OK, not really famous. Better to say "bootlegged in China," but I think this is kind of cool. Every now and then, I look at log files on the server where my mp3s reside to see if anyone is listening to the songs. Mind you, these aren't pretty charts or graphs; just raw server records that might look something like this:
Using my mad h4x0r skillz, I can write little scripts to parse these and look for things like "how many visitors downloaded an mp3 in the month of March"; or "what's the most commonly downloaded song on my site."
While doing just such an analysis recently, I noticed that one song was rather more popular than any other. And I don't mean five percent more popular; I'm talking about five times more popular. Hmm, that's strange. I mean, I like that song just fine, but it's not like "Stairway to Freebird" or something. This would require some investigation.
I scanned the logs manually, looking for any pattern that might provide a clue. I didn't need Velma and a box of Scooby Snacks to discover the regular repetition of a single URL where the referring server should be: http://music.soso.com.
I typed the URL into a browser and it brought up a Chinese site that seems to be some kind of music clearing house. I saw what looked like a search box (I couldn't be sure since all the text was Chinese) so I typed in my name and hit enter. Sure enough, there was a link to my song Shudder, along with the helpful (if totally inexplicable) title "Anniversary."
Of course, if my song were an actual Chinese hit, it would generate as many downloads in a few minutes as I'm seeing in a month. But it's still pretty interesting to see what a little bit of bootlegging can do for your stats. So here's what my friends in Kunming are raving about:
I've been a paying "Unlimited" subscriber to the Rhapsody music service for a couple of years now. And dammit, I hate Rhapsody. But I just can't give up the streaming access to all those hundreds of thousands of records.
Here's why I'm griping right now: I'm in the mood to listen to the Rolling Stones. Now, the Rhapsody music client is really, really slow on the old computer I run it on, so you've got one good shot at finding what you want before you get annoyed and give up. So I go to the search box (after slowly, painfully logging in for the fourteenth time; 'nother story). And I type "exile on main street" and select "Album" for the type of search. Then I hit "go" and walk away. I walk away because if I stand there I will get really mad and pull my hair out waiting for the search to come back. And I don't have the hair to spare. After doing some other things (work, like), I come back to find the message, "sorry, we couldn't find an album matching the search "exile on main street." Long story short, they had it cataloged under "st." rather than "street." That kind of thing drives me up the wall -- they can't implement abbreviation expansion in their search algorithm? Hell, they could just use proximity to come up with the right album.
So here are some other things that piss me off about Rhapsody, in no particular order:
1. When they have an outage and you contact customer service, they NEVER admit they've had an outage. They always refer you to a trouble shooting FAQ.
2. If you use the web client, you can stay logged in forever. It doesn't work very well and crashes your browser, but by golly those cookies persist like herpes! The real client? Forget it. Stop playing music for a few minutes and you're back into 30 second sample hell until you log in again.
3. Login from the desktop client is a pain in the ass and takes forever.
4. Playing a CD on your own damn machine contacts Rhapsody, logs you in (see number 3), and subjects you to occasional network stutters and other annoyances.
5. Sometimes the client just gets stuck between songs and keeps playing the last few seconds of a track. Man, I hate that. It even does it when you're listening to a CD. And each upgrade to a new version of the software preserves the old problems.
So why don't I cancel my account? Well, at the end of the day, $12 a month, or whatever it is, is a pretty fair price to pay for access to a gigantic catalog of music. And when it's working, it's pretty great. Like right now (I finally got what I want), I am listening to Exile, and after that I may dial up Bob Dylan's Live 1966, aka the "Royal Albert Hall" bootleg. A couple years ago, we put all our old stereo gear in storage and replaced with a laptop hooked up to a nice powered speaker/sub-woofer system and a high speed Internet connection. And for parties, I hook it up to a PA system out in the back yard. And Rhapsody employs some "editors" whose ears I've grown to trust and who put together rockin' play lists or "radio" stations.
So the library kicks, but the software . . . feh. I wish they'd just start over.
How come no one has ever heard of Shuffletown? I'm all the time mentioning it to music people as a record that had a big influence on me in the early 90s when I was struggling to find my voice as an acoustic musician after years of playing fast, hard, and loud, but I rarely meet anyone who even knows Joe Henry, let alone this great album.
It was originally released in 1990, but I didn't get it until 92 or 93 when a good friend gave me a cassette copy. Even thenI couldn't find the CD in the local record stores. And of course this was pre-Internet (at least in the shopping sense).
Evocative of The Trinity Sessions, Shuffletown was recorded live to 2-track tape and produced by T Bone Burnett. The sparse arrangements with instruments like mandolin and violin and muted trumpet draw you into the room and into the beautiful melodies in a way that make the words almost superfluous. But the lyrics are, by and large, pretty great too. Though occasionally vague, they're mostly vivid and compelling without being overly artsy or hifalutin. Shuffletown is easily in my top 10 or so records of the 1990s.
And yet the CD is out of print and I've lost my cassette copy! On the Internet, I can choose among a handful of used copies in varying conditions for about $30 (after shipping), or I can step up to a "collectible" copy pushing $50. There's no (legal) digital source anywhere that I can find. Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.fm . . . . Forget it. Every other Joe Henry album I can listen to on these services or order new, but not my favorite! So what gives?
It reminds me of when we bought a five-speed station wagon several years ago. We had to pay top dollar because it was such a rare car. Then when we tried to trade it in, the same dealer low-balled us because it was such an unusual car. Jeez.
(I know: don't tell me about specialized demand and how time-sensitivity creates an over-supply of exactly one when you've got an odd-ball item you need to move. I'm not looking for rational explanations; I want sympathy!)
Here I was just last week writing about how beautiful the weather was, and then we spent the weekend crammed into a hallway with a bunch of pillows hoping our tiny house wouldn't be crushed. OK, not exactly, but our metro area had some mighty nasty weather this past weekend, and we were all caught a bit off guard.
Friday evening we had a little league baseball game, our first of the season (I'm the coach; my oldest son is on the team). The big discussion of the day was whether the rain would let up in time for us to play the game at 6:00. The clouds broke, the sun came out, and we played ball. We won 10 to 3, and the kids played really well. So the family came home in a good mood. Muddy cleats on the porch, showers, time for bed, the usual.
We put the kids to bed as the first major storm lumbered past us a few miles to the south. Shelle stayed with them in their room while I watched the weather both on TV and out the window. Reports were coming in of damage downtown and along an eastward corridor that kept looking like it should include us, but as I watched out the bedroom window, our big, drought-damaged trees barely waved.
Later, when Shelle came to bed, we continued to watch the shocking scenes of old buildings brought down by wind and sign and lamp posts twisted and torn, cars and trucks tossed and rolled down the highway like dice. We thought about our basement -- wet, low-ceilinged, probably ruled by some rodent monarch from a Stephen King story -- and wondered if the front hall wouldn't be safer after all.
We finally turned off the TV and went to sleep, but sometime near morning we were awakened by a horrible bang, loud as a shotgun blast. We both sat up in bed, and I realized in a moment the power was out. It had been raining hard but now there was a sudden, eerie silence. And then distant at first, a sound of wind, trees waving and the slight cracking of limbs. Gradually we were aware of a sound you hear about all your life: a steady droning, growing slowly in both volume and pitch. A sound like a freight train. There was almost no time -- mere seconds -- to react. I jumped out of bed and ran to the door to look outside, hoping for some visual confirmation I guess. The floor began shaking slightly, along with the pictures on the wall next to me. But looking out the window, I saw relative calm, not the torrid swirl of trees and brush I expected. Shelle was already getting up to get the kids when we heard a new sound, shocking, piercing, comforting: a train whistle. It was just the CSX, which comes through several times a night, and which we hardly notice any more.
We did actually spend Saturday afternoon under a tornado warning and crammed into the hallway. After Friday night, no one was taking chances, and the kids were all pretty scared. We're used to Spring storms around here, but I don't ever remember a storm where so many big, ostensibly strong structures were damaged by the wind alone. Usually we get a lot of trees knocked on top of things and low, weak structures blown apart. But this wind pulled bricks off of buildings and bent metal reinforcements. That's some serious shit right there.
I work from home as much as I can. My wife and friends like to tease me by putting quotes around the word working with their fingers -- "oh, he's working from home." We all know that's a joke. If I were in the office I'd be so resentful I'd spend the whole time blogging like everyone else does!
But today I thought I'd take a break from writing about abstruse data center technology to mention a little bit about how freakin' awesome it is to be working from home. See, yesterday I went to the office, and after just under an hour in traffic, I spent the entire day in mind-numbing meetings. I had one 20 minute break, during which I found a colleague who happened to have his classical guitar with him at work, and I played for about 10 minutes just so I wouldn't pull my hair out. I even ate my lunch during a meeting. Then it was an hour in traffic back home in time to work some more, then choir practice and supper on the run, and up late working last night. So this morning, I have a great appreciation for the fact that I spent most of the morning working in bed and listening to BBC radio 4 over the Internet. Then I got up and ate these little left over cakes I found in the fridge. Yum! Really sugary, and good with coffee.
It's sunny and warm outside; upper-sixties. The fringe flowers are in riotous bloom. Brown thrashers, cardinals, and a couple of different types of woodpecker are flitting through the woods in our back yard. I stood barefoot on the patio and finished my coffee this morning.
Working at the dining room table, I saw one of our local Cooper's hawks emerge from the periwinkles in the deep part of the back yard with a mouse in his talons. He's as big as a cat, and sitting on a low limb in the back yard, right by the kids' play set, he was the king of everything. Then the other male, smaller by about a third, swooped down and sat about 20 feet away, screaming. The larger male, annoyed, took off in a great swoop and flutter, flying toward the house and lumbering for altitude. The smaller male went after, and I took to the patio to watch. The females were high up over the street, and I saw all four hawks circling and screaming, for all the world like they were oblivious to the interstate just two blocks to the East.
After yesterday's misery, I need a little time to reflect: it could be worse. I could have to spend every day like that.
The first Billy Bragg song I ever heard was "Levi Stubbs' Tears." I was a brand new freshman in college and Talking to the Tax Man About Poetry had just come out. A guy on my hall named Jay heard me playing Bob Marley on my Sigma acoustic, and he invited me down to his room to listen to records. I was a little scared: Jay was a junior, and he was imposing. A giant of a man, with shocking blue eyes and thick dark hair swinging across his face. Faded black combat boots and a cheap plaid shirt like a tent. When he appeared in my doorway at 10:00 in the morning with a coffee pot full of water and a pack of cigarettes, I thought I might be in for some hazing, not genuine friendliness.
I left my guitar behind and we went down to his room on the other side of the pay phone and bathrooms. Right away I noticed a very big, very nice stereo with an actual turntable instead of a CD player. Jay pulled out a red and white 12" record with a picture of a well-dressed Levi Stubbs on the cover and BILLY BRAGG in block letters. "You gotta hear this," he said. Before even telling me his name, I think.
It was weird, really, because most of the guys on the hall wanted to hear me play, and they treated me almost deferentially. I would play stuff they expected like The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd and "Magaritaville," and then I'd hip them to some deep Who or Pink Floyd cuts and some Kinks, Clash, U2, REM, Cure, and other things I considered edgy and tough. I reckon I was pretty snotty, playing and singing my simplistic versions of the things I wanted people to hear. But I was regarded as sort of the music expert on my end of the hall, and no one ever really pushed my boundaries. Jay knew from the get-go he was going to open my eyes rather than the other way around.
Billy Bragg's unadorned electric guitar and brilliant songwriting -- along with his crazy cockney voice -- were unlike anything I'd heard before. It was a bit like the sea change I'd experienced a couple of years earlier when someone put The B-52s debut record in my hands, the way that had revised the way I heard pop music. But this was something different again. There was something punk about the record, but it was like singer/songwriter punk. This had an intimacy and a sparseness to it that was more arresting in its way than all the noisy swagger of "God Save the Queen" (which, by the way, Jay and I would also listen to that morning).
The flip side of "Levi Stubbs' Tears" included the amazing "Walk Away Renee," a starkly funny poem about a romance gone wrong spoken over a guitar version of the old Left Banke song. The imagery of that track has never left me. Jay also had the Talking With the Taxman LP, and we listened to the whole thing. He turned out to be the kind of guy who would suddenly throw his head back with laughter, then jump up and lift the needle -- "Did you hear that line? 'A man could spend a lot of time wondering what was on Jack Ruby's mind'! Jesus, that's great." And then he would move the needle back and listen again.
Jay never did much like to listen to me play my guitar and sing, though we would sometimes cut class together and sit in Rose Hill cemetery to drink beer and smoke while I played. In fact, whenever I tried to play a song for him I had written, he would just laugh enigmatically, but not in the "move the needle back" kind of way. Later he moved into a house and got so heavy into LSD that when I'd go over to listen to records, he'd maybe put the Sex Pistols on one turntable and Hank Williams on another and mix the two into an unlistenable cacophony, turning it up loud and laughing over at me in that "isn't this great?" kind of way. I'd try to laugh along, but I was way too much of a square to really find this funny. I always suspected he was punishing me for not wanting to get high with him.
When Jay and I were friends, I looked up to him a great deal. He introduced me to a lot of music and ended up changing the way I played guitar and sang. When I got a band going, it wasn't a laid back, strummy, folk rock affair. I fronted it with an angry, unadorned Stratocaster; and although we covered a lot of standard "college band" songs, I stripped them back to an essential few chords and played them fast, snarling out improvised lyrics in a way I thought would make Jay howl with laughter and want to move the needle back. But he never came out to hear us play.
As for Billy Bragg, he turned 50 last year and he's still making great music. He's always been known for his Workers First "this machine kills fascists" kind of Socialism. And I love some of his big political songs like "Help Save the Youth of America" and "There's Power in a Union" and "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward." I also have to admit that some of his political songs just suck, lacking the beauty and nuance he's capable of. What I learned from Billy Bragg most of all -- the thing that really stuck with me -- is how the personal is often the most political. His very best songs are, like "Levi Stubbs' Tears," songs about individuals trying to work out the meaning of very personal hurts, people trying to sort out the messes of their lives. We may be fighting an uphill battle trying to straighten out big-picture politics as long as we haven't got a clue about the little pictures in our little worlds.
Here's a very young Billy Bragg playing "Levi Stubbs' Tears":
I love baseball, so I coach little league practically year-round.
I'm a huge music fan, so I write songs and play guitar and sing in a very good choir.
I think art is the chief expression of human existence, so I draw and paint whenever I can.
Also I have a job and stuff like that.
