Returning the Screw

A couple of weeks ago I caught the Sinkin’ Ships’ CD release show at Sneaky Dee’s — the Ships are one of my favorite local bands and was looking forward to the show for quite some time.

I don’t make it out to punk shows as nearly as often as I should; they are definitely good for the soul and the fun I had that night was more than I had in ages and was something I really needed. It did take a couple of days for my hearing to come back, though.

For an extra few bucks in the cover charge, the band threw in a copy of their new CD, All Signs Are Wrong, which is an excellently recorded and played collection of 10 solid Southern Ontario HC songs that are both catchy, loud, and, at times, passionate. Singer Naomi Allen’s vocals remind me a bit of Beki Bondage from Vice Squad.

I like how the band is not too tight and not too sloppy and tracks like “Tits on Toast”, “Bad Bad Bad”, and “On & On”, shows that the band can really turn it up, with guitar work sometimes reminiscent of AC/DC.

Check out this version of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton. Don’t thank me, thank my brother (Warning: he’s been drinking the Jesus Juice), he pointed it out.

Like the headline said. Ear to the Ground was cancelled. The film and spoken word stuff are still going ahead. That’s too bad.

It looks like the Ear to the Ground festival, scheduled for this weekend at Exhibition Place, is falling apart. According to some reports, festival organizers were presented with a rather large, unexpected invoice from the people who run Exhibition Place, which I guess they couldn’t find the means to pay so now they’re scrambling to find other venues, mostly in the Queen/Broadview neighbourhood (hey! My old ‘hood!) and a few blocks west at the Phoenix.

What a nightmare. Local message boards are all abuzz with people ready to chop the organizers’ heads off, which I think is a little unfair. I don’t think the average music fan knows just how tenuous most shows that aren’t booked into a bar are. There are so many things that can go wrong: a venue owner may decide that they don’t want a show that day for whatever reason, the police may shut it down, bands may make sudden unexpected demands. In one case, I thought that a big show featuring a well-known band from the States I had booked wouldn’t happen because of something as simple as the time that I could have access to the venue.

I was originally told 6 p.m. and the day of the show they decided that I couldn’t have it until 9 p.m. (Damn verbal contracts. Here’s a lesson: get everything in writing, no matter what) and 9 p.m. was way too late to set up, sound check and have bands play, especially since we had to be completely out of the space by midnight.

Early in the afternoon the day of the show the issue still hadn’t been resolved, the band was in town and I had a very terse conversation with their guitar player because his five minutes in town had convinced him that I hadn’t done enough to promote the show, and, to boot, one of the opening bands had pulled out the night before (I didn’t know this at the time but this last point would become a common theme in my days booking bands.). So I was seriously stressed out. I sat at a table in the venue listening to my Walkman wondering if I shouldn’t just take 600 bucks out of my bank account, give it to the band and send them on their way. Hey, who needs to eat.

I decided to hold Ottawa U to their original agreement and told the bands and sound guy to set up and let me deal with whatever happens. It turns out that no one cared what we were doing and the show went off seamlessly and was a huge success, but I doubt anyone who showed up new how close everything came to crashing down.

But that was small potatoes compared to what Ear To The Ground is going through; they are truly living the worst case scenario. It’s a festival that has grown from its small DIY roots to where it looks like they tried to take it to another level but, once again, unexpected circumstances caused potentially fatal problems. I assume that they’ve maxed their line of credit with the bank, and that the bank wasn’t willing to extend it or risk giving them a short-term loan to allow the event to happen. But then again, I don’t know the size of the bill they got from the Exhibition people or what it was for. But I do know this: the festival was primed to explode this weekend and if the Exhibition people gave them some sort of break they would have gotten some cash out of the deal instead of nothing, which is what they’re getting now that Ear to the Ground has left to find other venues,

Recently I went back to listen to a bunch of MP3s I downloaded just prior to NXNE. This is something I do when I head out to a festival like NXNE, Canadian Music Week, etc., so I have a chance to listen to bands or artists that I might be interested in seeing. It saves a lot of time and aggravation because it’s not very often that I’m stuck watching someone I’m really not into.

What’s crappy is that the songs will sit in a folder on my computer and when I go back to them later I sometimes have no idea who the artist is because they didn’t put enough information on the file to identify themselves.

How to do this? At the very least, put the name of your band in the file name. For example “fuckyoupowell.mp3” only tells me the name of the song, “thepowellhaters_fuckyoupowell.mp3” gives me a place to start looking if I want to find out more about you.

Another, better, option is, and I’m assuming you’re using one of those wizard-based programs to convert your files to MP3. Don’t just skip past the screen that asks for Artist and Title information. This is the information that will appear in the screen of an MP3 player and something that may be important to someone who downloaded your MP3 from a blog or something is isn’t familiar with you or your music.

If you’re working with a Web designer, tell them that you want detailed metadata in your MP3 files. What’s metadata? Ask some smirking Web guy and he’ll give you the stock definition: “It’s data about data.” But the answer in non-techie language is that it’s the information that describes the contents of a file. It should contain the things I mentioned above, like Artist and Title, but should also contain the name of the record it’s from (if it’s not from a official release, say it’s “unreleased” or something similar), the label (if applicable).

I guess the point is, don’t assume the person who downloaded music form your Web site is going to be organized enough to remember who you are.

According to Fark, 50 Cent (yeah, that 50 Cent) got bored counting his millions and collecting tacky bling, so he’s been amusing himself writing product reviews for Amazon under the name J.E. Swearingen.

Even if it’s not him, the reviews are too funny. A highlight, this from a customer review for Toddler Boys’ Miles Brown Boat Shoes:

These shoes are working out great for our youngest son, Branathyn, but I found, after he was wearing them for a while, that I had to make some changes. First of all, we put some new laces in, because the old ones we’re a little “raggedy.” Secondly I cut the tongue out to keep the shoes whispering lies in the dark of the night and poisoning my son against me.

And no, I’m not telling you my Fark screen name.

If I were American, I would be very, very angry. I would be angry at the lack of leadership shown by America’s leaders during the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. I would be angry that the country that symbolizes wealth and propserity around the world was unable or unwilling to get basic necessities to their own citizens in their worst time of need. And, perhaps most galling of all, I would be angry that offers of help by the international community were met with “Thanks, but no thanks. We can take care of this ourselves” by President Bush, when there has been no evidence up to this point that this is indeed the case.

So I understand the anger of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, in an emotional interview with local radio station WWL that was unusually blunt for a politician, but sent an important message to the rest of the world on the true conditions in the city, offering insight into how events unfolded and making pleas for help that seemed to be falling on deaf ears.

Listen to the interview here.