I don’t think I could overstate the importance of Hank Williams to the music of the past and present.  His material is absolutely timeless and fills a space in musical history between Jazz/Blues and the beginnings of Rock n’ Roll.  Not to mention the fact that he was one of the original tragic figures in music, living a life of hard drinkin’ and misery.  Hank Williams burned out way before Hendrix, Joplin, or other countless stars.

I just finished reading a biography on Hank Williams and although the book wasn’t great, it was enjoyable and enlightened me to quite a few things I did not know about Country Music’s greatest star.

Here are some interesting facts.

1.  Hanks real name was Hiram King Williams.

2.  At age eleven Williams began learning to play and sing the blues from an old Blues man by the name of Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne.  Sadly there are no known recordings of Payne and he died and was buried in an unmarked grave in the late 30′s.

3.  The women in Hank’s life were forces to be reckoned with.  First of all you had his mother Lillie who brought him up by herself after his father left at an early age.  In 1944 Hank married another tough and uncompromising woman by the name of Audrey.

4.  Although Williams wrote most of his own material he definitely had help.  In 1946 Hank struck up a professional relationship with a Nashville’s own Tin Pan Alley songwriter by the name of Fred Rose.  Hank came up with the basics and then Fred would edit the lyrics and tune up the music.  He also took care of the business side including the recording and relations with the record company.

5.  During the last few years of his career, Williams recorded music under the pseudonym “Luke the Drifter”.  The material was what he called “Recitations” but could more clearly be described as religious themed stories of morality.

6.  In 1952 after he was divorced from his first wife Audrey, he decided to insert himself into Country Musics famous Carter family.  For a short while he even courted one of the Carter daughters and almost accidentally shot June Carter (yes, June Carter – wife of Johnny Cash) during an argument with Audrey his first wife.

7.  Hank died on the way to a New Years show on New Years Day 1953 in the back of his famous powder blue convertible.

I put together a list of my favorite Hank Williams songs.  If you do not see the embedded playlist below, follow this link.

Dream Of Life is a stark and haunting portrait of Rock N Roll singer, poet and artist Patti Smith released in 2008.  Part historical document and part multimedia art project filmed by Steven Sebring but populated by Smiths talents and works.  The film begins with a rapid overview of the subjects life narrated by Smith herself in her own words.  The whole film is in fact narrated by Smith and includes a mixture of mundane, touching and bizarre moments.  The narration is an absolute pleasure as I have always found Smith’s voice hypnotic, and her words are particularly wise and elegant in this film.  Filmed over the span of 11 years, you’ll catch glimpses of Smith’s friends, family, and the legions of her adoring fans.  Patti Smith is a bit of a super fan, in the film you get the pleasure of hearing about many of Smith’s favorites including William Burroughs, Rimbaud, William Blake, Bob Dylan, and Walt Whitman.  The film is a little short on coverage of the CBGBs years and focuses more on Patti’s early upbringing, later family life, and the people that she has lost over the years (including her brother, good friend – Photographer Robert Mapplethorp, and her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5).  Overall the film can be slow and abstract at times but the space and oddities make it fit and gives it relevance in Smith’s body of work.  Her main strength has always been her words and I found it particularly easy to hang on each and every one.

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.