MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

I’ll try to keep this short and sweet.  In November I parted ways with Sound Images on good terms.  While I learned a lot and enjoyed the people and my time there, I really missed my “regular” clients: musical artists, flash/digital artists, record labels and story tellers in every medium.  Most of all I missed the work itself, designing New Media products for creative artists.

Beginning in January of 2009 I will be launching a new venture built around my passions, to be introduced right here.  Between now and then I’ll be transitioning this blog to a different kind of news platform, and we’ll attempt to build community around topics and ideas.

Anyway, I’m back.  And I promise not to stay away as long.

I kid you not!  Check it out: 
http://www.chainleader.com/article/CA6533927.html

OK, let’s cut to the chase: While they music doesn’t generate as much total revenue as eats, the profit margin is greater.  This big margin is what allowed labels historically to gamble and accept a 90% failure rate, and tolerate a parasitic distribution model.  Cracker Barrel has cut out the gambling by licensing music from established stars, and eliminated the cancerous distribution network by selling through their own stores – in other words, the gift shop is like a merch table for the restaurant.

This approach isn’t rocket science or genius, but common sense.  Any retail merchandiser would recognize the opportunity presented by music.  Unfortunately the music business is modelled on 19th century book publishers and carnivals, not modern merchandising.  As a result, the entire industry’s chased it’s tail for nearly a century.

Stories for Shorty: A Collection of Recollections from the Jockey Club 1982-1988 is a terrific memoir of a part of Cincinnati musical history that might otherwise be lost forever.  I contributed to the part of the story I knew best, my view from the mixing board over the early years of the club (it was in fact my first regular mixing gig, part of the original rotation from 1982-85, then periodically afterwards).  The editors graciously held the doors open, accepting any and all submissions, with many regulars posting multiple items in the volume.  By leaving out my recollections as a fan and player. I failed them.  Worse, I failed many of my friends who were ignored entirely or mentioned only in passing by others.  As I read the book, I realize I missed the point of those years.  Whatever the Jockey Club was or was not, sprang from a community.  I’m kind of a loner, and often miss that.  So I’m going to take a moment to record the part of that history that’s gone unmentioned because I was too lazy to do it properly in the first place.

When I got out of high school, bands I liked didn’t come to Cincinnati.  The Pit opened downtown in 1981, and that helped some, and Bogarts would occassionally book people like Iggy and even U2 (my friend Dave Glasser begged me to go, waving free tickets that WEBN had given out in the Rhine Room of UC).  But the truth is, local bands playing original music had no decent stages.

I got a lot of practice working real PA systems when a friend, Paul Jacobson, took out a loan so his metal cover band could join that then-thriving circuit.  He knew I was a gearhead, so he asked me to spec and eventually run his system.  I couldn’t resist!  This was the start of a reputation as a mixer that I actively resisted throughout my performing career.  Before the Jockey Club I played in bad cover bands with high school friends (I graduated in 1978), but was generally better known for my ability to cobble together functional PA systems from piles of castoff stereo and musical electronics gear that magically appeared before punk shows.  Venues were places like The Brew House in Walnut Hills, and another club located where Boswell’s Alley sits today, not to mention various studios in DAAP and parties around UC.  I stumbled onto this scene via the aforementioned Dave Glasser, who around this time was playing in a kick ass band called The Fucking Cunts, active between 1981-84.

Let me set the record straight on some flawed recollections, I may have seen from Victor Garcia-Rivera, on Neus Subjex’ database, and more recently, in Stories for Shorty.  The Cvnts played a mix consisting mostly of originals, with a few covers of songs by Gang of Four, The NY Dolls, The Clash, The Sex Pistols and Sham 69.  I attribute Victor’s error partly to his age and place in the scene at the time: The Edge was on Billy’s shit list for some reason in those early days, and Victor, who was a bit younger than those of us working the club (I was a regular sound guy there early on, and a fill-in through the end), was often on the outside looking in.  In other words, honest errors of omission. The biggest of these errors and others I’ve heard on the boards about that band stand corrected below:

• The Cvnts were not a cover band, or even close.  Like The Edge, they played a few covers of songs that influenced them.  The vast majority of their repertoire was original.
• The Cvnts had nothing to do with MT Eye (an actual cover band that played mostly new wave and alternative rock), other than being friends.
• The Cvnts were not Present Tension (Glasser’s later band), and shared only a single member and a few songs.

Dave Glasser was a personal musical savior for me.  He dragged me to the JC for the first time to run sound for the Cvnts.  In the process he introduced me to most of my future bandmates, and simultaneously pried me out of the cover bands I’d been playing in.  I’m a practical sort, with a deep seated gear lust, so cover bands seemed the only way to go, until Dave infected me with music that mattered.  I think Dave was introduced to bands like the NY Dolls by Cvnt’s bassist/singer, Dan Hall, or his close friend and Present Tension bandmate Dave Hahn, but I’m not entirely sure – all that happened before I met them.  Nonetheless, Dave was definitely a major link between his Greenhills crowd, Finneytowners like myself, and the regional punk/new wave scene that was gelling at the Jockey.  He doesn’t get enough credit for his work back then, but we can make it up to him by catching his new band, Sid Hatfield and the Deciders. Anyway…  

While running sound for the Cvnts, I was introduced to Dream 286.  Gary Shell (who would become one of my future partners at Ultrasuede Studio) usually ran sound for Dream, but often had conflicts with dates because he also worked for The Customs and later The Auburnaires, who paid better.  Eventually I was tapped to fill in on a bill they played with the Cvnts.  I kept the gig for the remainder of Dream’s run.  Dream’s singer/guitarist, Janette Pierce, later became my first wife, while the rhythm section, Joe Hamm (drums) and Randy Cheek (bass) would move to The Libertines upon the band’s dissolution.  This is where we find the a missing chunk of history in Stories for Shorty.  And it’s all on me: I had the knowledge and knew the deadlines, but neglected to put it down when it mattered.  So here’s the story…

Dream 286 and it’s descendants were largely the vision of keyboardist Doug Hallet and Janette. They’d played together in Latex Theater, where Janette augmented Viv Vinyl on guitar, maybe replacing her down the line but I’m not sure (this was also a bit before my time – clarity welcome in comments!).  Latex Theater wasn’t a great band, but they always put on entertaining shows.  Lu Linden was that band’s drummer, coming from the legendary Bitter Blood Street Theater, and he subsequently moved on to Dementia Precox.  The presence of keyboards is important here: These were not hardcore punk bands, but new wave.  While there was a crossover in crowds, and the scene at the JC was quite diverse, there was a clear division between 3-chord guitar punks and more densely layered, keyboard-driven bands.  While 11,000 Switches and Hospital bands, had keys, they were mostly textural noise, while Latex Theater, Dream 286 and it’s later incarnations used keys melodically, mostly in support of Janette’s guitar.  Joe and Randy brought a strong pop sensibility and general sense of wierd irony to Dream 286 that was in full flower in what started as a side project, The Buddy Bradley Experience.  In those days Doug was a punk in every sense of the word, with one of the best record collections in the scene.  He walked the walk, and was frequently dissed for talking the talk: he had a reputation for blunt (sometimes biting) honesty that usually offended.  As a result, his bands were often more popular with fans, especially out of town, than other bands, especially at home.  In spite of Doug’s unpopularity, Dream 286′s record release party was one of the first “sell out” shows, and held the unofficial attendance record until Johnny Thunders show.  I don’t recall the full line up, but I’m sure Dementia Precox and Junta were on the bill, and our friend Bradley from Lexington came up with his band whose name escapes me.  It’s possible that the Cvnts and Lunch Buddies were on that bill but don’t quite me… I’ll have to ask Doug!

Dementia Precox, on Hospital Records for a time, put out a landmark album, “SCHP”, in 1982.  The year is significant: Listen to work from Ministry, Revolting Cocks, NIN and other early US rust-belt industrial bands from 1983 onwards.  Dementia played Chicago, Detroit regularly, before moving to California to record and release this great record.  The songs and sound of SCHP were as familiar to regional fans as they were to Jockey regulars, since Dementia played all over.

Another correction to Victor’s recollection: The Lunch Buddies were not a precursor to the Ass Ponys, nor did it include Randy Cheek or any later-Libertines.  The band consisted of Chuck Cleaver, Dan Klienenger playing sticks and metal objects, and Dave Scott on bass.  I first met Chuck about that time through Libertines’ frontman Walt Hodge, at DAAP where we were all students.  He dragged me to Chuck’s senior show installation, which consisted of him standing against a gallery wall, with a garbage can full of clay which viewers could throw at him.  I think I nailed him in the nuts at least once that day.  I was an ass.

By this time, Dream 286 had broken up, and Randy and Joe had moved on to Walt’s aforementioned band, while playing in Dan Reed’s Buddy Bradley Experience on the side.  Janette and I were living together in a huge house in a bad part of Clifton.  The Cvnts had broken up as well.  I had quit playing in cover bands and teamed up with Dan Hall to form Somebody, while two of my former cover-band mates, Jim McMillan and Dave Hahn, joined Dave Glasser to form Present Tension.  Both groups played a couple Cvnts tunes.  But I never bothered to attempt to cover Dave’s guitar parts at all – we turned the grinder Government Satisfaction into a ska tune.  Both Somebody and Present Tension played the Jockey a number of times, and I don’t think either band played any covers.  Somebody wasn’t nearly as punk as the Cvnts, but got a lot more attention for our attitude:

• Our debut 7″, “Arbeit Mact Frei” was banned from record stores, and even attracted mainstream editorials over it’s clearly ironic title (it included an image of McDonald’s golden arches soaring over the then-new P&G towers).  Never mind that a jew (me) created the image and title!  Like The Edge’s “Newport Gestapo“, it suffered from the area’s decided lack of context and reason!
• We were banned from playing The Metro when they arbitrarily decided to stop giving bands the door, as stipulated in our contract that night (up to that point we were clearing $800-1000/night there – we were pissed that they wanted us to settle for $500, outside of our agreement).

Apparently Dan and our lead guitarist, Bone Quinn, scared Phil, the club owner arguing over the unannounced, after-gig change… Phil told me I was allowed in, but the one time I tried to enter, to pick up Janette after a Danse Macabre show, I was summarily bounced.  I taunted the bouncer in the alley, a convict on parole, hoping to get him to hit me so I could have him arrested but he wouldn’t take the bait.  He’s a better man than I was… I’d have killed me in his shoes!  On the other hand, Mike Devanney, our keyboard/percussionist, returned many times after our banning, as a patron and a band member in The Nervous Pioneers.  So who knows what was up with all that?  All I know is the principle writers of the band, and lead guitarist weren’t allowed in, and it was definitely enforced.  Sadly we were too young and dumb to recognize this sequence of events for the break they were!

Danse Macabre is another band that deserves a mention in our history, if only for it’s amazing lineups.  Initially Chris Sherman (aka Freekbass) and his buddy Jerry Hunter (now a Welsh scholar living in the UK) joined Janette and Doug, playing a more electronic set of songs.  Neither musician was old enough to get into clubs, both still in high school at SCPA!  But damn, they were good.  Chris was already a bass prodigy, and Jerry had a different concept of drumming than Joe Hamm brought to Dream 286.  His rhythm and sound was closer to Lu Linden’s poly-rhythmic garbage-beats than conventional rock drums.

Around the time Jerry started college, Chris joined Shag.  Danse replaced Jerry with a drum machine, and Chris with Dave Scott.  This lineup lacked the stage presence of the previous groups Janette and Doug worked in for obvious reasons:  Joe and Jerry’s crazy, powerful beats were the missing ingredient.  Eventually this band fell apart.  As Janette tired of smoothing over Doug’s faux pas, she started another project on her own, Alice Stoned, with a friend of Jerry’s.  But let me pause for a moment in my story and defend Doug to the scene.  While he was somewhat socially awkward, especially in the Dream 286 days, by the time of Danse Macabre he was well aware of the problems caused by his ill-timed or insensitive comments.  As a result, he curbed his comments, and really worked hard not to piss people off.  Unfortunately many people didn’t notice, or refused to recognize the change and continued to hold things he’d said years earlier against him.  As his regular engineer, I spent a lot of time with him over the years.  Long before he moved to Seattle in the late 80s, he was simply not the asshole people still  had him pegged for.  At that point he was a pretty nice guy, and a pretty good keyboard player.  Our loss.  In retrospect, he was just being a punk.

While I was in Somebody, we got a new roommate.  Greg Dulli was a freshman at UC from Hamiltucky, working at Camelot Records in Northgate Mall.  He took over Jim McMillan’s room in our Clifton Danger-house, and almost immediately began forming his own band, The Black Republicans.  Victor gets this part really wrong… The Republicans were as much a comedy act as a band, with songs like “Marvin’s Not Gay, He’s Dead“.  The band included Jamie Osias on guitar, Steve Brown on bass.  In other words: this was NOT the Afghan Whigs, or even a Whigs precursor by any stretch.  Indeed, the band split generally over creative conflicts between Jamie and Greg.  When the Republicans formed, most of the Whigs were not yet living in Cincinnati!

When Janette and I were engaged we moved into our own place, a block away from the old house but much nicer (if not any safer).  A few weeks before our wedding, a new neighbor moved in across the hall, a new photographer for the Enquirer from D.C., John Curley.  John and I hit it off immediately, since we were both gear heads into music.  I immediately introduced John to my friends, but at this point I still barely knew him.  Since my former roomie Greg was a block away, and on good terms with our new chow, Tzung Tung Gao, I asked him to house-sit for us while we were on our honeymoon.  When we returned, he and John were fast friends.   

Later during that summer of 1985, John moved to a basement apartment in the place next door, to better use the recording gear he’d begun collecting, while we found a house in the safer Northside area.  Greg had become John’s constant companion, while John encouraged Janette and I to use his gear to record a project that was slowly morphing into Sex Device at his place.  One night we stopped over and met this spacey kid from Louisville, who Greg’s school friend Michelle Dickenson knew.  Greg, John and newcomer Rick McCollom were working on new music – it took awhile for us to realize Greg had gotten very serious about music (when I met him he dreamed of acting, not music).  This was the roots of the Afghan Whigs (never mind the tales about jails).

Former Lunch Buddy and later Danse Macabre bassist Dave Scott was our constant companion around this time.  He had bought an Alesis keyboard with a built-in sequencer, and made lots of crazy songs in his basement “Straight Studios” using any device capable of producing or storing sound.  He was like a mad scientist down there!  Eventually this stuff was released as solo projects, on his own label, Dangerous Music. As a film major in college, and by this time, an industrial video producer, Dave was my go-to composer as well.  Dave’s a natural networker, and as bbs’s morphed into the internet, he reached across the region to other artists.  In this role he opened new doors for Jockey refugees like us, after the original doors had closed.

With all that as background, I should apologize for giving short-shrift to many other bands whose stories I don’t know.  Junta got a couple nice lines that hint at their originality and greatness.  Flamboyant singer Paul Stewart and guitarists Billy Wol, and Mike Davis truly rocked the scene, and made everyone work harder to entertain a crowd.  I think Dennis the Menace had broken up by the time the JC opened, but Mike Devanney, Jerry Chambers, Robert Beatty, Fred Pies and the much-loved Marc Chenault almost certainly played there as The Nervous Pioneers.  I bet Shag played the Jockey too, though I never saw them there.

All in all, Stories for Shorty is a remarkable book, and it’s editors have made a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.  It’s shortcomings fall on us, the staff and artists who didn’t take the time to tell their own stories.  So I offer these stories as an apologetic addendum, not a critique.  As my memory clears, I’ll post more in comments.  But for anyone who was there, it’s a must-buy!

Dave Davis

PS: I’m sure my memories are at least as flawed as Victors, so please set me straight, wherever I stray, in comments.

Sound Images has always been known for their generous support of good causes.  So it wasn’t hard to convince them to let me take on the Building a Mystery project for the foundation set up by Lauren Fernandes first for Katie Reider’s treatment for cancer, and now tragically, for her memory.  Check out the record… it’s pretty eclectic and fun listen, reminding you of the beautiful person who made all the songs (in every sense).  

In a rare display of promotional virtuosity, local powerhouse Shake It Records has scored a home run with Wussy’s 2006 sophomore release, Left for Dead.

Over the course of the fall of that year the band became the darlings of the Usual Suspects:

First, Cincinnati’s CityBeat dropped a long article for the record’s release party.

Next, Rolling Stone featured a review by Robert Christgau in the same month that Spin’s Steve Kandell issued a strong 4/5 stars.  Even alt-weeklies in other towns got in on the action without supporting tour dates, like The Boston Phoenix  piece here.

I knew this was a good record while we were working on it, but I didn’t expect all this.  Someone’s doing something right at Shake It!  Way to go!

-d-

Sub Pop Records : Daniel Martin Moore : Stray Age LP.

We’re proud to see Sub Pop jumping on Daniel’s bandwagon, and linking the Shake It edition! Very nice, Sub Pop!

Everthing old is new again sooner or later.  The vinyl version, mastered by our own Dave Davis, is part of a trend – low-volume vinyl releases that sell for a little more to select group of fans.  Sure, the medium of vinyl is old as dirt.  Maybe that’s what makes the experience of listening to a record so special.

This is the second vinyl-tagalong we’ve done at Sound Images over the past couple years.  We used the vinyl version of Heartless Bastard’s All This Time to address sonic shortcomings of the CD!  By all accounts, that project was a win.

Ruckus Roboticus: Wildly Vivid : On World Cafe/NPR Music

What’s that Ruckus on the radio!??! RUCKUS ROBOTICUS! Whoooa!  How cool is D’AT!

A few years ago I got a call from a very nice DJ named Dan about doing some mastering.  He was kind of cryptic on the details, but was insistent that someone who “got it” work on this thing, so he put me through a brief phone interview before sending me the job, basically a breakbeat DJ disc.  Since I’m a big electronica fan on my own time (and it’s what I last did as a musician), we hit it off and I got the job.

Fast forward 3 years.  Somehow he tracks me down at Sound Images, with a new record, Playing With Scratches.  As soon as I hit play, my head twisted in new directions, via some very old paths.

Dan filled me in on goings-on in the intervening years, including his remix gigs.  But as cool as all that is, national attention for your music is what it’s all about.  It doesn’t get much better than World Cafe, which has shown much love to Cincy artists.  Check out the show at the link above!

(Photo Backstory – I was crawling on the floor behind Eddie and Frank as this was shot, working on monitors!).

If you think rock/pop bands have it rough, you ought to check out the jazz and orchestral worlds… in spite of a Grammy nomination and sold out performances it’s been frustrating to see how little coverage Bridges, Eddie Daniels Plays the Music of Frank Proto has received since it’s release.  Fortunately I’ve discovered this piece at Crossovermedia, which specializes in such recordings uncategorizable music projects.  Cooler still they provide a list of spins and attention the music has garnered.

Beyond this, the project’s label Liben Music has a page of reviews for this record.  As does Eddie Daniels at his site.  As the engineer, I’m pretty proud of the positive comments about the sound of this record, as well as the music and performances we captured.  Still, considering the importance of the music, the concept (new orchestral and chamber compositions featuring a clarinet virtuoso), the reviews don’t reflect the achievement.  Fortunately our industry peers recognized it with a Grammy nomination for Best Chamber Performance.

The CD and DVD package of Bridges is available from Liben.com.

More is more when it comes to audio data.  But what sounds better?  Clever coding can actually make something sound “better” (but different) from the source.  Whether this is good or bad is a matter of perspective (a CD can be measurably “closer” to a source mix than a vinyl disc, but some prefer the latter for reasons unrelated to “fidelity”).  I thought it would be interesting to compare these real world digital products, to the source CD.  So, I ponied up $0.89 for Amazon, $1.39 for Apple, and dusted off my 1994 remaster of the Stones’ Exile on Main Street for a shoot-out.  While I was at it, I ripped a 128K AAC version (iTunes’ $0.99 fare) using Apple’s tools.  We then compared the bits directly by “subtracting” one file from another, yielding a “residue” containing only the differences.  Surprise:  Amazon’s old-school MP3 was measurably “more like” the source than anything Apple sells!  While the difference isn’t nearly as great as the 128K AAC version, Amazon’s residue is measurably twice as good, with differences evenly spread across the audible spectrum (Apple’s 256 version is most different in the midrange, where we hear best).  Given the AAC codec’s pedigree, I expected it to measure better than MP3.  And in fact, the AAC file does sound better to my ear, and is harder to pick out in blind comparison.  But numbers don’t lie: the absolute fidelity of Amazon’s files is better, and a dime cheaper than the much-crappier 128K standard files from Apple!

Not surprisingly, 256K is kind of a sweet spot for either algorithm, with less aggressive processing.  The benefits of AAC are it’s optimization of midrange frequencies, and coding tricks that get the best audible performance out of low bitrates, like 128K.  At double that rate, the benefits of those tricks are less apparent and differences that make 128K AAC sound “better” to the ear work against the format.

To visualize the “differences” between purchased versions and the CD source check out the image of the waveforms attached above…

The first, giant wave is the original music, next come residue/differences from (in order) Amazon 256K MP3, Apple Plus 256K AAC and finally Apple 128K AAC.  The smaller the residue (i.e. the “difference” between the source file and process under test), the more similar the two files are.  Similarly, when listening to the residue files, the only thing you hear is the difference between the files.  Since we can’t post clips of them without making ourselves targets for major labels, Amazon and Apple, let me describe what you hear in each case, and explain what it means.

The Apple 128K AAC has the largest residue and is by definition the “most different”.  What’s there: intelligible lyrics, plenty of drums (especially cymbals) and a fair amount of piano.  Electric guitar and clear vocals aren’t here at all, but there’s a TON of high frequency content in the top half of the 10th octave (15-20K), corresponding to music that’s simply eliminated in low bitrate AAC and MP3 files.  Average level while playing is approximately -32 dBFS.

The Apple Plus 256K AAC is next in line.  Here the vocals are even more clear, and the residue sounds more musical.  Unlike the 128K, drums are less clear, although cymbals remain pretty noticable, albeit not so much as cymbals but a grungy high frequency noise.  Average level here is -38 dBFS.  For reference, a 6 dB change, like this one between Apple’s 128K and 256K files, represents a halving of volume, or in our case, the file is literally half the loudness of the 128K.  This makes sense: the main difference here is that we’ve doubled the data rate!

The Amazon 256K MP3 is also twice the bitrate, but uses a different algorithm to get there, and thus gets much different results.  Most obvious is level, which is shown above and clearly much quieter.  Specifically, this one averages -44 dBFS, half again what Apple’s best delivers and 4X better than their 99-cent fare!  What you hear in the residue is similar to the Apple Plus: lots of vocals, but more snare and less cymbal, with most differences concentrated in the upper midrange (a little surprising), with peak energy very high up, at 9K.

 So CityBeat and the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards aren’t the only places to notice the Bears new album.  Blog Cosmic Debris reviews their Car Caught Fire release!

I mastered the record at QCA Mastering, with plenty of care and help from the band.  What a blast!  It went on to win the Cincinnati Entertainment Award for Album of the Year in 2001.  You never know what a record’s gonna do until you put it out.  This one worked out well!