The other Chad Dickerson lives in Lexington, Kentucky and has a band called Switchmen. Chad handles guitar and vocals. You can find out all about them here:

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As those bards from Australia once sang, It’s a long way to the top / if you wanna rock and roll.

Here’s wishing the Switchmen success, from one Chad Dickerson to another.

. . . a portrait of the legendary figure in music and technology and his ideas about creativity, design, interactivity, spirituality and his collaborations with musicians over the years.

In the film, Moog explained that he “can feel what’s going on in a piece of electronic equipment… it’s something between discovering and witnessing.” [I love this phrasing. - CD] And he was convinced that many musicians come to “feel” a circuit in a similar way. In fact, musicians make such strong emotional connections with the electronics inside a Moog synthesiser that the inventor himself reached cult hero status.

Permanently changing the face of music, the Moog synthesiser went from being the centerpiece of a late-60s craze — appearing on records with such titles as Spotlight on the Moog, Moog Power, Music to Moog By, Country Moog, Moog Indigo, Exotic Moog and countless others — to an indispendable instrument for progressive rock bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes to predating the electronic dance music movement of today.

In the film (which is an eminently watchable 75 minutes), Moog and his colleagues and admirers speak to each other like the geeks that they are, talking shop about the various parts of the synthesizers, their modularity and tuneability, and the difficulty they had explaining the early models to musicians and others as they attempted to commercialize their work. While the filmmakers don’t position it this way at all, the discussion of Moog Music sounds very much like the tale of any technology startup, only the startup was founded in 1953, predating even the first known uses of the term “hacker.”

After I enjoyed the film so much, I checked Metacritic and saw that it got a surprisingly low score of 51. I dug deeper into the individual reviews and I think this Austin Chronicle review nails it:

Moog is a laudatory ovation to the man whose technical work has proved essential to numerous artists working today. As such, it provides only a smattering of social context for the electronic music explosion. Moog is an inventor’s movie all the way. . . There are things to be learned here, but it would take a real aficionado to geek out on all the knobs and circuit boards on display.

I’m not a hard-core music gear aficionado, but watching Moog was a sheer pleasure, even when I didn’t understand the specific technical aspects of the discussion. Set your Tivo for Moog, or buy it here. It’s a really, really delightful film for geeks (and Moog’s enthusiasm and joy of creation is enough for me to forgive his role in the rise of prog-rock — just had to say that!)

(Trailer below)

http://stream.qtv.apple.com/qtv/plexifilm/moogtrailer3_ref.mov

I first became aware of Laura Cantrell via her appearance on John Peel’s Peel Sessions in January 2001. If you’re not familiar with John Peel and the Peel Sessions, Peel (who died in 2004) was a legendary DJ and man of taste. His Peel Sessions ran from the 60s until his death and have included Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Pavement, White Stripes, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley. . . so it means a lot when someone like John Peel says this about an artist (referring to her first record, When the Roses Bloom Again):

My favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life is an LP by a New York woman born in Nashville called Laura Cantrell. It’s country, and I don’t know why I like it, but it has the same sort of effect on me as Roy Orbison had in the ’60s.

Her Peel Sessions appearance again in April 2001 made the top 125 all-time list of Peel Sessions, right there between Joy Division and Led Zeppelin (yeah, the list is in alphabetical order, but JOY DIVISION and LED ZEPPELIN!)

Like John Peel, I have a hard time explaining the effect that Laura Cantrell’s music has on me. Her voice is beautifully smooth and classic (note: just avoided temptation to use whiskey metaphor), with hints of Kitty Wells. In fact, Elvis Costello said of her: “If Kitty Wells made Rubber Soul, it would sound like Laura Cantrell.” The lyrics drip with authenticity but without a trace of the cloying self-consciousness that you often find in country music made by city-dwellers who are long-disconnected from the places and scenes they sing about. Her music is very real and very simple and utterly remarkable if you like real country music (if you don’t, please move along. . . nothing to see here).

Her new digital-only album Trains and Boats and Planes (available on Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic) is described on her site as “travel-themed, based on the Burt Bacharach-Hal David title track, along with thoughtfully-chosen songs by Roger Miller, Merle Haggard, John Hartford, Gordon Lightfoot, New Order, and three previously-released tracks.” Tonight, the standouts from the new album for me were Roger Miller’s “Train of Life” and Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings,” but the whole show was wonderful. I embedded a couple of snippets below from my Flip camera using Flickr Video:

There are lots of Laura Cantrell songs from this album and past albums available online, many as mp3 downloads:

• Almost 20 downloads on her site. My favorites are “Churches off the Interstate” and “When the Roses Bloom Again”.
• “Love Vigilantes” (New Order cover!) and “Roll Truck Roll” (both mp3s from Download.com)
• Her MySpace page

I don’t know when or where Laura Cantrell is playing again (the show I saw tonight is the only one listed on her gigs page), but be sure to keep an eye out. I waited seven years, but it was worth it!

(If you can’t catch her live, be sure to catch her radio show on WFMU, Radio Thrift Shop, where she plays other people’s good country music.)

Though the podcast didn’t get off the ground before Yahoo! came calling, I wrote well over 200 weekly columns at InfoWorld, and Jon figured prominently in two of them, one about the very successful New York CTO Club that he co-founded seven years ago (still going strong), and another about having the management sense to know when to step back from a situation and let things happen without interfering.

Jon and I still keep in touch, but now we talk mostly about our guitar-playing (a subject we discussed in the podcast) and music. Tonight, Jon told me to check out Andrew Bird (his latest album got a solid review from Pitchfork). I’ll put that on my list. . . .

I’m really glad to see Jon in the blogosphere, and I’m looking forward to reading more of what my favorite Aussie guitar-playing CTO has to say!

(For those of you not familiar with the Silver Jews, their Wikipedia entry reads in part: “The Silver Jews were always a conduit for David Berman’s brand of sardonic, countrified indie rock.” Hmmm. . . . “sardonic countrified indie rock” is about as close to my ideal as one could imagine, suggesting the perfect mixture of Stephin Merritt‘s raised-eyebrow lyrics, Gram Parson‘s “Cosmic American Music,” and a nice dose of Bakesale-era Sebadoh thrown in for good measure.)

So, it only makes sense that when I put on track one of the Silver Jews’ excellent 1998 record American Water (9.9 from Pitchfork — whoa!), an album we had never listened to together or even discussed before, we sang the first wonderful sardonic-countrified-indie-rock line in unison, completely unprompted:

In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection

In that simple shared moment, I experienced the powerful feeling of knowing that things were just plain right.

Well, I missed my chance to see him.

Several years ago, I used to spend time in Augusta, Georgia — James Brown’s hometown — and always loved how much the city embraced him despite his tawdry legal troubles. They still named a street after him (James Brown Boulevard) and eventually named the local civic center the James Brown Arena. I’m not sure if he was ever charged with any crimes in Georgia, but he was pardoned for his past crimes in South Carolina in 2003 and released a public statement:

God bless America on this beautiful day. I hope my pardon shows the youth that America is a beautiful country. I feel good!

James Brown helped make America a beautiful country. Rest in peace.

• Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: a look at the connection between manic-depressive illness and creativity. I bought a copy for myself — it’s a fascinating subject.
• George Jones’ autobiography I Lived to Tell All. Now, a title like I Lived to Tell All might seem a little melodramatic to some, but for George Jones, living to tell all is a truly unexpected achievement. Wikipedia describes George Jones as follows: “an American country singer known for his distinctive voice and phrasing that frequently evoke the raw emotions caused by grief, unhappy love, and emotional hardship.” That barely scratches the surface. Anyone who cares about American popular music (or humanity itself) should keep a turntable around loaded with a couple of scratchy George Jones records. George Jones lived his life squarely inside the agonizing parentheses in song titles known to all country music fans. . . If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will), These Days (I Barely Get By), A Picture of Me (Without You), Nothing Ever Hurt Me (Half As Bad As Losing You). These songs are clever in their expression of abject sadness (“these days I barely get by“), but never cute — they hurt every time. I saw George Jones perform at the Masonic in San Francisco in February 2000 (see photo) and the place was 2/3 empty. 1/3 full is a triumph for a man who once rode a lawn mower to the liquor store when his license had been revoked.

Life can be hard at times, and my mother’s old George Jones records taught me just how bad it can get (and the book I gave her was just a clear explanation of the story behind those records) — but they also taught me a little something about resilience and faith. (A 1999 piece about George Jones in Salon.com makes it all clear.)

So, what was your first Amazon order?

http://www.bix.com/a/ElL2e5l64z

Vote for me on Bix.com!

Welcome to Yahoo, Bix! We’re going to make beautiful music together.

For more on Beck and his puppets, check out these links:

• I’m a Puppeteer (puppeteer Rob Saunders’ personal blog)
• Beck puppets trash Radiohead’s dressing room in Dublin (video)
• Beck: Master of Puppets at Bonnaroo 2006 (interview with the puppeteers)
• Yahoo! Search for “beck puppets” turns up a lot of other good stuff

I love those damn puppets.

Beck with Mitchell, Caterina, Chad, originally uploaded by Yodel Anecdotal.

More on all of this later (time to rest!), but. . . . wow. (You all know Caterina. Mitchell was one of our photographers for the event.)