This concert film of David Bowie & the Spiders during the last public appearance as his alter ego Ziggy Stardust is directed by D.A. Pennebaker who is best known for directing the classic Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back.  Oddly the film took a rather long time to surface as it only premiered in 1979 and didn’t see wide distribution until 1983.  The film was originally filmed in Pennebaker’s rough cinema verite’ style on 35mm and then remastered in 2003 for its 30th anniversary release on DVD.  This remaster didn’t do much for the quality of the picture, it is still grainy, dark and sometimes jerky.  This of course really doesn’t diminish its enjoyment, or at least it didn’t for me as it is a landmark performance from Bowie and his Spiders.  The band includes the extremely talented guitarist Mick Ronson, who I consider to be criminally overlooked.  The costuming and make up is a thing to see as Bowie takes the stage wearing his strange gender bending alien glam, alternating between wearing a kimono from mars and other strange sci-fi hero costumes the whole time sporting his killer space mullet.  The concert features songs from Bowie’s albums Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, and the album of the same name.

One of my favorite moments is when Bowie starts miming… I’m not kidding he actually mimes that he is behind an invisible wall up on stage which he eventually is able to break through and bridge the gap between him and the audience.  I was fairly surprised that the venue was populated by mostly young women screaming in adoration, I guess I underestimated Bowie’s sex appeal during the early 70s.  Early on in the film you get to see the crowd file into the venue which is always fun because Bowie fans really like to get dressed up decked out in all sorts of costumey clothes, makeup and accessories (something I got to witness first hand when I went to see him on his Earthling tour in 1997).  Other highlights include a particularly jazzy rendition of “Changes”, and covers of “Love Me Do” (as part of a medley w/ “Jean Genie”), “Lets Spend the Night Together”, and The Velvet Undergrounds “White Light/White Heat”.  You will be disappointed if you are expecting any documentary footage as you really only get glimpses of Bowie getting his make up and wardrobe done backstage during breaks.  These scenes go by uneventful except for a surprise appearance by Ringo Starr and Bowie’s now infamous first wife Angela.  Angela was particularly fun for me to see because I had heard all about their “open relationship” and drugged out escapades together as they are both featured in the Punk book Please Kill Me (see my review here).

If you haven’t heard of the sites Last.fm and Pandora.com, I’d have to ask you… what rock did you crawl out from under?

If you did in fact just crawl out from a cave… They are customizable internet radio stations that allow you to listen to almost anything you want.  You sign up and you can begin creating your own station built from one of your favorite bands, songs, or genres.  Here is a closer look at each of the sites.

The tag line above mentions the social aspect of this site, which basically allows you to add people as your friend and then in turn listen to their radio stations.  Once you’ve signed up for an account and added some of your musical tastes you can then choose to listen to your own station which is populated by anything you choose to add or play through searching for a certain artist or genre.  Do keep in mind that if you add a bunch of bands, and then decide to listen to a sampling from a genre or “tag station” then anything you hear will be added to your profile unless you ban it.  You have two options when it comes to songs, you can “ban it” which will prevent it from playing on any of your stations or you can “love it” which the site also keeps track of for future reference.  Personally I prefer not to use the “love it” option as it will then play those songs a little too much for my liking.  The site also gives you the option of listening to your own “love it” station which is a nice feature.  In addition to your “love it” station, your own library station, and those of your friends you can choose to listen to the recommendation station which is built by the site based on what music you’ve added, listened to, or tagged “love it”.  The recommendations usually are fairly solid but basic.  You won’t find too many suprises here but the selections make sense being made up of bands that have common sounds, have some sort of relation or share some other distinction.  One of my favorite features is the ability to use an addon with most popular PC/Mac media players that will “scrobble” the music that you listen to.   “Audioscrobbling” is just a term for uploading what you are listening to to your profile so you don’t have to manually add your tastes.  This feature also allows you to publish what you are listening to currently, list your loved, or list your top tracks on your own website or social networking site.

I noticed after listening at work that the stations will populate themselves with certain artists each time you load them.  For instance if you have added 40 artists you like it will pick out around 8 to continually cycle through.  I found this extremely limiting and repetitive.  I noticed some other things as well…  Firstly, you will run into songs that are considerably louder than most of the music, this can be very annoying if you are playing this in an office with a bunch of people on the phone.  I basically had no other choice but to ban each of those songs as there were no volume leveling options.  Another slightly annoying occurrence is what seems to be the sites inability to play certain artists.  Now if I manually put in The Beatles it may play a few songs, but I added them to my library I never once heard them pop up.  This may be a glitch, if so its an extremely annoying one.  On the flip side you will end up hearing a huge amount of other artists, like when I added The Stray Cats – I eventually had to get rid of them because I was hearing them so much for whatever reason.  My last annoyance is a small one and it is that you will end up hearing a bunch of live versions of songs which isn’t always bad but usually the sound quality isn’t up to par.  I have a suspicion that both the live music and the fact you don’t hear certain artists is because of licensing fees, but I not completely sure of it.

This site also has some interesting features to offer, the biggest being that it is based on the Music Genome Project.  Which is basically a database that links songs by common musical elements (Read more about it here).  An example of one of those elements would be “vocal harmonies”, so you might hear a song by The Byrds followed by a Crosby, Stills, Nash song – not because they share members but because they both rely heavily on that musical element.  Although this is a really interesting idea I don’t find it to be all that helpful personally but I could see someone a little less seasoned discovering a ton of new stuff.

I have used Pandora.com at my office as well and I did find the stations to be controlled well and featured a little more variety.  The service did have a couple really disappointing elements.  My main issue with the site is after awhile it the service will begin to time out every hour.  Now, this may not be an issue if you are just listening personally, but it can be extremely irritating if you are streaming the site from another computer hooked up to an office stereo system.  The whole purpose of the hourly timeout is to get people to actually subcribe and pay for the service.  I understand where they are coming from… you have to make money to continue streaming and pay license fees.  But on top of that they also feature visual ads (thankfully no audio ads at this point).  The time out and the ads lead me to pursue other options.

Compared to the choppy flow of last.fm’s insistence on picking a limited number of artists to play random samplings from, I found Pandora to be a little more pleasant.  Basically as far as I could tell, it would pick one of your preferred artists or genres – play 4 related songs and then move on to the next random item and repeat.  Which turns out to be a pleasant listen with a much wider variety.  As far as the depth of the selections go, both site rely a little too heavily on the hits.  If I had to choose which site had a better depth it would be Last.fm but both sites have the ability to surprise with an offbeat track.

My verdict:  Out of the two sites/services I personally prefer Last.fm for it social connection and the ability to connect it to your own music library.  I also find the recommendations to make more sense for the most part and find last.fm has more depth as a service and in the music available.  For listening in a professional work setting I would say Pandora if somebody was willing to pay so you didn’t have to constantly babysit it, because of this I usually lobby for Last.fm at my place of work.

1989 – 1996 was a period of creative and professional rebirth for Neil Young.  He was inducted into the Rock N’ Roll hall of fame in 1995 and enjoy a renewed popularity and critical acclaim.  He would also be connected by the media to the hottest new music buzz word/style as the Godfather of Grunge.  I have outlined the releases from this era below.  Please note what I deem to be the ESSENTIAL releases.

	1989 – Neil Young – Eldorado EP: Just 5 songs, 3 of which appear on his next release Freedom.  The first glimpses of Neil back on his game.
	1989 – Neil Young - Freedom: Neil’s best album since 1979′s Rust Never Sleeps.  This release is book ended by a live acoustic version and studio  version with full band of the great anthemic song “Rockin’ in the Free World”.  ESSENTIAL
	1990 – Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Ragged Glory: Neil reunites with the Horse and famed producer David Briggs for this album that proved that he and the Horse could still rock out.  I have always thought that the title of this record was the perfect descriptor for the bands particular brand of raw, unbridled rock n roll. ESSENTIAL
	1992 – Neil Young – Harvest Moon: This album was partly intended to be a sequel to one of Neil’s most popular albums Harvest, having roughly the same players and feel as the original.  It unfortunately doesn’t quite live up to it’s predecessor but it is a solid and consistent release.  ESSENTIAL
	1994 – Neil Young – Sleeps With Angels: Neil was creatively reinvigorated and he claims he was inspired by the tragic suicide of Kurt Cobain.  Sadly the albums release would precede another death, as David Briggs would die of lung cancer in 1995.  This was their last collaboration together.  The album features some of the most instrumentally and tonally diverse to come from the band.
	1995 – Neil Young – Mirror Ball: Instead of using Crazy Horse on this release he decided to enlist Pearl Jam and they were happy to back him.  Whatever your opinion of the band they are a tight rock band and they provided a great backdrop to some enjoyable songs on this release.  ESSENTIAL
	1996 – Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Broken Arrow: Along the same vibe as the previous two records.  After this record Neil would retreat from public life and go on a long hiatus.
Live Albums from this period:
	1991 – Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Arc/Weld: Weld is a great heavy set of Neil/Horse classics.  This conventional live album was also releases as a double disc set that included the bonus disc Arc which is a bit of an anomaly being it was a compilation of snippets of shapeless heavy distortion recorded during that tour.
	1993 – Neil Young – Unplugged: Famously preformed twice because Neil wasn’t happy with the first performance.  In fact he was so unhappy with it he paid for the first performance himself.  Although he was extremely sensitive about the decision to team up with MTV on this, he ends up putting out a compelling acoustic performance with some great acoustic versions of classics like Mr. Soul, Pocahontas, and Transformer Man.  ESSENTIAL

Here is a playlist I have put together featuring my favorites from this era.  If you can not see the playlist below, please follow this link.

This will be my last post on Neil Young… for at least awhile.  I will not be covering Neil’s music from 2000 on as I have found little interest in it outside of a few releases.

This documentary released in 2005 is about Arthur “Killer” Kane, former bassist of the legendary New York Rock band The New York Dolls and his involvement in the New York Dolls reunion at the 2004 Morrissey curated Meltdown Festival.  After the Dolls broke up in the mid 70s (after releasing only 2 great records),  Arthur started a few different bands that didn’t really go anywhere and eventually his drinking had gone out of control and he sank into obscurity.  Fast forward almost 30 years we find Arthur living in LA and working at the local Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Family History Center Library having converted fully to the religion.  In 2004 Arthur’s dream came true when Morrissey put together a New York Dolls reunion.

The movie surprisingly give a pretty decent (although abridged) history of the New York Dolls besides giving you Arthur’s compelling story.   I had thought the film New York Dolls – All Dolled Up* was going to be a documentary on the band but was extremely disappointed as it is just 3 hours of rough live and interview footage filmed when the band was together.   The other film is interesting but far from a must see.

One of the best things about this film is that you get the interesting perspective of getting Arthur’s story not only from the subject but also from his friends and higher ups in the LDS church and his coworkers.   The film also includes interviews with the other living band members (David Johansen & Sylvain Sylvain), old friends from the scene (Photographer Bob Gruen, other proto-punk/punk musicians), and famous musicians (Chrissie Hynde and Bob Geldof).

Check out the trailer via youtube.

Other New York Dolls related films:

New York Dolls – All Dolled Up (2005) *note that this is not a documentary as I mention above

Morrissey Presents The Return of The New York Dolls – Live from Royal Albert Hall 2004 (2004)