Creole Lady Marmalade

At the Wynn hotel they have an amazing waterfall surrounded by trees that they project all kinds of stuff on. Tonight we saw giant robot flowers dancing a duet, followed by a James Bond intro style version of Creole Lady Marmalade. Very cool...

Beatles Revolution

I'm blogging from the Mirage right now where Sarah & Tony brought us to the Beatles bar 'Revolution'. The Cirque du Soleil show 'Love' is here so the whole casino has Beatles stuff everywhere. I'm off in search of the Blue Meanie...

Lee comes to visit

Our friend Lee came to visit us this weekend, which was perfect timing as Sally has just started her summer vacation. We did some of the normal stuff like mooching around in Scottsdale, an early morning hike around Papago Park (which turned out to be really good as all the animals were out and about, and all the flowers are blooming right now - seeing flowers on a cactus is still trippy to me!), and heading up to the top of South Mountain to catch a sunset. We also ate some great food...

First, on Satrday night we had to head over to Trader Vics for some appetizers and drinks. Then on Sunday, Lee's friend-in-Phoenix Yvonne had suggested meeting up at South Mountain Farm for breakfast one morning, which we did willingly because we know how good the food is there! Then Sunday night we ended up at our current favorite burger place, Stax. Monday we went to the Eggery for breakfast, it seems really old school but they do great healthy food there, and then finally as the piece de resistance, we tried the Bada Boom Pasta Room but it was closed, which was lucky really as we ended up at the Italian Grotto, which was awesome. Lee grew up in new York, and loves his italian food, and the Italian Grotto passed all of his tests for good authentic east coast italian food!

Finally, not a lot of people know this, but rocker Alice Cooper lives in Phoenix - mainly I suspect because of his incongruous love of golf! Anyway he also owns a bar here called "Alice Cooperstown" and we had to go. it's a cross between a sports bar and the Hard Rock cafe. Alice wasn't there when we dropped by, but hung on the wall were guitars belonging to Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. I worshipped at the altar for a long time...

Eurovision, and much better music...

Today is Eurovision day! An ongoing tradition now in Europe since 1956, we celebrate our unity by singing terrible pop-songs at each other and then voting for our neighbors' songs so that they won't declare war on us. Last years winner (shown left) was a Ukranian transvestite with a star on his/her head. This year I'm betting on Ireland's "Dustin the turkey"... and to think this was the competition that gave us Abba - what happened Eurovision?

I on the other hand woke up early this morning dreaming of "Thaxted". It's a hymn better known as "I vow to thee my country" and takes it's melody from the Jupiter movement of Holst's "The Planets" suite. I'm not particularly religious or even nationalistic for that matter, but something about that tune makes me want to start crusades, kill heathens, and worship the Union Jack. Take a listen sometime and see if it does the same for you ;-)

A quick bit of searching around on iTunes led me to a lot of versions of the tune with whiney white people mumbling their way through it as we white folks tend to do in British churches. But in amongst all the chaff I stumbled across an incredibly beautiful version by a group called "Libera". From what I can tell they are a group of young choirboys with incredibly high pitched voices, that someone had the good sense to put electronic ambient style music behind. The effect is truly haunting and well worth checking out.

From there I had to go find Holst's "The Planets", and stumbled upon possibly the best version I have ever heard committed to digits, a recording by the Berliner Philharmoniker & Sir Simon Rattle, available on EMI. This version also includes some newly composed pieces - not by Holst as he died in 1934! - known as the "Asteroid" suite. The amazing thing listening to Holst is you realize how every good scifi movie of late has been influenced musically by "The Planets". A quick listen to Mars and you start to think of Star Wars imperial death-march; quieter bits of Venus and Mercury had me thinking of Alien, and any other scifi movie that wants to impose the vastness of space (and how alone you are in it) on you. It's a truly great recording, check it out if this is your kind of thing.

 All this thinking about scifi movies led me to a recent favorite "Solaris". Now all arguments aside about whether Soderbergh's remake is better or worse than Tarkovsky's 1972 version, or whether either lives up to Stanislaw Lem's original book, Soderbergh's version does contain some amazing music by Cliff Martinez. In fact in many ways it is the music that represents the personality of the Solaris sea in the movie, and set's the tone for the whole movie. Watch the movie first 

and see if it's your kind of thing, if it is this is a great album to listen to when you're in the mood for something to chill out to.

From Cliff Martinez, I started thinking about how classical and electronic music can be very similar in the way they are constructed, if not in the end result - the sound. This led me back to an album that I definitely don't listen to enough - BT's "This Binary Universe", which combines some very orchestral sounds and compositional devices with some amazing electronic sounds taken from "circuit bent" kids toys - literally the act of ripping the plastic off old toys and start re-wiring them and see what noises you get out of them! It's a great album, and even better if you pick up the version with the DVD that has a cool animated movies to go with each piece of music.

So here I am, a head full of hymns, legendary classical music, and some amazing pieces of orchestral electronic music, but somehow in the next 2 hours I have to switch gears for the most mindless pop Europe can produce. Can anyone suggest a good album path that might get me from Holst, Cliff Martinez and BT all the way to Dustin The Turkey???

Blog Updates

Merry Christmas (or celebration of choice) to you all! Here's a quick update on some major blog changes I just put in place over the last day:

If you go to http://www.RossCoops.com you'll now see this spiffy new homepage (left) that simply navigates you to a variety of sites that I run and that you may find interesting or amusing... or retarded.

There is a brand new photo gallery blog at http://www.photos.rosscoops.com/ which has all our latest pictures in it, including a lot of Xmas Lights pictures we've been taking over the last couple of weeks. You really haven't seen christmas lights till you've seen them wrapped around a 100ft+ palm tree! :-) Note: photos are now here.

I've also revamped my music site around at http://www.music.rosscoops.com/ which has now become a blog. There is some new music coming soon. I've finally thrown off the shackles of Mellotone and embraced electronic music fully, as you'll soon see in the upcoming "City of Apes" mp3 that I'm finishing mixing right now. I've also invited my old Mellotone buddy Jim Titus to co-blog with me on it, so I'm sure he'll be doing his best "Synthesizers? Bah Humbug!" impression to counter balance my enthusiasm.

Crowded House: The Revenge

So if you read the blog back in April, you'll know how I enjoy calling my buddy Jim from Crowded House concerts, to share (ahem!) the moment. Well yesterday lunchtime I'm driving on the freeway and my phone rings. Seeing as I yell at other people drifting all over their lanes while on the phone, I try not to answer while I'm driving so I let it go. When I checked my messages later it was my buddy Lee, calling from Seattle's premier holiday weekend music festival, Bumbershoot. He was half way through the Crowded House concert and loving every minute of it - damn I wish I'd been there. And to make me even more jealous, I just read this morning that Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam was on stage with them too for a couple of songs.

For everything we do love about Phoenix, the music scene is a bit lame here. Every week when I look through the paper, all the upcoming concerts are 80's metal hair bands or the latest Britney Spears wannabe. At least we have my buddy Jim's favorite band here, Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers.

The Photo? That's Lee on the right enjoying some band called Mellotone. Wonder what happened to them, they were good ;-)

9/2 note: Arrgh! It gets worse :-) Sunday night my buddy lane in Portland called, he was watching Crowded House playing there. Man, everybody saw them this weekend but me... I'm so sad...

Mississippi

Time for another song posting on YouTube, and this time it's one that I wrote. "Mississippi" is the first song I wrote after Mellotone broke up and it's probably got the most complicated chord changes in any song I've ever written. You may even notice me flub one of them near the end if you watch carefully ;-) ha ha



You can also watch this video at YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vJ7M07Lh_U

RIP Tony Wilson

Just wanted to take a moment to mark the passing of Tony Wilson earlier today. You may not have heard of him, but theres lots of music you wouldn't have heard without him.

Tony was a small fish in my home town of Manchester, England back in the 70's. He was a local TV news presenter; hosted a local TV music show which famously gave The Sex Pistols their first break on TV; ran Factory Records which gave us Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays amongst countless other bands; and ran the Hacienda night-club, which basically re-invented the night-club scene with industrial design and led to the birth of house music, rave and the Madchester baggy scene.

How great was Tony? Factory Records had some of the biggest bands of the late 70's, 80's and early 90's on it's roster. His first contract with Joy Division was written in blood on a napkin in a pub, and like with every other band he signed, it basically said "Factory Records owns nothing, you (the band) own everything".

There was a great movie made recently about the Manchester music scene called "24 hour party people" with Steve Coogan playing Tony as the main character, guiding the movie through 30 years of great English music. It's very funny and highly recommended...

BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/6941392.stm
Slate - http://www.slate.com/id/2172341/fr/rss/

Blackbird

The 'Dramatic Chipmunk' inspired me! This new blog allows me to start doing something I've been wanting to do for ages, record song videos, stick them up on YouTube, and then link to them straight from the blog. Here's me trying it out for the first time with Paul McCartney's "Blackbird"...



You can also see this video on YouYube.com at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XGfRoL8lM8

Crowded House

Thursday night we had tickets for Crowded House at the Marquee Theater in Tempe. They were doing a warm up show before playing the Coachella Festival this weekend (more on that later). Anyway we showed up at 6.30pm like the tickets said and of course that was just the time they opened the doors. They could have told us the show actually started at 8pm. If they had, we wouldn’t have had to deal with the crazy woman in line behind us that insisted on trying to talk to us all the time. Speaking of the other people in line, everyone was at least 40 if not older which was kinda sad and made me feel like I’m getting old :-)

Anyway all was forgiven when we got inside. The Marquee is the nicest place I’ve been to in ages to watch a show, because it’s a new enough building that it’s been designed for it’s purpose, rather then the old Portland trick of taking some old building and trying to make it work as a music venue. What am I talking about? Let me give you some examples and see when was the last time you experienced any of these in a club:

• Bathrooms that can hold 20+ people at a time, so there was never a line, even for the girls bathroom, even at a sold out show. I still remember the horror of La Luna in Portland back in the 90’s where peeing out the window was the preferred option...
• A sold out show where the theater is only 2/3 full, so people have room to breathe and not stand on each other (listen and learn Doug Fir!)
• Good acoustics, the band sounded great and you couldn’t really hear people talking around you (hello again Doug Fir!)
• They card you once on the way in if you want to drink and give you a wristband to indicate that you’re allowed to. No more silly dividing the room up into drinking & non-drinking areas (hello Crystal Ballroom etc)
• Lots of security guards there who didn’t care remotely that you might want to take a picture to remember the occasion - heaven! As you can see from the crap-tastic pictures on this page, my camera-phone isn’t exactly going to put the record companies promotional department out of business is it now?
• The first half of the floor was flat and standing room only for those who like to be up front near the stage. The back half of the room had the sound guys in the middle and seats on either side for us old codgers with bad hips/knees. But the floor here slants up to the back of the room, so that even sat down you still had a great view of the stage over the heads of the people standing up. Genius!
  

So around 8pm the lights come up for the opening band, and out walks Liam Finn (Neil’s son), who then precedes to sing, play electric guitar, use lots of effects (especially looping & layering of guitar/bass parts), play the drums along with the looping guitar parts, and generally do a pretty mean impression of Tim Finn (Neil’s brother) in his choice of melody. He also had tons of hair & a beard and kinda looked like a miniature Grizzly Adams. I’m assuming this is how you pick up sheep in NZ? Bizarre but cool, he only suffered from the usual plight of a solo artist on stage, it quickly gets a bit repetitive. Had the rest of his band Betchadupa been here, or had anyone from Crowded House joined him on stage it would have been magic. I stupidly forgot to pick up his new album while I was there, but I’m sure it will be on Amazon soon.

Then Crowded House came out and generally rocked (or maybe melodically popped) the place for hours. They were a little rusty here & there, but considering it was there first gig in decades and they had a new drummer, they were excellent. They played maybe 6 tracks of the new upcoming album, and while all good, there was a couple that are going to be instant classics IMHO. Of course all the old favorites were there too, and I’m glad they did “Pineapple Head” as it’s a personal favorite of mine.

Now the sad part for me was that my brother Jim Titus wasn’t there. Jim & I both love Neil Finn (not in a gay way of course, though I can only speak for myself there), and I think I’ve only ever been to one Finn concert without Jim there to share the experience. I have this bad habit of calling Jim up from concerts so he can hear the music. ‘Course Jim complains about this endlessly as the phone can’t handle the volume of a concert, and all he actually hears at the other end is “KRKRKRKRKR-SCREETCH-KRKRKRKRK”. Ignoring this I called him anyway but then hung up straight away, thinking better of it.

About 2 minutes later the following happens:
Neil Finn: “Who has got a cellphone on them?”
Crowd: “CHEER! YAY! ME, ME, ME”
Neil Finn: “You know if you all call someone right now, we can double the size of this show. C’mon, hit your speed-dial right now!!!”
CROWD: “CHEER! YAY! beep beep beep”
ME: “#2. DIAL. ring ring”
JIM: “Oh god, not again...”
JIM’S PHONE: “ KRKRKRKRKR-SCREETCH-KRKRKRKRK”

See, Neil made me do it though. And yes mom, I would jump of a bridge if Neil told me to. Now here’s the weird bit. For about a year Jim kept wanting our old band to play an old Crowded House song called “Locked Out” and I always went “eh. It’s an OK song but...” followed by my reason d’jour not to play it (mainly lazyitus). So can you guess what song the band start playing just as Jim picks up? Yeah, “Locked Out” :-) Karma man. It’s a really good song too, we should do it sometime...

So I mentioned the Coachella Festival back up at the top. I knew Crowded House were playing there, but they were playing here too so I never really looked into it any further... until today. Turns out a bunch of my other favorite bands are playing, like Jarvis Cocker, Damian Albarn, Happy Mondays and Bjork to name just a few. And to really rub it in that I should have investigated it further, it’s being held in Indio CA, which is the last place we spent the night on our 3 day drive from Portland to Phoenix last year. Had I known it was only about a 3 hour drive on I10 west of here, in the desert where we once swam late at night in a pool while a gigantic blood red moon hung ominously in the night sky above us (no doubt a portend of doom, like oooh 2 more years of W), well I would have gone. Doh!

Rick Springfield plays Ostrich Fest

So its Saturday night, 8.25pm and I’m flicking through “Get Out” (our local what’s happening guide) when I see the truly great headline: “Rick Springfield plays Ostrich Fest”. After laughing hard for 10 minutes I realize that he took the stage at 8.30pm that night and there was no way we were going to make it in time for the show, doh :-(

For all the times that the Valley seems so much more hip then Portland, occasionally it betrays it’s humble beginnings. Yes this weekend was the 19th annual Ostrich Festival, celebrating the fact that “Ostrich ranching was once a prominent part of life in Chandler. Chandler and Maricopa County led the nation in raising ostriches for their stylish and expensive plumes.”

I’m ashamed to say we missed it all. Oh how I would have enjoyed seeing Rick Springfield amongst such other delights as the “Purina Incredible Dog Challenge”; a parade with high school marching bands, clowns and floats; karate demonstrations and a petting zoo. Just goes to show, one year you’re selling 18 million records and playing a doctor on TV, and the next you’re knee deep in ostrich shit!

Ah, I’m just jealous really, I’d have played the gig in a heart-beat ;-D