Salon.com > John Perry

Hail, Metallica!

Mon, 24 Apr 2000 16:01:00 +0000

The queue of major Recording Artistes lining up to lodge complaints about that barbaric device Napster now appears to stretch several times round the block.

At the core of the Artistes' complaint lies a fearful injustice, one that's being perpetrated at their expense -- quite literally at their expense. Money is involved. Their money. And they are losing it. Robbed! Stolen From. Ripped off.

This is terrible.

It's not as though we were just talking about Music -- or "Our Art," as many of the foremost Artistes refer to it. Any fool can rob a few parking meters, get a guitar and play "music." Let's say 10 minutes to raise the cash, a couple of hours to buy equipment; three minutes to record a single ... that's ummm -- well, call it four hours to be on the safe side.

But the Napster scandal is not about music. It concerns the real heart, the very lifeblood of the industry: Money.

Fortunately, many of the Artistes who have been assaulted in this cowardly and underhanded fashion are already comfortably off and will not suffer undue hardship -- but that is not the point. The mental distress to which these sensitive, creative individuals have been subjected is almost too painful to contemplate.

Anthony Powell

Sat, 15 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

"Only a novel can imply certain truths. Biography and autobiography are forced to attempt exact definition. In doing so truth goes astray." -- Anthony Powell, "Hearing Secret Harmonies" (Vol. 12 of "A Dance to the Music of Time")

When the English novelist and critic Anthony Powell died March 28, at 94, the literary world lost one of its greatest figures.

A reserved man with a dislike of bad manners and personal publicity, but a keen interest in gossip, he continued working almost until the end, publishing three acerbic volumes of journals covering 1982-1992, the last of which appeared in 1997.

He produced plays, literary criticism, biography and 50 years' worth of book reviews for the Daily Telegraph, but will be best remembered for a sequence of 12 novels written between 1950 and 1975, the roman-fleuve "A Dance to the Music of Time."

Powell was the last surviving member of that prolific, gifted generation of English writers who came out of Oxford in the mid-1920s. Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Henry Green, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, Howard Acton, George Orwell and Powell himself were all born between 1903 and 1906, and all attended the university, with the exception of Orwell, who was a schoolboy at Eton with Powell, Acton and Connolly.

Sharps & Flats

Tue, 22 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"People try to put us d-d-d-down -- talking 'bout my favourite station/Just because we're n-new in town -- talking 'bout my favourite station/The BBC was dead and cold -- talking 'bout my favourite station/But our new approach is fresh and bold -- talking 'bout my favourite station."

The Who
Nov. 10, 1967
Station I.D. for BBC Radio 1

Whether, like Pete Townshend, you believe that the Who's essence lies in their singles or you share Roger Daltrey's view that the band's true home is onstage, this album is for you. The "BBC Sessions" are a collection of recordings made between 1965 and 1973, with the emphasis heavily on '65 to '67, when the Who were not so much a rock band as a bright, articulate pop group whose live shows blew their rivals clean off the boards.

The Who were the most aggressive, most competent live band on the circuit. Only the tightness of their ensemble playing kept the unlikely marriage of pretty, melodic pop songs and sudden crescendos of unimaginable violence from flying off into complete chaos. The tension between the two produced a drive that has never been matched -- a quality that's captured on the "BBC Sessions."

New rock tell-all zaps Jagger, Stewart, Sting

Wed, 02 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

That howling noise heard all over the London music scene at the moment is coming from readers of the new Keith Altham book "No More Mr. Nice Guy." The book is a collection of open letters in which Altham, a highly respected veteran of 35 years in the British music business, first as a journalist and then as a publicist, tells his ex-clients exactly what he thinks of them.

"Hell hath no fury like Rod Stewart asked to part with money," Altham writes. "Dear Rod, remember when your early manager Giorgio Gomelski turned up backstage in 1984 after your not having seen him for 17 years? 'Where's my eight pounds seven shilling and sixpence you owe me from the Steampacket gig at the Marquee in 1967?' you barked."

Altham recounts the story of Stewart and Jeff Beck's brief reunion for a 50-date tour in the mid-'80s. Altham bet Beck 100 pounds he'd never endure a week with Stewart, let alone 50 days. Joining the tour in Philadelphia on Day 7, Altham headed backstage, passing an opulent suite marked "Rod Stewart," a far plainer room labeled "Band" -- and a broom closet bearing the name "Jeff Beck." Opening the door, Altham found Beck curled up on the floor in a fetal position. The guitarist grinned weakly and said, "You're all I need. Where's me checkbook?"

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

Thu, 25 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000

The Jews in Nathan Englander's short stories are mainly displaced persons. Some of them are the refugees one would expect to find in tales of the Soviet Union, the Holocaust and present-day Brooklyn. But most suffer a more intimate exile, dislodged from their own lives by causes mundane or miraculous -- hair loss, manic depression, reincarnation.

Location and dislocation are central to Englander's brilliant debut collection, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges." Despite their impressive range of settings and situations, the nine stories all fall within the terrain of Orthodox and Hasidic life. Englander never lets his treatment of this world become self-conscious or sound like travel writing; the Yiddish and Hebrew studding his pages are simply part of the landscape.

Instead he focuses on the tensions between his characters, their communal responsibilities and the spiritual and moral universe in which they move. The manic-depressive hero of "Reunion," for instance, resentfully depends upon his rabbi to mend the family rifts his manic episodes cause. In "The Wig," a faded Hasidic beauty yearns for the hair shorn from her head and regularly slips into Manhattan to indulge an obsession with "immodest" shampoo advertisements.