and if any of 'em are any good, I'll put 'em up here. Promise.

I find out tomorrow.

TWO THINGS.

One, I've had so many problems trying to keep my connection up this month (there was a mixup between the DSL branch and the dialup branch of the ISP, and for about a week (till yesterday) I got cut off from both - ultimately the phone company is to blame for the whole mess, which I bet comes as an absolute shock to you) that I could just retch.

Two, ... well, you know, a year ago I was running off my head. I was in two plays, the new band was playing all the time, I was out doing something literally every damned night, as well as a busy job that demanded occasionally overtime. And I wrote like crazy, songs and reviews and stuff, mostly. And I was learning how to put a website together, and I was reading like crazy, and and and and.

Now that the wheels have fallen off the bandwagon (that's Newton's first law, right?), I feel like I have to take everything out of the box before I can start putting things back in. Which is the other reason I've been somewhere between sporadic and downright absent from here and the offline world this month.

Anyway, while my world will not be back in true shipshape until I actually get work (the only thing on my mind these days, if you're curious), you can IM me [misterchicobangs] if you like. I would definitely like.