A few days ago, we asked you to submit questions for My Morning Jacket to be asked in our first-ever eMusic Twitter Interview. And ask you did! And answer they did! And now the truth can be told! Below the jump: the transcript of the inaugural eMusic Twitter Q&A! Spoiler alert: They’re totally into Krallice! I have to say, this band is a lot funnier than I initially thought. Even if you’re not a fan, this is absolutely worth a read.

From MMJ fan @bwshoaf: Favorite albums so far this year?
Floating Action Desert Etiquette, Washed Out Within and Without, Krallice Diotima, Centro-Matic Candidate Waltz & self-titled albums from Bon Iver, Yuck & Kvelertak

Fan @erikweber asks: Do you ever plan on doing an acoustic tour?
Maybe a campfire acoustic tour where the band wakes from their sleeping bags, roasts marshmallows for the crowd all the while accompanied by a symphony of trained crickets, hoo-ing owls & snoring beagles. Bring yer own log seat ‘n blanket.

From @meeler_time: What was the writing process behind “It Beats 4 U”? Did the guitar or drum part come first?
Jim brought the guitar batter in first to Patrick and me who cooked up the drum ‘n bass together Carl ‘n Bo then tended the oven, eagerly waiting to add the frosting and tasty fruits. Is it time for cake?

User @AKAdevondra wants to know: what are your favorite places to visit in the US?
Snoqualmie Falls, Shake Shack in Madison Sq Park, Oregon coast, Atlanta Botanical Garden, all 24,264 Subway locations in the US. Also an awkward 20 min trip up & down the St. Louis Arch in the innards of a washing machine w/a family I’ve never met before.

Fan @theycallmebum: How are setlists devised? Have the T5 shows impacted current setlists? Will you please play more from At Dawn?
Yeppers on them T5 shows. Some of those oldies were played for the first time & we fell back in love with a lot of ‘em, This year we’ve consciously been mixing things up by slipping those tunes into the set lists. Including a bunch from At Dawn

From @drock4048: Is there any connection with the theme song to Hawaii 5-0 and “Off the Record”?
The main riffs are played on the electric geetar and both were covered by Sammy Davis Jr.

From @Jack_Sparks: Having played fests of all sizes this summer do you approach a ‘Roo with 80k different than a smaller one like Mt. Jam?
We’ll tailor the set to match the feel of the fests & crowd & time of day. Soft ‘n sweet or dance party or brutality bonus But wherever we be we strive to provide you with the same quality live experience you’ve come to expect. Our guarantee since ’98.

From MMJ fan @jenniferlsutton: What are the backward lyrics in off the record?
It’s the recipe for supreme happiness & everlasting bliss as presented to you, the listener, in a backwards mumbled manner. Can’t reveal our secret recipe, but two key ingredients are red ripe strawberries & Lion-O from the Thundercats

From @CMdawn: How is it decided who plays which lead, intro etc btw Jim and Carl/Is it time for Tom to unleash a wicked bass solo?
Multi-tasking onstage is dangerous! If Jim gotsta sing Carl handles da intro. Solos b decided by intense day long games of HORSE. Also, there’s never an appropriate time for a wicked bass solo. The exception being Metallica’s “(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth”

From @Bert348: How does MMJ feel about being called one of greatest LIVE rock bands in the history of music?
We never have and never will cover the songs of legendary alt rock band LIVE. Ok, ONE time we played “Lightning Crashes”. But it was at my cousin’s bday party. It’s his favoritest song. And he made us all wear bald caps. And cry while we ate the cake.

MMJ Fan @Ben_Heine asks: You guys want to have dinner at my parent’s house when you’re in Tuscaloosa? Moms a good cook
Oh oh oh! That’s awfully kind of you. What’s on the menu?! FYI: We will require space for two RV sized hovercraft. We’ll send along our rider soon, which includes a bucket of circus peanuts (shelled!) & a tub of King Cobra

From @ALifeOnShuffle: What was your favorite part about playing/experiencing Wakarusa?
Midnite ride on the giant ferris wheel, watching Mega Man dance above the crowd during the set. Also, the octopus was very scary.

Fan @johnnYYacMMJfan: Describe the role of the Omnichord, from songwriting and demos, to recording and performance. When did you discover the Omnichord?
It is the Ouija board of musical instruments, allowing us to tap into the collective conscious past, present and the to-be. To harness the power cosmic and release its life-sustaining, positive energy in a series of joyful beeps and bloops .We found it buried in a tin box, adorned with jewels from an ancient BeDazzler, deep in the Catskill mountains. We fought trolls.

From @dmg541: How has your relationship w Erykah Badu evolved since your cover of “Tyrone?” Any chance for a collaboration track?
Twas a time when we adored her from afar. And now we adore her from afar but sometimes are blessed to share the stage w/her. We’d LOVE to collaborate on a tune somewhere down the road!

From @RunningOZ: Recent works by MMJ & other bands run 40-45 minutes I believe that’s the perfect amount of listening time, what say you?
I’m sorry there was this funny video on YouTube of a cat crying after being told his princess was in another castle Did you ask me something? Ohhhh, 40-45 min records. Yeah I just download the singles

Fan @thebonemline: what does it feel like for each of you during the solo of “One Big Holiday” when you play it live?
I get the sensation I’m in the Swiss Alps skiing, just me and a giant pink teddy bear, coasting down the mountain eating gumdrops.

Fan @marcoa_64: what inspired you to write something as gorgeous and soulful as the last verse of “Steam Engine”?
It was 2002 in Shelbyville, KY. After a long day of rehearsal we went to visit our pal, Riny, at the local dog pound They had just picked up the cutest lil’ litter of puppies from an old tobacco barn. And there was this one, with an adorable Superman curl on top his head. He looked up at us with his big sorrowful eyes. And barked “the fact that my hearts beating.. is all the proof you need”. And we just had to take him back to the studio.

MMJ fan @mclunch asks: Patrick, who are your biggest influences on the drums?
His name was Mahgeetah Art Blakey, John Bonham, Steve Gadd, Bruce Morrow…the list goes on and on.

Fan @flewintheair: Do Jim J.’s magical powers come from his beard? If so, I am not shaving tomorrow to give it a try.
I will answer the first question as Jm J. Bullock. Being Jm J. Bullock, I have no beard, but still have plenty of magical powers. I do, however, know plenty of dudes with beards who also have magical powers. Go figure.

Lastly, MMJ fan @spacejockey101 wants to know: Jim, if you had to take one album on a desert island, which one?
Would take the album Desert Etiquette by the band Floating Action

As we head into the 4th of July weekend with firecrackers in one hand and a frosty six-pack in the other, the eMusic staff thought we’d help soundtrack your next barbecue by offering some of our favorite reissues and best-of compilations — revolutionary records, if you will — for just $4.99 or less. As the old adage goes, there’s something for everyone here, from the minor-keyed moodiness of Joy Division, the Smiths and the Cure to the sucker-punch riffs of the Stooges, Black Sabbath and Pantera.

Tom Waits and Aphex Twin even emerged from hiding to share a pair of old fan favorites.

Let’s get into it then, shall we?

Happy Birthday, you fabulous asshole.

April was a phenomenal month for new releases here, and of course when the influx is so great many fantastic albums end up falling through the cracks.  Here are a few of the most criminally overlooked albums of April, please to be sharing your lists as well!

Yikes! – London Elektricity -  This album was not tagged properly until this week, so I didn’t even notice it come in at first.  One of Hospital Records  brightest returns with an album of moody, transcendent drum n bass I would emphatically recommend to fans of any electronic genre.  From the smokey lounge jungle of  “Elektricity Will Keep Me Warm” to the  euphoria of “The Plan That Cannot Fail”; and accompanied more often than not by vocalist Elsa Esmeralda, this album is a constant joy.  I was curious to see what he would do after his fantastic collaboration with Underworld on last years “Scribble“, and he certainly did not disappoint.

Son Lux – We Are Rising – Sophomore full length by avant-indie-tronic Anticon artist (say that 10 times fast).  This one doesn’t seem to be as sparse as his brilliant debut “At War With Walls And Mazes“, and the songwriting seems a tad more conventional but the arrangements are as inventive as ever.  He deftly blends horn sections, choral arrangements, synths and his own pained warble into complexly syncopated pseudo pop songs.

The New Regime – Speak Through The White Noise – The New Regime is just one dude, Ilan Rubin.  Coulda fooled me!  This record sounds massive, like a less falsetto Muse or earlier Radiohead.  Razor precise production and stadium sized hooks served up with more competence and conviction than one would expect of a single 22 year old.  This album is majestic, and it deserves a lot more attention than it has received.  Oh, and he was the drummer on the final Nine Inch Nails tour, which is always extra points in my book.

What’s that you say? 50 million new releases are not enough? You need something beardier? Something that smells vaguely of weed and hot tar? LOOK NO FURTHER, FRIENDS. Ye Olde Thunderstealers My Morning Jacket have arrived today to distract you from the Foo Fighters and TV on the Radio and poor old Paul Simon with a seven-minute epic jam from their forthcoming record Circuital — which, coincidentally, is also the name of this song. A world record has just been set for the space of time in which records become dated. “Nine Types of Light? Didn’t that come out forever ago?”

Download the new MMJ above for the cheap price of one email address, which the group will presumably use to update you should they happen to, I dunno, interview Gwyneth Paltrow.

Give it a listen, then tell us what you think.

Well, SNL was on again this past Saturday and, despite the best efforts of Dame Helen Mirren, it was kind of a dud. This season is stuck in a strange spot, pairing a genuinely good cast with some genuinely terrible writing. Real People Problems!

One thing that didn’t suck, though, was the Foo Fighters, whose new album, the great Wasting Light, is out tomorrow. I make no bones about my soft spot for this band. Watch them barrel through the first single, “Rope,” above.

Greil Marcus interviews D.A. Pennebaker about filming Bob Dylan from New Video Digital on Vimeo.

If you find yourself looking for a good reason to hate Bob Dylan and also have not seen D.A. Pennebaker’s legendary Don’t Look Back, well, my friend, let me introduce you to a little saying I like to call “two birds, one stone.” Pennebaker’s documentary is justifiably-storied, unsparing in its portrayal of a reckless and caustic young Dylan while also showcasing the man’s undeniable genius. (The scene in which he basically shames Donovan simply by playing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is one for the ages). Well, Don’t Look Back will be available on Blu-Ray for the first time in a few weeks and, in honor of its release, Flavorwire presents Pennebaker in conversation with the one and only Greil Marcus — himself a legend and also arguably the world’s foremost Dylan scholar. Listen to them get into it in the video above.

Marc Bolan’s musical career began as Tyrannosaurus Rex, a moniker under which he created a handful of whimsical folk records in the late 1960s, attracting influential fans and collaborators such as Tony Visconti and John Peel. With a new decade came a new sound and a shortened band name: 1970′s T. Rex introduced Bolan’s glam side via a batch of electrified Tyrannosaurus songs placed alongside new material. While 1971′s Electric Warrior, and its monster hit, “Bang a Gong (Get it On),” would eventually define Bolan’s career, it was 1972′s The Slider that presented T. Rex at its most fully realized — an artistic peak that Bolan would, unfortunately, never reach again.

In many ways, The Slider is Electric Warrior‘s sister album, a fact that has evolved into the critical shorthand “more of the same.” But a close listen reveals The Slider is the party to Electric Warrior‘s hangover remedy (despite the fact that they were released in the opposite order). Every one of The Slider‘s songs, even the acoustic-driven tracks, are slaves to the groove, with lush production — including strings! — and a huge sound throughout. If you don’t keep up your guard, they will get you in bed. Bolan is a riff machine, and the only thing catchier than his guitar licks are the earworm melodies that spill out across the room like an upturned bowl of marbles.

Continue reading Six Degrees of T. Rex’s ‘The Slider’

“He would fucking hate this comparison, but reading Christgau the first time was exactly like hearing Bob Dylan for the first time.”
–Rob Sheffield

To mark the publication of rock critic Rob Sheffield’s second book, an “I Love the 80s”-style tribute to the music of his youth called Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos took a unique approach to the author interview: a jukebox jury in which music critics, rather than songs, were the focus of discussion. You can read the final version of the interview here. But as a treat for all you music criticism diehards, I’ve posted the uncut interview after the jump.

Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield’s first book, Love Is a Mix Tape, is a deeply affecting, frequently funny account of his romance with his first wife, Renee Crist. Also a writer about music, Crist died, suddenly and without warning, on an ordinary day when the couple had been married only a few years, and were barely finished with their twenties.

The new Talking to Girls About Duran Duran goes further back—and it’s largely flat-out funny. Where Mix Tape is a ’90s book—Sheffield and Crist met in fall 1989—and its backdrop is both the pop radio of the early ’90s (when new jack swing and Eurodisco began to assert themselves on the charts, and rap had its great pop moment) and the weird Indian summer of the alt-rock surge, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran is—who’d have guessed from the title?—about the ’80s, each chapter keyed to a different song from the decade.

Sheffield grew up in Boston, where new wave impacted his consciousness in ways both obvious and surprising. Sheffield likes to joke, but he doesn’t condescend. Throughout, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran uses music as a prism for his own experiences during the ’80s as a teenager and then college student, trying to figure out the mysteries of womankind, working a memorable summer job delivering ice cream and pondering icons like Paul McCartney: “[The Rolling] Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols . . . set out to piss people off. But there’s no way they could possibly piss people off the way Paul does.” And, of course, Duran Duran, whose hold over women then and—improbably, as he notes—now sets the whole thing in motion.

Clearly, Sheffield is a lot of fun to talk music with. But for this interview, I wanted to tap into Rob’s deep store of knowledge about music writing as well. Both of us were fans of rock criticism before we started writing it, and it tends to be at the center of our conversations. So I decided to tweak the Jukebox Jury format: Rather than playing him songs to react to, I read him quotes from other rock critics, mostly about artists identified with the ’80s. Plenty of the music Talking About Girls zeroes in on is touched on here. But the talk roams further, to touch on Sheffield’s early writing career, the formative impact of specific pieces of music and music writing, and the overall landscape of pop—and not just the kind featuring cheesy synths. We spoke over a late weekday lunch at Enid’s in Brooklyn.

—

“Rhythm guitar. Rhythm guitar. Rhythm guitar.”
Joe Levy, liner notes to Luna, Live (Arena Rock, 2001)

It’s by someone you know well, and it’s about a band you like.

My first guess would be Pylon.

Later than that. East Coast.

The Feelies?

It’s the liner notes by Joe Levy to Luna’s live album.

That’s funny. It’s very like “rhythm guitar,” their live album.

You’ve known Joe Levy for a long time. When did you meet him?

You could just read me Joe Levy quotes! It’s funny how now, like, “rock criticking” isn’t even one of the Top 5 things in his Q rating. When he talks about music, he can still turn that on. But if that’s all he did, he’d still be . . . [suddenly dawning] That [quote] actually sounds like an allusion to the [Robert] Christgau and [John] Piccarella liner notes to Television’s live ROIR tape, The Blow-Up! The liner notes [to it] as well—like that person Christgau and Piccarella have to make the case for Television as a great guitar band to. I’ve always wondered who that was.

I totally have a guess. You first.

I would have guessed Robert Quine.

My guess has always been Greg Tate.

That would be a good one.

Because they mentioned . . .

[Miles Davis’s ’70s guitarist and Tate favorite] Pete Cosey. Those liner notes are superlative. Also, that was the first Television album I bought.

I met Joe at Yale. Joe founded a music magazine there with Julian Dibbell called Nadine, after a Chuck Berry song. He was like the rock guy everyone on campus kind of looked up to and knew. He had all these records that were often heard about but impossible to find. For instance, nobody [had] actually heard a Stooges album. Those albums were not only long out of print, but they were unfindable. If you were lucky, you might find a compilation with something from Raw Power. Joe was the guy who had Fun House.

If you’re a kid who’s obsessive about music, you like reading about it, because there’s just so much more information, you know? It’s weird how much of music culture in the ’80s and ’90s meant going to the ends of the earth to find a particular [record]. A group of four friends from school—we all made a pact that the first of us to actually find a copy of Dusty in Memphis would tape it for the other three.

It’s like some ’80s teen comedy where the main characters compete to lose their virginity.

Exactly! It’s like Britney’s Crossroads, except instead of riding to L.A. to find her birth mother . . .

I still remember in, like, 1989, I found a copy of the first Raincoats album, which was also an album that nobody could find. Everyone kind of knew about it because they had that one song on the [1980 Rough Trade compilation LP], Wanna Buy a Bridge? There were so few sources of information. You’d read. “Oh—there’s this band in London, the Raincoats. They have a violin player and they play punk rock and they’re women.” That’s all you’d hear about.

And you’d want to hear them.

Yes. And maybe years later, you’d be in the same room as Wanna Buy a Bridge?, and you’d hear “In Love,” and you’d think, “Oh my god—there’s more stuff like this?”

Eventually, I found the Raincoats’ first album and Dusty in Memphis the same day. It’s so funny: Later that day I went to a friend’s house for dinner, and everybody who came over was like, “Holy crap! That’s the Dusty Springfield album. Can we tape it?” We would tape the album—then put it on from the beginning and tape it again. Now it’s an album you hear at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

It’s really funny how much of it in the ’80s was being in the right place at the right time. To even hear a copy of a [rare] record—there was so much scrounging involved. I don’t miss the romance of that scrounging at all. You also bought a lot of shitty Dusty Springfield records hoping for a glimmer. There were a lot of [Springfield] records in the ’70s that just weren’t good at all.

—

“Liars till the end, they pretend their decade didn’t end around 1984-’85, when U.K. new pop conquered the world and went phfft.”
Robert Christgau, review of Duran Duran, Decade (Capitol, 1989), Christgau’s Record Guide: The ’80s (Pantheon, 1990)

[In the middle of the word “around”] Duran Duran, Decade. Of course. You could have stopped after “Liars till the end.” But also, I love the presumption that that’s the end. And also that he’s still insisting that their career ended when he decided it did. And yet that’s something I love about him. I fucking love him for sticking to his guns and still hating that shit.

When did you first encounter Christgau’s writing?

The first Consumer Guide I read was in the December 1981 Creem magazine. The Kinks were on the cover to celebrate Give the People What They Want. There were reviews of Pearl Harbor & the Explosions [and] Funkadelic—Christgau spending 100 words talking about The Electric Spanking of War Babies. It was like, “Holy crap, this music exists? What the hell is this?” There was a positive review of the new Ray Parker Jr. album. Being able to read somebody in print who’d go to bat for Ray Parker Jr. was mind-blowing. It’s not like other places in Creem magazine were talking about Ray Parker Jr.

A chapter in your book takes off from Ray Parker Jr.’s “A Woman Needs Love.” I could have used Christgau’s great line about him: “Blessed with a one-track mind in a 24-track world . . .”

The writing was so compelling and revelatory. He would give everything a chance. A couple months later, he gave a good review to the first A Flock of Seagulls album, and a good review to ABC’s The Lexicon of Love. As someone who was a teenager at the time, [I] had kind of gotten used to the idea that the adult world never could and never would have any sort of respect for this kind of stuff that I loved.

Right, you talk about that in the chapter on A Flock of Seagulls’ “Space Age Love Song”—that kind of teenybop new wave.

Yeah. And [Christgau was] not just going to bat for it, but hearing what it was trying to do as well as what it did, and appraising it on its own terms as well as his. That just kind of blew my mind—the idea that there was this adult writer who was willing to take Ray Parker Jr. and A Flock of Seagulls without condescending to them: “Oh, isn’t it funny that these records are so good?” I still have that copy of Creem magazine on my shelves.

He would fucking hate this comparison, but reading Christgau the first time was exactly like hearing Bob Dylan for the first time—you can picture the facial expression he’d make hearing that. [laughs] But I remember on the Top 40 station, WACQ, hearing “Like a Rolling Stone”—just hearing that voice and wanting to know more, wanting to know everything about it.

The fact that he liked A Flock of Seagulls also made his dismissal of Duran Duran actually mean something.

That’s why it bugged me that he didn’t like Duran Duran! There was a New Year’s Eve party a few years ago—the “Hey Ya!” New Year’s Eve—at a bar in Brooklyn. Ally is deejaying—my wife, then my girlfriend—and she’s playing “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Christgau just says, “You know, I hated this shit at the time . . . and I hate it now!” He goes up to Ally and says, “Don’t you have any Aztec Camera?” [laughs]

Did she?

She did not. But the idea that you go up to a girl who’s deejaying at a bar and ask for Aztec Camera as a replacement for Duran Duran—that’s principle. I admire that. And also that he loved Aztec Camera. I specifically remember a Consumer Guide where he said they sounded “like U2 with songs (which is all U2 needs).” It’s funny—it just seems like a throwaway line in an Aztec Camera review, but I was like, “That’s exactly the thing about U2,” who were one of my favorite bands, who were brand new at the time. It’s one of those things he can toss off. I guess also like with Dylan, it’s easy to underestimate how hard it is to pull off that kind of voice. You know how that Decade review ends, right? “Sometimes I think the little girls don’t understand a damn thing.”

You’ve done a lot of interviews for the book. Do you ever get tired of talking about Duran Duran?

No. I’ve been like a pig in shit. I get to talk about my favorite topic every day! I’m lucky if I get to have two conversations a year about Scritti Politti, you know?

—

“A great single is an exquisite thing. It doesn’t leave you hungry for more or curious as to the mating habits of the artists. It gets in, absorbs your entire being, and gets out—no guilt, no alibis.”
John Leland, Spin, August 1985

It’s not John Leland, right?

It is. It’s from his first “Singles” column in the second issue of Spin.

I was going to say John Leland, except I didn’t laugh when you read it, and John Leland is always funny. But I guess he was just explaining it.

I was tempted to quote his Milli Vanilli column, one of the greatest pieces of rock criticism ever.

The “Singles” columns—it’s funny to go back and read them now that they’re finally archived online, [and see] how completely ahead of the game Leland was. Every time a new column came out, there’d be “The A List” at the end, and you’d physically crave hearing all the records that he’d mentioned in it, some of which would be findable and some of which I’m still hoping to find. [laughs]

When you’re reviewing an album, you’re force-feeding it to yourself. But that’s what you do as a fan anyway; you get the record and listen to it 100 times a day when it comes out. The way a fan consumes a single is different. You live with it over time. You hear it on other people’s radios; you hear it against your will; you hear it on purpose. That’s where the pop process is. To me, it’s the most exciting way of listening to music.

It’s fair to say writing a book about singles is what I did [with Talking to Girls About Duran Duran]. The ’80s was such a singles-driven moment, in part because of the way that MTV changed pop music. There was no context at all. They had 24 hours [to fill], and there weren’t 24 hours of music videos in the world. So they had to play everything. If you stayed up all night watching MTV, you’d see all this wiggy shit that no radio programmer would have allowed in the door.

It basically brought Top 40 radio back, which had been dead for a decade, under the name CHR (Contemporary Hits Radio).

And it forced even individually formatted stations to become CHR stations.

The classic-rock station in my hometown, during the MTV putsch, kind of went CHR in that period. They were playing contemporary black records—something that would have been impossible three years earlier, and impossible three years later. You write in the book about that happening in Boston.

It did. WBCM was the rock station. They played a lot of synth-driven new wave, just because there was more of it. It was kind of funny—in 1982, which was such a pivotal year, they were playing [the Pointer Sisters’] “I’m So Excited.” They were playing [Marvin Gaye’s] “Sexual Healing.” They were playing King Sunny Adé.

Whoa!

I wouldn’t have heard it any other way. It’s weird—when people write about King Sunny Adé now, it’s almost always like, “Disappointed hopes, he should have been the next Bob Marley,” which is insane. I think it’s easy to forget the impact that he had, and also the way that he changed the rock audience in a lot of ways. [Ade’s 1982 album] Juju Music was a huge record in terms of the way it arrived as a new wave record to an Anglophone world. It had this really explosive, expansive effect. Now, it’s hard to find anything that’s written about Juju Music that isn’t like, “Well, this is his failed compromise with American production techniques.” From a certain perspective, maybe that’s true. But it’s still the one I play.

—

“Her position is clear. If he was rude, so what? You can excuse all that, you must excuse all that, because what it allows to exist—his music—is ultimately much more important.”
Chris Heath, “The Man Who Would Be Prince,” Details, November 1991

Is the boy in the song rude?

No, the person the writer is trying to interview is rude. It’s Chris Heath on Prince. The “her” is Martika.

[laughs] That’s awesome. That’s a pretty good summary. He had the “Rude Boy” [button] on the cover of 1999. I can hardly think of an artist less suited, and an interviewer less suited—I can hardly think of a worse pairing than Chris Heath and Prince. He tends to exhaust people by talking them out. He tends to bring out the loquacious [side of his subjects].

We’ve talked before about being big Chris Heath fans. I picked this one because it’s from Details, which you wrote for in the ’90s. Back then the magazine had excellent music coverage—about half English writers, like Heath, and half American.

A lot of that was James Truman, the editor who then became editorial director. Then John Leland took over and brought me in. Part of it was very driven by James Truman’s tastes, which were very ’80s, new wavy, Anglophile-y—mostly stuff that was Bryan Ferry-esque. If you wanted to write about anything and you wanted to pitch it to editors at Details, finding the Bryan Ferry connection to it was key. “P.M. Dawn are kind of the Roxy Music of hip-hop!” Roxy Music were so interested in everything [that] you could relate anything to Roxy Music. And there was never an editorial [directive] like, “OK, you’ve mentioned Bryan Ferry too many times in this section.”

The worst thing James Truman could say about something is that it was “rock-criticky.” He looked back with a certain amount of distaste at his own having come up through the rock-critic ranks in London. He once wrote that one of the first things he [covered] was, he saw this terrible new live band and couldn’t believe how bad they were, and wrote a terrible review. It was the Sex Pistols. He was like, “I should have known that was a sign of my future in rock criticism.”

For the most part, Details was very committed to stars. It closed them off to some things—Guided by Voices, for whatever kind of loss that was. Even writing about Guided by Voices [involved] comparing them to Roxy Music—which is stretching the Roxy Music comparison to its breaking point. That’s why they basically made Björk their house artist at a time when she was getting no airplay in America, no attention from anywhere else in America.

She was really big in clubs, though, and that’s an area Details excelled at covering. In fact, I think you were the one who wrote about the Bucketheads’ “The Bomb!” in 1994. I was really happy to see that because I’d been dancing to that song almost every night I went out that whole summer.

Too funny. [sings in falsetto] “These sounds keep falling in my mi-i-i-i-ind.”

—

“Galaxie 500, Today (Aurora): Everything you ever sorta liked about mid-period J. Richman without any of the embarrassing jizz.”
Byron Coley, “Underground: 80 Excellent Albums of the ’80s,” Spin, January 1990

[laughs] Would that be B. Coley?

Yes. He’s from Boston, right?

He was Western Mass., which might as well be another planet. And because he was always writing about, “I was listening to this record in my backyard looking up at the trees, out of my mind on windowpane and Canadian Club”—it was very non-urban. He was someone who I loved because he made no pretense at all to like stuff that he didn’t like. I mean: I wouldn’t have traded record collections with him. But you could really trust the parameters of his taste. I remember he wrote something in Spin once about, “I’ve heard 40 Jandek albums, and I’ve never heard a Janet Jackson song.” It wasn’t like he was making the case that Jandek was more important. He was explaining why he didn’t need to make the case.

Your book is almost the opposite of that—very much about mainstream ’80s pop. You also talk about the Replacements and the Smiths, who sort of epitomize “college rock,” and Pavement is a touchstone in Love Is a Mix Tape. But I’m curious about your relationship as a listener to more underground ’80s rock. Did you like what was referred to back then as “pigfuck”—bands like Big Black and Pussy Galore?

Yes. Loved it. Part of the thing with “pigfuck” is that the [term] “indie rock” wasn’t around. So people were still calling all that stuff “post-punk,” which sounds really weird now.

It has specific time-period resonances now.

[Back then], you would call the Minutemen post-punk. You would call the Feelies post-punk. You would call ’Til Tuesday post-punk, you know? [laughs] You would call Lloyd Cole and the Commotions post-punk. A lot of people would call Run-D.M.C. post-punk. It was becoming really useless and difficult as a catchphrase, and “indie rock” was a couple of years away. So “pigfuck” was awesome because it described a specific sound. Those were such great records. I never saw Pussy Galore live. I’ve been told I didn’t miss much. But those records are fantastic.

—-
“‘I Feel Love’ is the windmills of my mind.”
Chuck Eddy, The Accidental Evolution of Rock & Roll (Da Capo, 1997)

Is that Frank Kogan?

Close.

Chuck Eddy?

Yes.

Chuck would listen to everything, and had this amazing ability to come to a record cold—to say what makes it sound good right now. He had this thing about Jason and the Scorchers in Creem. He said, “Why would anybody who ever heard Lynyrd Skynyrd ever listen to Jason and the Scorchers?” I was really kind of shocked by that. I thought, “Shouldn’t Jason and the Scorchers get extra credit for trying something different?” He didn’t grant anybody extra credit for trying anything different. It was all about what got done.

In the 1986 Pazz & Jop [Critics Poll, the Village Voice’s annual survey], he said, “One of the things 1986 really brought home to me is that the average rock record is as useless and a lot less durable than its average pop competitor”—I think “competitor” is the word he used. He listed a lot of bands nobody remembers now, like Scruffy the Cat and the Lucy Show and the Mighty Lemon Drops, and said, “They’re sloppy, they can’t write songs, and their tiny budgets don’t allow for production values, which does make a difference when catchiness is the only virtue you’re peddling.”

Did that crystallize something for you?

Definitely. Part of it is that he was writing about stuff that otherwise wasn’t getting a lot of critical attention. Maybe my favorite piece of his was “Whitesnake Can Go Eat Puke,” in the Voice in 1987. It was a roundup of pop-metal bands. It was Def Leppard, Poison, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, a couple of others, and Whitesnake. He was ranking them: “Poison and Bon Jovi are great, Leppard’s going down the tubes”—later revised, obviously—“Crüe’s improving, and Whitesnake can go eat puke.”

The leeway that they gave him to do something like this—he talked about how Pussy Galore and Mötley Crüe were very similar bands, both trying to do the same thing. He said, like, “Pussy Galore made better records, but Mötley Crüe can probably put on a better live show than the one Pussy Galore did when I saw them last week. So could Peter Tosh.” Peter Tosh had probably been dead for a week at that point. Too soon!

Obviously it became kind of a standard trope for him to compare a record to something that was getting a lot of print media attention. That’s too easy to do. That later became something he would repeat past the point where it was useful.

I’ve always enjoyed reading him more on singles than on albums. Because the Voice section was so album driven, sometimes he’d have to squeeze an album into a few grudging sentences. They let him review Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue” when it came out. He said, “This is the greatest single of 1987—and Byron Coley doesn’t know it exists.” It’s like, “Who’s gonna get this joke?” That’s something I admired about Chuck. He never let that get in his way.

—

“Though Chris Lowe’s airy, bohemian dance rhythms again seem to suggest a salon more than a disco (nothing wrong with that), there’s a difference in Neil Tennant’s voice, and in the cadences he builds his words around. His naïveté—the assumed, artificial, self-protecting naïveté of someone who could too easily have given himself over to cynicism—is gone.”
Greil Marcus, “Real Life Rock Top Ten,” Artforum, October 1993

[Simon] Frith?

It’s Greil Marcus.

He’s writing about Very?

Yes.

Very is a strange record, my friend. It doesn’t fit into their career at all. It doesn’t fit into 1993 at all. It doesn’t fit into the history of pop music at all. It’s a fluke. It’s completely bizarre.

I think it’s their best album.

I agree.

I was tempted to quote him on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” from the 1987 Pazz & Jop.

[Quoting] “What possible words could we have come up with to fit this melody?” There was a Greil Marcus comment in the 1986 Pazz & Jop as well, about why his favorite record of the year was Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going.” Have you read this?

Yes, where he calls pop radio “a good, weird machine.”

That was a huge, huge, formative statement. The way it talked about a way of listening to pop music—it’s so ingrained as a pop fan. That was a time when Pazz & Jop would come out and people would use it for a manifeto-y sort of platform.

When did you begin reading Greil Marcus?

I first read his byline in the Village Voice–a review of Bonzo Goes to Washington’s “5 Minutes.” It might have been the [same] Voice with Richard Goldstein on MTV. I wish I still had a copy. The headline was “What’s Art Got to Do With It?” He was talking about David Lee Roth, Cyndi Lauper, Billy Idol. I wish I still had a copy of that. I wish there was a handy anthology of all this really cool ’80s music criticism that you can only find on microfiche. I know how to use microfiche, but kids today . . .

They seem to think those things only exist if they’re on the Internet.

And trying to tell them to go to the library and read something . . . [shakes head]. I was a librarian. Part of why I loved being in and working at a library is that it meant reading and listening to my Walkman, which were my two favorite things. After I got off my shift, I would go to another room in the library with the microfilm. You could often find Village Voices and Boston Phoenixes archived, back to the ’70s.

You could read Greil Marcus’s [Voice] review of [Van Morrison’s] Veedon Fleece six months after it came out, when he said, “This album came out, I wrote a good review, forgot about it. Then I heard it at a friend’s house the other day for dinner and was like, ‘This is great. What is it?’ ‘Well, it’s Van Morrison. I bought it because you said it was good.’” And he does a whole new review. Writing about records six months after they came out is usually more interesting.

You obviously have gotten to do that with the new book.

A lot of listening to music is memory, and a lot of memory is listening to music. It’s funny that music is always in the present. It always confronts you with the new, the right-now. But it’s always connected to memory. Even if you’re writing about a song that’s playing right now, you’re always writing about it after the fact. It’s always after the moment. Especially writing about dance music—if you can call it a genre of pop-music criticism, it’s my favorite genre, because that’s built into it. The impossibility of trying to recapture that moment—even if you’re writing about something you heard last night, the immediacy of it makes it more exciting to read. There’s something retrospective built into it.

—

“Marshall Crenshaw presents our hero as prime date bait: he longs for a ‘Cynical Girl,’ doesn’t have any interest in ‘The Usual Thing,’ and promises to take his pick ‘Rockin’ Around in NYC.’ Sign me up.”
Renee Crist on Marshall Crenshaw, Spin Alternative Record Guide (Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks, eds., 1995)

Yes, Renee wrote that.

Obviously Love Is a Mix Tape is about your relationship with Renee, but I wondered if you could talk a little about her as a critic.

It’s funny, because she was an obsessive music fan and a writer who’d never done a lot of writing about music. Like a lot of [fiction] writers in the ’80s, she would always have music in there to set the scene, or characters discussing music. But the idea that you might cut the bullshit and just write about music seemed like cheating in a way. She was like, “I’m not an expert.” The idea that she could do this and was qualified to do this is something that she just needed encouragement [for]: “You don’t need to fit it into this really elaborate, boy-brain framework.” More than anybody, Madonna gave Renee a voice of freedom as a critic, I would say, and a writer. The first time she wrote about Madonna, she turned a corner.

I think it kind of surprised her how much it freed her up as a writer to write about music, without having to do the thing of, “I’m going to have a character who listens to this kind of music.” It freed her to listen to all sorts of different stuff. Just because as a writer, you would write about De La Soul, and you could write about Pavement, and you could write about Madonna, and that could all be part of who you were.

Her family was so musical. They were readers but they weren’t academics. Her grandparents were coal miners. She was the first one on either side of her family to go to college. [But] everybody in her family sang, played—and she could do that. She could pick up a guitar and learn a song in a couple hours. I was so fucking jealous, you know?

It’s interesting that she had that musical background, and was a writer, but came to music writing in such a roundabout way.

And also that she came to things as a fan, and as a girl fan. I was always amused by the ways boys and girls listen to music differently. One day I came back [home] from working at the library. She said, “I’ve decided I like the Fall. They’re just like the B-52’s: One guy with a guitar playing this one surf riff over and over again, and a girl in the background going, Ooo-ooh-wah! Ooo-ooh-wah!” She played that song “L.A.”: “[Mark E. Smith] is just Fred Schneider, except now he’s got a Northern English accent, and the girl is Brix [Smith] instead of Kate and Cindy.” I was like, “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying that really fucks me up to hear you say that.” I can think of friends who’d become violent at that suggestion. But she was right.

More arrivals from the WMG vaults today, sure to satisfy no matter what your personal tastes. And be warned: this is just the first of many Wednesday catalog drops, as we slowly bring the rock and pop legends to eMusic.

Today sees the arrival of two artists who couldn’t be further apart on the stylistic spectrum: Led Zeppelin and the Cars. I have an ambivalent relationship with classic rock — Hendrix and the Doors never really clicked for me, nor did many other FM radio titans — but I love Led Zeppelin. They pull off a blunt and abrasive reconfiguration of the blues, and I still hear menace and power in their music (their take on “When the Levee Breaks” is, to these ears, essentially a White Stripes song). I can find no fault in those first six records, every one of them essentially a rock and roll flamethrower. Legendary rock scribe Lenny Kaye walks you through their catalog in this outstanding Led Zeppelin Icon hub (even if you’re not a fan of the band, Lenny’s writing is simply phenomenal) and Dan Epstein uses Led Zeppelin’s III as a starting point in this excellent Six Degrees to link you to the records that inspired the masters — and the albums that they themselves inspired.

And if your tastes fall a bit more on the New Wave end of things — Ladies & Gentlemen, the Cars. Ric Ocasek smuggled irresistible pop hooks in ’80s pop dressing, and some of these songs have choruses for days. And if you already know these records, check out Melissa Maerz‘s fantastic Six Degrees of Candy-O, where she uses the Cars’ masterpiece as a springboard to discovering other power pop classics.