Schucks Chuck!

Well, to quote John Lennon: ”If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry‘” and via the blog music ruined my life we’re offered his opinion on the then-fresh New Wave sound in this pretty funny 1980 interview from Jet Lag! punk zine. Like The Ramones classic Sheena is a Punk Rocker 7″:

A good little jump number. These guys remind me of myself when I first started, I only knew three chords too.

Check it out. And while on the subject of the N.Y. quartet’s pretty damn good use of the same three chords:

Interview in Punk Outlaw.com

I’ve been sending out emails to various blogs and fanzines lately in order to make some sort of promotional effort for the Gå Vidare till Norrmalmstorg‘s Blästrad EP and two nights ago I stayed up a bit later to do an interview with Robert Rose that runs the punkoutlaw.com website as well as the AIM TV Group (that produces American Latino TV, LatiNation and the annual American Latino TV Awards) and the Punk Outlaw Records label.

Roughly covering the history of the band with some additional info about the Swedish scene it turned out great so check it out here. Again, all members of the band are happy for the (unexpected) attention the release has been receiving and if you haven’t checked it out it’s available at
http://gvidaretillnorrmalmstorg.bandcamp.com/
 .

Musical Memories

Here’s a nice little feature from Dave Grohl‘s upcoming documentary Sound City: Musical Memories – artists and producers sharing their earliest memory of the events that got them into music. There’s 20+ of them now including Joe Barresi, Rick Nielsen, Lee Ving, Weezer, and Tom Petty among others. Pretty neat!

Available as a playlist on the official YouTube channel the first interview starts here. I wrote about this earlier here.

“Calling all stations…” II

So, yesterday’s show was somewhat satisfactory. I called in to show support for Troy and his great blog the Bigfoot Diaries (because through the years he’s gotten out of his way to promote me and my music, something I truly appreciate), plus maybe get a chance to discuss mainstream media in a format that actually reaches out to people. Looking at it now I’m not too sure that was accomplished, but I think Troy did great. They’re on about 30 minutes into the clip, so check it out!

I mention the book Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business by author Fredric Dannen and if you wanna know how the record industry truly works you should definitely check this out. You’ll find it here.

Fear on Film

Well, here’s a nice slice of pop culture history: Fear on Film, a roundtable discussion produced by Universal Studios featuring directors John Carpenter, John Landis and David Cronenberg -  who were all working with the studio at the time. Intended to be used as a promotional tool, I think this is just a fascinating time slice as Carpenter was working on The Thing, Landis had just finished An American Werewolf in London and Cronenberg was about to begin Videodrome. Three parts in total, check them out!