Search Results for: music

Drug Life: A Reading List

1. “Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing and Death.” (Shane Morris, Bro Jackson, September 2013)

Every batch of Molly is different. And that’s what makes the pills or powder you’re buying at your local music festival so dangerous. Shane Morris offers a first-person account of his time in both the EDM and Molly industries.

2. “Is Marijuana Withdrawal a Real Thing?” (Malcolm Harris, Aeon, January 2014)

When the author takes a smoke break after five years, his dreams are disturbing enough to send him looking for answers in medical journals and user forums.

3. “The New Face of Heroin.” (David Amsden, Rolling Stone, April 2013)

In case you’ve missed the swathe of NPR reports, Vermont is a plaid-clad heroin hotspot, “conjuring up images more commonly associated with blighted inner cities than a state with the nation’s fifth-lowest unemployment rate and a populace that is 95 percent white.”

 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

When Instruments Are Replaced by Computer Software

At Oxford American, writer and musician Ginger Dellenbaugh looks at how the steel guitar established itself as an American instrument, and why there may be so few people mastering it today:

Recently, I met a friend at his studio in East Nashville to listen to some of his new demos. The second track featured a beautiful pedal steel solo.

“Who played that?” I asked.

“No one,” he answered, pulling up a window on his computer. “It’s Wavelore.”

Wavelore is an online company that offers software for the replication of what, until now, were instruments that were difficult to convincingly reproduce digitally: dobro, pedal steel, theremin, zither. The Wavelore Pedal Steel Guitar is a software library that uses single note samples, instead of pre-recorded licks or patterns, to let you design custom pedal steel guitar sounds without ever getting near an actual instrument. If you play around with the pitch bender and add some reverb, it is difficult to distinguish the software from a real player when it’s set into a track. There is even a function that distinguishes between blocking (muting) a string with a pick or with the side of your palm. The sounds I had thought were played by a session player were, in fact, oblong black boxes on my friend’s monitor where the pedal steel line was represented by constantly morphing, nebulous green wisps. Technology has finally caught up with the complexities that had protected the pedal steel from digital replacement: one can now get an authentic pedal steel sound without using a real player.

Read the story.

Photo: Graham Hellewell

Spinning Steel Into Gold

Longreads Pick

How the steel guitar established itself as an American instrument, and why there are few people who mastering it today:

When I ask about young players, many guitarists just shrug. In the last ten years, many of the greatest pedal steel players have passed away: Jeff Newman, Tom Brumley, Hal Rugg, John Hughey. These days, Dan Dugmore, Russ Pahl, Mike Johnson, and Paul Franklin are the main session players in Nashville. In a place where you can find a lead guitarist on almost every corner, and which has experienced a musical renaissance of sorts in the last decade, it’s surprising that all four still remain the go-to steel players in town, despite the generation gap. There just isn’t a new wave of young players coming up who can replace the quality of the old guard.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Apr 15, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,291 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by Jessica Rinaldi / Boston Globe staff

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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Last Hand-Me-Down: Retracing My Brother’s Life Through His Clothes

Tom MolanphyLoud Memories of a Quiet Life (OutPost 19) | May 2012 | 18 minutes (4,652 words)

Tom Molanphy earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He freelances for 10Best/Travel Media Group at USA Today and teaches creative writing, composition and journalism at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. This essay previously appeared in “Loud Memories Of A Quiet Life,” published by OutPost19, and our thanks to Molanphy for allowing us to reprint it here.

Many things conspired
To tell the whole story.
Not only did they touch me,
Or my hand touched them:
They were
So close
That they were a part
Of my being,
They were so alive with me
That they lived half my life
And will die half my death

– from “Ode to Things” by Pablo Neruda

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 for Paul

It’s dark and quiet in my brother’s closet. Brian, my other brother, rummages through bathroom drawers, rattling painkillers in their bottles. He’s checking for used razors, combs, brushes — anything with hair or skin or “part of Paul.” My Dad, on his knees in the living room, jimmies the lock on a long, black trunk, a keepsake of Paul’s from our Uncle Jack. He clears his throat in the deep, rumbling way he does before diving into a tough job. We’re each looking for what to take and what to leave. Read more…

Naked and Famous

Longreads Pick

A profile of photographer Ryan McGinley, whose work has influenced advertising, film, music videos, and Instagram:

One of McGinley’s portraits of McChesney—taken in the bathroom of a gay club into which he dragged a mini trampoline for her to bounce naked on—was used as the lead image for his Whitney show. In it, Lizzy is caught in midair, feet a blur, mouth caught in the earliest milliseconds of a smile. The background is bisected at her torso—from the waist down, it’s all graffıti, but from the waist up, it’s a celestial mural. Her head pops up between two spacecrafts; her breasts—obscured by her own wrist—look to be about Saturn-sized. Twelve years later, it’s still one of McGinley’s most collectable photographs. José Freire calls it “one of the most beautifully optimistic things you’ll ever see.”

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 10, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,028 words)

The Business of Books: A Reading List

1. At the small publishing company where I work, the pace these past few months has been chaotic. We send representatives to book festivals in L.A., Tucson, Philadelphia, the D.C. suburbs and New York City. We didn’t get to AWP in Seattle, though, so I was delighted by David W. Brown’s write-up for The Atlantic, “11,800 People Sharing in the Existential Agony of Writing.”

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The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie

Longreads Pick

Sullivan searches for the real story behind two phantom voices that recorded songs for Paramount in the early 1930s:

No grave site, no photograph. Forget that — no anecdotes. This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on. The objects themselves — the fewer than 10 surviving copies, total, of their three known Paramount releases, a handful of heavy, black, scratch-riven shellac platters, all in private hands — these were the whole of the file on Geeshie and Elvie, and even these had come within a second thought of vanishing, within, say, a woman’s decision in cleaning her parents’ attic to go against some idle advice that she throw out a box of old records and instead to find out what the junk shop gives. When she decides otherwise, when the shop isn’t on the way home, there goes the music, there go the souls, ash flakes up the flue, to flutter about with the Edison cylinder of Buddy Bolden’s band and the phonautograph of Lincoln’s voice.

Published: Apr 12, 2014
Length: 55 minutes (13,953 words)

A Kurt Cobain Reading List in Reverse Chronological Order

Every generation has that one unforgettable death that bears the question, “Where were you when ____ died?” For baby boomers, it was JFK. For the cool music-minded baby boomers, it was John Lennon. And, for Generation Xers, like myself, it was Kurt Cobain. Like generations past, you never forget where you were when a cultural icon dies. For me, the day the news broke that Kurt Cobain died is permanently etched in my mind because I was there.
—Former Billboard editor Carrie Borzillo

Twenty-seven years ago, in December 1987, three kids in Aberdeen, Wash. formed the original line-up of Nirvana. They recorded a 10-song demo the next month. Bleach was released on Sub Pop six months later, followed by Nevermind in September, 1991. It opened at #144 on the Billboard charts. The next January, it hit #1, and the band played “Saturday Night Live” that same night. Three months later they were on the cover of Rolling Stone. In Utero, their third and final album, was released in September 1993, debuting at #1 on the Billboard charts and selling 180,000 copies within a week of its release. Seven months later, Kurt Cobain was dead; a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

That was 20 years ago. Nirvana will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this Thursday. Kurt Cobain’s life and legacy have been examined in far too many books, dissertations and teenage diary entries to name. This list is the opposite of comprehensive; instead it offers seven specific snapshots.

The Chemistry of an Echo: On the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, investigating copycat suicide and the lasting influence of the Nirvana icon (Candace Opper, Guernica, April 1, 2014)

According to Opper, Cobain’s death was arguably the first major celebrity suicide since Marilyn Monroe’s passing in 1962. This piece, which examines both Cobain’s death and the phenomena of suicide contagion, provides a fascinating look at how suicide prevention specialists sprung into action after the tragedy, providing resources to devastated fans.

Who Killed Kurt Cobain? (Tim Kenneally & Steve Bloom, High Times, April 1996)

Two years after Cobain’s death, High Times investigated the rumors that foul play—and not a self-inflicted gunshot wound—were to blame.

Kurt Cobain’s Final Tour (Amy Dickinson, Esquire, February 1996)

Crisscrossing the country with Courtney Love, this story follows the strange saga of Cobain’s earthly remains, which, in search of nirvana, are divided, molded, stuffed in a teddy bear, held up in customs, and inhaled by many).

Kurt Cobain’s Downward Spiral: The Last Days of Nirvana’s Leader (Neil Strauss, Rolling Stone, June 1994)

Rolling Stone traces Cobain’s final days—from his nearly fatal drug overdose in Rome to the discovery of his body one month later in Seattle.

Cobain to Fans: Just Say No (Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 1992)

An LA Times interview in the living room of Cobain’s Hollywood Hills apartment; he addresses drug rumors and tenderly explains that as a new father he doesn’t want his daughter “to grow up and someday be hassled by kids at school… I don’t want people telling her that her parents were junkies.”

Kurt and Courtney Sitting In a Tree (Christina Kelly, Sassy Magazine, April 1992)

From the seminal teen magazine Sassy, a cover story on the then-newly engaged poster couple for grunge love. Bonus: an I Heart Daily video interview with the story’s author and former Sassy editor Christina Kelly.

Everett True Thrashes It Out With The Latest Wizards From Seattle’s Sub Pop Label (Everett True, Melody Maker, October 1989)

From the now defunct British music weekly Melody Maker, a very early interview—right after Bleach, and back when Cobain still spelled his name “Kurdt.” Cobain jokes around, sports a goatee and is described as “your archetypal small guy—wiry, defiantly working class and fiery.” Note: This interview comes via Flavorwire’s excellent compendium of essential Kurt Cobain books, interviews and photos.

Photo: Ramsey Beyer, Flickr

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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