Search Results for: This Recording

Whoomp! (There It Was)

Longreads Pick

Twenty years ago, Steve Rolln and DC the Brain Supreme released their hit “Whoomp! (There It Is)”. The story behind the one-hit wonder:

“When he learned about the chant, Whoomp! There it is­, in the summer of 1992, he pitched the idea for a bass-heavy party song to Steve. Both men were now 26 and seriously considering their futures in the music business. They didn’t have a full album or a deal with a record label, and no one was paying attention to the one-off songs they were releasing in the club. With ‘Whoomp!’ though, DC thought they had something—even if he hadn’t written lyrics yet. Make a few beats, DC told Steve. Do the bass your way.

“At the recording studio in his house, Steve put together five beats and brought DC over to listen. They were good, DC said. But one stood out. Steve had sampled a 1980 dance track, ‘I’m Ready,’ by an Italian group named Kano. He’d heard the song years earlier and especially liked the synthesized, funked-out intro. To the Kano sample, he overlaid the bass—a sort of BOOOOOM-booooooooom rumble—and then the cymbals.”

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: May 31, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,839 words)

articles read & loved no. 51

dietcoker:

Billy Joel Pays Tribute to Phil Ramone: ‘He Was the King’

Longreads Pick

A personal reflection on the relationship between a musician and his producer. Ramone, who produced for Joel, Paul Simon, Barbra Streisand and others, died March 30 at age 79:

“Phil perceived that recording hadn’t been fun for me for a very long time. The process was like pulling teeth. I don’t want to do 15 to 20 takes. I start to hate the song. If I gotta do more than a half a dozen takes, I’m ready to leave. I don’t wanna beat something to death. I just want to be as spontaneous and improvisational and free-wheeling and then I can walk away. I don’t think it’s a matter of laziness, it’s a matter of being in love. You gotta love what you’re doing. If you love what you’re doing, you’re gonna do a great job. If you’re starting to dislike the process, you’re gonna hear it on the recording.”

Author: Billy Joel
Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Apr 3, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,361 words)

Confessions of a Corporate Spy

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] A competitive intelligence consultant on how he acquires information about competitors for various companies:

“As the sales manager and I surfed Talbots’s website together, looking for the green mini my wife saw on the website earlier that day, I mentioned offhand that I had just graduated from business school. I talked about how tough it had been to find a ‘real’ job and said I did some business research now, casually identifying the analysts out in California who had hired me. I mentioned that I was really interested in retail stuff—that, heck, I was helping write a report on it for investors, in fact. And wow, isn’t the retail world weird these days with the recession and all? Thus began a conversation about the business.

“Apparently that store had been having a great year. Best in the region. Hitting its numbers. What numbers? Oh! You must be proud. Any younger folks biting on this new stuff?

“I fingered the cell phone in my front shirt pocket, to see if the voice recorder was still working. No, I didn’t tell the manager I was recording her. Legally, in Georgia, I didn’t have to.”

Source: Inc.
Published: Feb 2, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,373 words)

Suds for Drugs

Longreads Pick

Tide detergent is known as “liquid gold” on the black market, and is being stolen from stores by the cases in exchange for drugs:

“As the cases piled up after his team’s first Tide-theft bust, Thompson sought an answer to the riddle at the center of the crimes: What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning. ‘We never promised to go easy on them, but they were willing to talk about it,’ Thompson says. ‘I guess they were bragging.’ It turned out the detergent wasn’t ­being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: ‘Liquid gold.’ The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.”

Published: Jan 6, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,848 words)

Deadhead

Longreads Pick

A history of the Grateful Dead, as told through its concert recordings:

“After Garcia died, Lesh was briefly involved in vetting the live releases from the vault. He also spent a great deal of time listening to the output of the final years, hoping to find material worth releasing, but came across little that made the grade. ‘It’s tremendously time-consuming, and often really boring, to listen back to what you did years ago,’ he said. ‘What bores me the most is listening to show after show, and it’s just average. You’re just going through the motions. Everything seemed better at the time than it turns out to be on tape.’ When he listens to music today, it tends to be Bach. ‘I also listen to a lot of country music, you know, like the new country music. Brad Paisley.’

“When I asked him about last year’s giant Europe ’72 release, he said, ‘I have to admit, I have not listened to it.’ It should surprise no one that Lesh can recall little or nothing of many Heads’ cherished nights. ‘Sometimes I remember what they looked like, what they felt like,’ he said. I ran a few dates by Lesh, mentioning the venue, the context, the set list, the high points—such as a certain transition in Scar->Fire. ‘Scar-Fire?’ he repeated, unfamiliar with the shorthand. I may as well have been a Ukrainian Trekkie accosting Leonard Nimoy on the street. ‘The Fox in Atlanta? I don’t remember,’ Lesh said, with a look that seemed to combine apology and condescension. The eighties dates in particular provoked a curdled look. ‘I may have consciously blocked out some of this stuff,’ he said. ‘It was very distressing to see Jerry fall apart. It seemed like the negation of everything we’d ever worked for. It wasn’t a tribe or a cult or a boys’ club, or anything like that. It was a living organism of several people. It was Homo gestalt. Did you ever read Theodore Sturgeon? “More Than Human.” Check it out. That’s the conceptual matrix.’

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 19, 2012
Length: 49 minutes (12,404 words)

Lizards’ Colony

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] An Iraqi-born American woman works as an interpreter inside a prison camp:

“She opened the door of the trailer, the rising sunlight submerging her. The still air was saturated with extreme humidity, making it feel like Basra, and the temperature was close to thirty-five degrees Celsius. The heat might have been tolerable but not the humidity, which left heart, soul, and spirit filled with loathing. Besides, something somewhere was making a stench like rotten eggs—no, decaying fish. Was it the sewers or the rank smell of the sea? Was she imagining it? Was this a result of the shock of the rape that had kept her in the hospital for ten days? Who could say?

“During those ten days she had consumed nothing but liquids. How could a person work in a hostile environment with everyone else lying in wait? She was raped and lacerated. She had entered a hospital the first day and had received her work there; no one cared about what had paid happened to her. Before she had time to heal, a load of documents had been dumped on her head, documents she had to review: dozens of tape recordings for her to hear and reconcile with the huge, companion file. She started in the hospital and then finished in the small, cramped, stifling trailer. She read while the pains racking her midsection grew increasingly intense and tears came uninvited to her eyes. She speculated about the appearance of Ahmad, the able-bodied terrorist covered by this huge file and the many tapes. He was no doubt an awe-inspiring, powerful, grand giant with a muscular body. She gazed at the sky. Why did it look pale blue in the morning?”

Published: Nov 9, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,665 words)

Moderately successful indie rock groups like Grizzly Bear have found it difficult to earn a living that would place them solidly in the middle class:

For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. ‘People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,’ says Droste. ‘Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.’ Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with ‘a nice little “Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.” ’ They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (‘Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage’), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. ‘I just think it’s inappropriate,’ says Droste. ‘Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.’

“Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?” — Nitsuh Abebe, New York magazine

More by Abebe

Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?

Longreads Pick

Moderately successful indie rock groups like Grizzly Bear have found it difficult to earn a living that would place them solidly in the middle class:

“For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. ‘People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,’ says Droste. ‘Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.’ Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with ‘a nice little “Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.” ’ They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (‘Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage’), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. ‘I just think it’s inappropriate,’ says Droste. ‘Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.'”

Published: Oct 1, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,854 words)

Neil Young Comes Clean

Longreads Pick

Inside the secluded life of the legendary musician—still stubborn, still writing songs and now the author of a new memoir:

“We would spend a few hours creeping along — he drove slowly but joyfully, as if the automobile were a recent invention — on our way there or on our way from there, the ranch where Young lives with his wife, Pegi, and their son, Ben. His longtime producer and friend, David Briggs, who died in 1995, hated making records here, deriding the hermetic refuge as a ‘velvet cage.’

“In addition to the studio, where more than 20 records have been made, there is an entire building given over to model trains, another where vintage cars are stored and another piled with his master recordings. Llamas and cows roam under cartoonishly large trees. It seems like a made-up place, an open-air fortress of eccentricity meant to protect the artist who lives there. But what it has most of all is not a lot of people.

“‘I like people, I just don’t have to see them all the time,’ he said, laughing. David Crosby, his bandmate in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, used to describe the complicated route into his ranch as ‘my filtering system,’ Young said.

Author: David Carr
Published: Sep 19, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,420 words)