My internship is teaching me how businesses work. I'm learning about the music industry. I'm learning my way around Excel way too well. But most importantly, I'm being enlightened by the following snippets. I've started to keep a post-it note by me each day I'm there, and whenever I find a ridiculous description of a jazz musician or World War II fighter jets DVD, I jot it down. Unfortunately I can't show you the album art on here (wait...I could find it online...note to self for future. And it damned well WOULD be online because I put it on there!) Anyway. Let me know if you want me to get promotional copies of any of the following quality-sounding products:
-Bach Sonata in G "Hamburger Sonata" (Ok, I know Hamburg is a city in Germany and that's probably what this is referring to, but you know your first reaction was a beefy sonata.)
-An album is in the genre "pyschedelic," and the following are "selling points," which should make you want to buy the album.
-"Ram Dass and Timothy Leary are cultural icons due to their early days of pioneering experimentation with the mind-expanding powers of pyschedelics like LSD." (So these guys got drugged up. Probably still do regularly. That means they make good music? I mean I know the Beatles got some pretty wacky ideas while on acid, but I have news for you: without musical talent, a wacky idea is just a wacky idea. Have you heard of any other hit about a walrus or a submarine?)
-Includes "spoken word and electronics." (Now that's the combination needed for a Billboard #1 if I've ever heard it.)
-Mr. Dass himself says, "The music itself is the high and you just become it, like a surfer becomes one with the wave."
-One of the tracks is titled "Spacesuit for Earth."
-And the best part of all is the album cover. I can't find a picture of it, but check out George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass" artwork, and imagine guys 30 years older and living in the 2000s. And no lawn gnomes (unfortunately).
You know you want to buy it.
-Another album (perhaps similar to the previously mentioned) was in the genre "freak folk." Shannon has already put in a request for a promo of this one, but I'm too embarrased to ask my overseer for it.
-And lastly, my favorite of the last week. This is a "press quote" for a band called Megazilla. A press quote usually means that a famous newspaper or magazine gives the album a good review so we quote it. In this case I think this guy is a part of some other "famous" band. I have no idea though and I don't want to know. Anyway, you tell me if this makes you want this album:
"You were literally so loud and bass heavy that I had to go home to take a s**t*, while I was on the pot I started puking." --Tony Lobos of Monte Carlo
Comments: 1. What's the point of comparing a live act to their studio album? Usually very different areas. 2. Explain the relationship between a live concert and a quality studio album. 3. Since when are is bodily waste supposed to encourage me to buy an album?
LB
1 comment:
"Ram Dass and Timothy Leary are cultural icons due to their early days of pioneering experimentation with the mind-expanding powers of pyschedelics like LSD." (So these guys got drugged up. Probably still do regularly."
I seriously doubt that Timothy Leary is still taking LSD, considering that he died in 1996! And Ram Dass had a terrible stroke in '97, and rumor has it his health practitioners insisted he give up even smoking grass, which he did.
But as you're discovering, their influence in the world of psychedelic music and art continues unabated.
SIncerely.
Eliezer Sobel, author of
The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Conscioussness-Raising Adventures.
(First chapter is about my meeting Ram Dass in 1975. You can read the prologue at http://www.the99thmonkey.com )
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