Hello everybody.

I’m making some changes to the this blog. So for the time being I have unpublished all these posts. I’ll put them back on line as we go through them. thanks.

You can also visit me at http://www.trichordist.com

 

Filed under: Uncategorized

I am on the fucking warpath this week. Lamest arguments in favor of illegal file sharing from the past week. I’m not making this shit up. These are real arguments people presented. And argued vehemently. 1. “Marijuana is illegal. File sharing is illegal. Therefore it’s okay.” Response try filesharing your pot dealer’s stash with 5,000 strangers online and let’s see how long you live. 2. “The RIAA is secretly behind filesharing. They make more money suing people …

Ted Kaczynski’s Santa Cruz vacation shack. 04 Lulu Land In 1982 I lived in the tiniest house imaginable. It was at most 400 square feet yet it boasted a kitchen, bathroom, living room and two bedrooms. My bedroom was 6 x 10 feet. big enough for for a single mattress on a small platform. The small closet could hold about a ½ a dozen shirts, a couple of jackets and a sweater or two. I rolled up four or five pairs of jeans and stuffed them onto the shelf at the top of the closet. The rest of my …

Very early Camper Van Beethoven. From Left to Right. David Lowery, Mike Zorn, David McDaniel and Boris Yeltsin. 02 The Day That Lassie Went To The Moon Camper Van Beethoven was originally called Camper Van Beethoven and the Border Patrol. We shortened it after about 9 months. Nobody was listing the full name of the band anyway. There are only two or three posters that I’ve ever seen that show the full name of the band. But this was the original name of the band. The band name was the brainchild of …

Giant Dipper. The Roller Coaster of Love. 03 Big Dipper Click here to play big dipper. This is an interview I did with KQED for The California Report. As part of their California Songs series they ask me about Big Dipper. So todays blog is simply the audio recording of that interview. http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201107151630/d Look for the full or extended interview file. Gabriel Coan/KQED David Lowery The wooden roller coaster on the Santa Cruz boardwalk is a magnet for families, kids and …

The Black Swan Theory or Theory of Black Swan Events is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that The event is a surprise (to the observer) and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight.- wikipedia. 12 Take The Skinheads Bowling (click to play) I’ve mentioned this before. Success in the music business is completely unpredictable. No one can really predict which artists will end up being successful. No one can really predict which song or album will be a hit. …

South California as proposed by secessionists. 05 St. Cajetan I was browsing the web last night and came across this NY Times article about the Inland Empire and 10 other counties wanting to secede from the state of California. The idea is to form their own state called South California. Not to be confused with the Mexican states of Baja California Norte and Baja California Sur (Lower California North and Lower California South). If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you already know about the …

Did I dream this? Listen to Marigold. 07 Marigold I awoke from a strange dream just before dawn. It was Nov 3rd 2005. I know this because I wrote the dream down in much detail using my laptop. I can see the date the file was created. I wrote it down cause it seemed like my subconscious had been processing something. My head or rather my brain seemed like it had been churning a vast multi axis array of data all night. My head felt hot. And i was hungry and exhausted. Because of this I thought it might be …

Listen to 02 The Palace Guards I am totally hijacking the 300 songs blog for a few days to blatantly promote my new album solo album The Palace Guards. It comes out Feb 1st 2011 and you can buy the CD here from: click here for Amazon download from itunes click here I was driving around in my car listening to the reference master of my new CD The Palace Guards. I like to listen in my car because it’s a good to hear how your albums sound outside of a studio or on something other than a high end set …

06 I Sold The Arabs The Moon First of all let me openly acknowledge I am hijacking my blog for a few days to talk about the songs on my upcoming solo album The Palace Guards. Available everywhere Feb 1st. And I know I have a lot of competition this week. It looks like a number of my peers are releasing records. So let’s quickly review them. First off Iron and Wine has a new album out. Kiss Each Other Clean. I am told it is a 45 minute field recording of Sam Beam humming The Theme to a Man And a …

The Doubtful Guest. By Edward Gorey. Eventually I’ll get around to explaining what this has to do with the song. Pre-order autographed copy of this CD from Newbury Comics. click here. Deep Oblivion is a track from my first solo album The Palace Guards (Feb 1st 2011). I originally started this solo project in a deep depression about the viability of making albums. By this I mean the rampant illegal downloading of songs had not just reduced CD and Album sales but had eliminated much of the …

  12 The Long Plastic Hallway “The music business is cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free, where good men die like dogs. And then there is a negative side.”-attributed to Hunter S. Thompson There is actually a debate as to whether Hunter S. Thompson said this or not. I suppose because there are variants that are similar attributed to other people. Really? It sounds so much like the guy it has to be Hunter S. Thompson. Part of this post …

  07 Turquoise Jewelry come down from that condominium treehouse stop driving around in that station wagon with the wood on the side take off that jumpsuit you look like grace slick staying up all night drinking that 7-11 coffee Funny story about this song. It was all pretty much based on the alleged sighting of Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane) at a 7/11 in the north bay of SF. Sausalito? Mill Valley? I’m not really clear. I’m not even sure who told me about it. Paul MacKinney (my old …

  The word Cracker has an interesting history one that I felt worthy of further elaboration. It’s origination is widely disputed. Was it from the ’crack’ of the whip of the white vaqueros that herded Spanish cattle in Georgia and Florida? Was it because they were such poor people they cracked and ate their seed corn? The most interesting etymology of the word purports to illustrate a history of friction between the dominant English culture and Celtic subculture of the British …

03 This Is Cracker Soul Cracker Soul. Perfect song to come up next in the cue. Especially after the previous two posts touched upon race and ethnic identity in the music business. I think there is a misconception that the music industry is very “integrated”. That it must be more “advanced” than the rest of our society. It has always been at the cultural vanguard so it must surely be much farther ahead of the rest of america in marching towards some post-racial society. It …

Bob Lefsetz is a smart and entertaining music business theorist and writer. Yesterday he was comparing the level of innovation and risk taking in the tech world versus the music business. As an object lesson Google and Groupon. Here is his piece. http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/11/30/googlegroupon/ Odd thing. It turns out that Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven play a small role in this story. Here is my letter to Bob that has been making the rounds of the Blogosphere. Read your …

Hey all. Jill Smith daughter of Don Smith was kind enough to send this gallery of photos to me. You may want to go back and read post #61 that is largely about Don Smith. I’ve updated it with these new photos. A very young Don Smith March 1981 Me and Don. This must have been from around 2003-2004? I remember it was my first pair of reading glasses. The gang that couldn’t shoot -i mean record straight. Bugs, Michael Urbano, Davey Faragher, David Lowery, Don Smith, Johnny Hickman, Rich Hasel. …

09 The World is Mine So besides the our obvious big hits there have been three other significant money making events in Cracker career. The last two were especially important cause they carried us through some dry periods. 08 Shake Some Action 1. The inclusion of “Shake Some Action” in the film Clueless. And it’s subsequent appearance on the soundtrack album. We were at the peak of our career (sales wise) when this song was licensed. Bryan McPherson our attorney at the time demanded …

Little Known Fact. The “H C” on the Montreal Jersey is an abbreviation for the city’s motto: Heist Central. Over the last decade many many bands have had their gear stolen in Montreal, not just CVB. 13 Everybody Gets One For Free In the wee hours of the morning oct 20th 2004 someone broke into the Cracker/CVB trailer and stole a bunch of our Camper Van Beethoven instruments. We were in Montreal Quebec. Few people down in the states realize this but Montreal is a little like Manhattan. …

Member of the Lewis and Clark expedition the explorer York. The Arikara Indians of South Dakota called him “Big Medicine” and the nickname stuck. 07 I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right I stated before some songs are coherent stories that can be explained easily. Some are just collections of words that sound good together that evoke a mood or sentiment. And others are somewhere in between. I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right is one of the the latter. On one level it’s a playful jab at my …

No 300 songs today. Walter don’t roll on shabbas. But here’s the full The Hold Steady Interview. http://radio-va.com/2010/10/09/david-lowery-interviews-the-hold-steady /

Cracker Producer Don Smith. A Very Young Don Smith 1981. 05 My Life Is Totally Boring Without You 01 The Good Life Although most of Gentleman’s Blues was recorded at the legendary Bearsville studios near woodstock NY a few of the tracks were radically revamped in Agoura Hills at Don Smith’s studio “Costalot” (see #48 Friends). We were supposed to be mixing by the time we got to Don Smith’s place but mixing is a very loose concept when you are working with Don. It might …

Camper Van Beethoven Original Line-up. Jonathan Segel left the band in 1988 but rejoined when the band reformed. No real 300 songs post today. I’m working on a rather involved one at the moment. To tide you over. One of the most controversial of the cracker songs. I mean controversial cause some people loved it and some people hate it. It was the album closer and so it was supposed to be fairly silly. actually the whole thing is kind of a rip off of the band War. Which at first seems like a weird …

The Cracker Demi Song Vault. So continuing where I left off with post 59. I had a few more thoughts on the demi-songs that populated the early CVB records. I said after we went to virgin most of these went away. Part of this was a function of being on a major label instead of on our own imprint. But not in the way you imagine. Typical major label contracts pay you songwriting royalties on only 10 songs no matter how many you put on the record. (it gets pro-rated). So we were much less inclined to put a …

“C amper Van Beethoven” II and III. I think the C fell off the paste up board and was incorrectly lined up again. Camper Van Beethoven placed the Star of David on the album for no other reason than to confuse people. The symbol has such heavy meaning while this record was purposely devoid of any coherent meaning, messages or interpreta tion. On Subsequent pressings the star was removed after we were hammered by Rough Trade about the symbol. They were worried that the obliqueness of our songs …