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Monday, August 24, 2009
Michael Jackson case: View the search warrant
The Los Angeles County coroner has ruled Michael Jackson’s death a homicide and a combination of drugs was the cause, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Monday, a finding that makes it more likely criminal charges will be filed against Dr. Conrad Murray, who was with the pop star when he died.
A search warrant affidavit unsealed Monday in Houston includes a detailed account of what Murray told investigators.
Scroll down or click here to read a copy of the search warrant obtained by the American-Statesman, and click here for the latest updates in the investigation into Jackson’s death.
More Michael Jackson
Photos: Memorial service
Photos: Reaction to Jackson’s death
Photos: Jackson through the years
Michael Jackson search warrant
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CD review: Arctic Monkeys - ‘Humbug’
‘Humbug’
(Domino)
C
The Arctic Monkeys’ rapid rise to rock royalty (their acclaimed debut, “Whatever People Say I Am,” arrived in 2006, followed a year later by the Billboard Top 10 charting “Favourite Worst Nightmare”) could be credited to lead Monkey Alex Turner’s entertaining, detached perspective on newly acquired rock stardom. But it’s easy to see how that act can get old fairly quickly when a band is actually successful. Such is the case on “Humbug,” the band’s first album recorded in the United States, with producers Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco. Turner doesn’t seem to be fully committed to the endeavor this time around; he’s not helped by a collection of songs bogged down by cliched lyrics. Even highlight “Crying Lightning” is spoiled by lines such as “the next time I caught my own reflection it was on its way to meet you,” which renders forgettable an otherwise appealing, spooky thumper.
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CD review: Jack Ingram - ‘Big Dream & High Hopes’
Jack Ingram
‘Big Dream & High Hopes’
(Big Machine)
B
Jack Ingram’s career has been on an upward trajectory since the success of the 2005 hit “Wherever You Are;” on “Big Dreams & High Hopes,” he shows no signs of slowing down. Ingram can’t be accused of false advertising on “Dreams;” most of the songs, including the opener “Free” and the title track are the musical equivalent of the “hang in there” cat poster. He adds a bit of darkness here and there when he feels like it; see also the regret-filled “King of Wasted Time.” Singer-songwriter Patty Griffin and fellow country artist Dierks Bentley both make appearances on “Dreams.” Bentley’s guest spot, the barroom stomper “Barbie Doll” — which Ingram co-wrote with Todd Snider — will probably be coming to a radio near you.
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Interview: Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth
Never let it be said that Thurston Moore likes to loaf around the house.
“I’m on the Merritt Parkway while we’re talking,” Moore says.
It’s June, and the Sonic Youth guitarist is driving from the Massachusetts home he shares with his wife and fellow Youth Kim Gordon and their daughter Coco to New York City, the city that gave birth to the band some 28 years ago.
He’s heading to an opening night for photographer Richard Kern, who came out of the same downtown New York scene as Sonic Youth. He’s meeting with editors at Abrams Books with whom he’s working on several projects. He’s going to visit his niece. Later in the summer, he’s heading to what he calls “noise camp,” a brief tour with his improvisational noise project Northhampton Wools.
“A few shows, sleeping bags and tents in West Virginia,” Moore says. “I am excited about the Sonic Youth tour, but noise camp is in the front of my cerebral context, tingling.” (Sadly, the tour was cancelled when Moore came down with the flu in early August.)
“I’m a guy who likes to keep busy.” He pauses. “Well, I tend to keeping busy whether I like it or not.”
On top of all this, this year, Sonic Youth released “The Eternal,” its 16th studio album and first on Matador Records. It’s also their first on an independent label after spending the last 19 years on the major label Geffen Records. The band plays the Dell stage at 7 p.m. Oct 4 of ACL.
This is an odd type of homecoming for the band. Sonic Youth were always scene leaders in independent rock and, in turn, made the world of major labels seem safe for the like of, say, Nirvana. It wasn’t; most bands who signed to majors crashed and burned after a record or two.
But Sonic Youth hung around on major longer than virtually anyone. “We were fortunate Nirvana opened up alternative rock for a moment there,” Moore says. “It sort of gave us a little bit of security.”
Indeed, they were around long enough to see major labels lose an extraordinary amount of the potency.
“The record industry is completely barren now. We knew nobody at Geffen anymore,” Moore said, “They would certainly put (a new record) in the rack at Virgin Megastore, but there was really no personable energy going on there at all.”
Now they’re back on an indie, even working with the same folks (Matador co-owner Gerard Cosloy was signing bands for Homestead Records in the mid-80s when Sonic Youth released the album “Bad Moon Rising” on the label.)
“We were liberated from this long contact and we had music-loving friends at a real successful label,” Moore says of Matador. “That excitement brought energy to the songwriting.”
That may have been true, but as journalists are fond of saying, there’s no inspiration like the deadline. Moore and Gordon, along with guitarist Lee Renaldo, were always working on projects (including having several school-age kids between them). Drummer Steve Shelly runs the record label Smells Like in addition to Sonic Youth’s vanity labels SYR and Goofin’.
“Every once in a while I’d look at the calendar,” Moore said, “ and it was like, ‘if we want this record out in June, we gotta get it done by Christmastime (2008)’”
Something had to change. “Usually, we’d get an album’s worth of songs together and rehearse and and discern one from the other and bring the whole mess in the studio.”
The band approached “The Eternal” differently than their last couple of albums. “We would get together on weekends and write songs really fast,” Moore said. “If we were lucky, we’d slam em down on tape. There was more of an immediacy to the songwriting. There was a punk rock vibe (in songs such as “Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn” and “Sacred Trickster”).
Family considerations can equals punk rock in Sonic Youth’s world. After a few decades as scene leaders, tastemakers and elder statesmen, they can have private lives and pursue outside interests and be parents and, oh, yeah, be one of rock’s most surefire acts.
“We’ve always been sort of grateful and never had any ambitions of real grandeur,” Moore says. “This is how we live our lives.”
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CD review: Willie Nelson ‘American Classic’
‘American Classic’
(Lost Highway)
B
Willie Nelson once again stamps familiar standards with his ineradicable musical personality on his new album, “American Classic.” Nelson simplifies and slows down the tempos, then applies his tawny, world-weary voice to mostly melancholy lyrics, as he interprets songs from the mid-century catalog. He leaves it to Joe Sample, Diana Krall and Norah Jones on piano, Christian McBride and Robert Hurst on bass and Lewis Nash and Jeff Hamilton on drums - along with dashes of sax, harmonica and organ — to supply the welcome jazziness. Nelson had perfected this stripped-down strategy on 1978’s “Stardust,” recording immortal versions of “Georgia on My Mind,” “Blue Skies,” “September Song,” “Moonlight in Vermont” and the title song. Nothing on “American Classic” matches those intense refinements. Nelson is weakest here in the duets with Krall and Jones, whose zesty playfulness contrasts with his drifting vocal responses. He regains his storytelling balance on “Angels Eyes” and he unspools homespun joy for “On the Street Where You Live.” Nelson saves the album altogether with his last two cuts, a soulful version of “Since I Fell for You” and a bigger-band retake of “Always on My Mind,” which he canonized in 1982.
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CD review: Richard Thompson box set is a heavy-hitter
‘Walking on a Wire: (1968-2009)’
(Shout Factory)
A-
“Walking on a Wire” is a top-flight introduction to a guy who might be the greatest living British bluesman.
Not in the 12-bar or Clapton sense, but in the sense that Richard Thompson’s music taps into the well of emotional chaos and elemental storytelling that fuels the deepest blues. Then he translates those feelings into a guitar glossolalia that could only come from a son of Albion.
Just as the blues is profoundly American, Thompson’s music is decidedly United Kingdom. With Fairport Convention, he fused the most ancient of British ballads into a vibrant, electric folk rock as thrilling in its own Scots manner as Dylan’s update of Woody Guthrie. With wife Linda, he made some of the 1970s’ most emotionally exhausting rock, peaking with 1982’s no-really-it’s-not-JUST-about-divorce classic “Shoot Out the Lights.” He spent the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s looking for new fans now and then and honing a fan base that just kept getting harder core. A critical darling and commercial nonstarter for most of his career, he can sell out small to mid-sized venues pretty much wherever he chooses to go. Not a bad life, really.
That doesn’t make it too surprising that this is the third(!) box set of Thompson’s career. The first, “Watching the Dark” (Hannibal/Ryko, 1993), was a three-CD affair that mixed studio tracks and rarities (The version of “A Sailor’s Life” on there should get some sort of Nobel Prize.)
The next, “RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson” (Free Reed, 2006) was a five-CD, fanatics-only behemoth with fan-chosen hits, amazing and obscure live guitar blowouts and some of the ugliest graphics in box set history.
“Walking on a Wire” is the opposite, a four-CD overview of his studio output from the Fairport days (“Meet on the Ledge” and the epic “Sloth” still thrill) through the Richard and Linda years to his most recent solo album, the surprisingly rocking “Sweet Warrior.”
Thompson has always quibbled with being called a mope, but the recorded evidence is pretty overwhelming. His isn’t an adolescent, Robert Smithy mope, but one who has a deep-seated knowledge that happiness is an occasion (“Old Man Inside a Young Man”) and the complexities of love often just make things worse (“Withered and Died,” “I Misunderstood”). And his guitar playing lives in those moments when melancholia becomes sublime (“Calvary Cross,” here in its tight studio version, deserves to be heard live).
His ’80s and ’90s output suffered a bit from a long-term collaboration with Mitchell Froom. Froom’s production is often too slick and too vanilla by half, turning solid songs into dad-rock almost by design.
Thompson wisely cherry picks from these albums, and of course most of the songs are from 1991’s “Rumor and Sigh” where the tunecraft was good enough to withstand Froomization. (Or dispensed with it altogether - “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” is just Thompson and an acoustic guitar; it became a live staple, perhaps his all-time most popular song).
But he got over it, and “Walking On A Wire” shows you why people have adored him for 40 years.
These days, Thompson still tours constantly, knocking out studio albums or fan-club records or movie scores or guest spots on other people’s albums, working and playing and playing and working. These days, a young man is inside the old man.
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Yeah Yeah Yeahs replace Beastie Boys
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have been confirmed to replace the Beastie Boys Friday co-headlining at Austin City Limits this year. The New York trio replaced the, um, New York trio at Lollapalooza as well.
R&B singer Raphael Saadiq has been added to the 5:30 - 6:30 Friday slot on the Lady Bird Lake stage previously occupied by Lily Allen, while the 7:30-8:30 remains unfilled (or at least, not public). Ben Sollee is now 12:30- 1:30 Sunday on the Austin Ventures stage.
This puts the YYY’s up against Kings of Leon. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The Kings’ album “Only By the Night” has moved more than one million copies in 46 weeks (aided, of course, by “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody”). The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s newest, the New Wave-inflected “It’s Blitz!” has moved 149,000 in 22 weeks. (While “Zero” is a terrific song, it doesn’t have the radio legs of “Sex on Fire.”
Sales-wise, there’s no comparison. But on stage, the YYYs are still an absolute force of nature live and it could be thrilling to see them take command of tens of thousands.
MORE ACL FEST
- ACL aftershows announced
- Hot or not? Rate the ACL bands | Full list of bands
- Photos: ACL Fest history | ACL Fest A to Z
- 2008 photos: Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Reader photos
- Full ACL Fest coverage
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Review: Steve Earle at Austin City Limits taping
Steve Earle showed up to tape his Austin City Limits segment at his most unpretentious, and that’s saying something. For at least 15 years, Earle has seemed utterly uninterested in branding, selling or otherwise packaging himself and this admirable non-strategy has worked—if success means playing what you want, with whoever you want, the way you want it played.
Last Friday, Earle focused on songs by his old friend and mentor Townes Van Zandt. Like the recently released Townes, Earle’s long set was a loving tribute to the tortured genius who heckled him at an early gig—yelling “Play the Wabash Cannonball!”—understood why seeing Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb on the same night was “a very big deal” and served as inspiration, for better or for worse.
Earle said he’d had a hellish time picking 16 Townes tracks out of a “28 song short list,” and explained his decision to include the classic “Pancho and Lefty”.
“What you do the first day in jail is pick the biggest guy in the yard and knock him out and then you get to keep your radio,” he said. “On that basis, I recorded this song.”
Irreverent and self-effacing—and looking something like a homeless PhD— Earle kept his mind on Van Zandt and himself in the background. That was his plan, anyway, but real Steve Earle fans remained permanently fascinated by Steve Earle. It’s hard to take your eyes—or ears—off a performer who never lets himself get poignant without running his emotions through a corn detector first.
Case in point: Earle stunned the audience with a sad and unsentimental version of “Fort Worth Blues,” his eulogy for Van Zandt, but then pled guilty to excessive poetic license with its lyrics.
“In point of fact,” he said, “Paris is exactly my kind of town.”
