Down and out with the archive computer

I feel in the mood to burble a while. The recent viewing of “Oil City Confidential” has had me thinking more than a little about music and life. I’m absolutely fine as long as I never look in a mirror. On the odd occasion that I accidently stumble in front of one, the true extent of the rift in the space/time continuum becomes glaringly apparent. Am I really that old? Yes, I am. I could, perfectly legally, have great grand children – and I had the gall to moan about how old and shambolic Wilko Johnson looked last week.

… but I really don’t feel as old as he looked!

Oddly, my reaction has been to have a nostalgia binge. In the main, I was concerned with the music but as is always the case, I strayed into the realms of the internet and computers. They are, of course, all connected. It’s fifteen years ago that I opened my web site. In those days, you could leave your machine on overnight to download music and maybe, if you hadn’t dropped the connection, you’d have an album sitting on your desktop in the morning. Try it nowadays and it can take just one minute.

The sad thing about that is nothing has any real value. If you’ve got a Rapidshare account and a free day, you can download hundreds, if not thousands of albums. Browsing www.rlslog.net will mean that albums, games, TV shows, films and even e-books are just a free click away. In many ways, I think the music we listen to, like so much else in our lives has truly become disposable.

Back in the days, you could go into real shops selling real records, where you could stand in a booth and listen before buying. If it was an album, you’d sometimes eschew the ubiquitous carrier bag, unless it was transparent. Then, at least, your peers could wonder at your taste and style and envy the record you were taking home to play. Sans carrier, it was an under the arm job and that was fraught with danger. Would your garb clash with the latest artistic statement you were carrying? In these days of iPods filled with a lifetime’s listening, people really haven’t got a clue.

In my teens, I wore an khaki Army greatcoat when most around me were clad in Air Force blue ones. My personal feeling was this was a far better background for most albums one might be transporting. While it never seemed to be compulsory to have a Roger Dean cover under the arm, there does seem to have been something about them that appealed to the teenage male psyche. Those were innocent days. It was perfectly possible to walk out of a record shop and, because of the vinyl you were carrying, find yourself in someone else’s home, listening to them try and out play you in a rather sad version of top trumps.

Essentially, everyone was trying to garner “Prog Points”. The weirder the cover, the longer the tracks, the more unpronounceable the track titles or band name, the more inaccessible the music – the higher the “Prog Points”. These “innocent” days were possibly marred by a misuse of copious quantities of cannabis that dictated when an album scored incredibly high “Prog Points”, the listener could at least declare, “Oh, wow man!”

The 1980’s were a big let-down for me. I’d liked the energy of punk but the styles of the New Romantics were too bizarre for my tastes. I can easily accept that it probably had little to do with musical trends and far more to do with me, in my twenties, trying to find identity when it seemed that all around me had lost theirs. Decades can change but that doesn’t mean my listening habits had to. They didn’t but that was no excuse for some bands to treat their fans as lab-rats and expose them to a fanciful form of musical experimentation that would see some groups blatantly try to jump on any passing band-wagon.

In some cases, we even had musicians with hugely successful albums behind them, turning their back on on the recording studio and opting, instead, for the soundstage to create that most hideous of entities, the pop promo video. Now, of course, everyone is a video director, a reporter and … a blogger. I can accept that it offers everyone a freedom to communicate and artistic expression but it doesn’t seem to have any excitement.

For a collector of rock video like me, YouTube is a dream come true but it’s also my worst nightmare. I spent more than a decade trading video around the world and now, it would take you weeks to garner what I’ve collected. It all seems so lifeless. There may be ease of use and speed of download but it feels moribund. The fact that ad agencies now use viral e-mail campaigns is surely proof of this.

Rockmine, as a web site went online on July 18th, 1995. The world wide web, as it then was, had been in existence for 20 months. They were strange, exciting, halcyon days. I had an Apple Powerbook 180c. A stunning machine that looked a bit like a Tonka Toy computer and had a 9 inch colour screen and a massive 3mb RAM. With RamDoubler and MaxRam, I could con the poor beast into thinking it had 36mb RAM. Enough to run an email client, browse the web and work in PhotoShop! New, it cost well over £ 2,000. I bought mine second hand for £ 800 and have never had the heart to throw it out, even although it has long since ceased to boot up.

I used to frequent the newsgroups in those early days. The Internet Marketing Digest and the VRML list were my two favourites. Everyone was trying to work out how to market themselves and some of us had hopes of a true virtual reality in cyberspace. One day on the IMD, a member was kind enough to give all the other members a mail to which we could post details of our sites. He was Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo and he guaranteed we’d get listed within 24 hours! On the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) list, the members once got an even stranger posting. We were asked to check out the US Army’s tank battlefield simulator that they were building on the web.

Technology keeps expanding and yet I seem to remain unexcited by it. The nearest I’ve got to it of late is a bit perverse. For the last 4 months, I’ve been without a Mac laptop which, sadly, has troubled me deeply. It’s the first time in nearly 15 years that I haven’t had a Mac portable with me at almost all times. The straightened strictures of the current economic climate have discounted any possibility of getting a new one.

I do have a PC laptop which, like any PC’s is a tad unstable but at least it is a portable computer – made all the more acceptable by the fact that it now runs Mac OS 10.5.5! How sad am I that instead of getting excited about music, I’m genuinely pleased to have conned a poor unsuspecting PC into running Apple software, even if it has to be as a virtual machine.

Here’s a screen grab of my desktop

and a close up of the System Profiler

OS X running on an Intel Celeron M! How cool is that?

Oh, and just in case you wondered, it is perfectly useable.

From One Oil City To Another

I found myself in Aberdeen last night, in the middle of a blizzard of snow, wondering if it were possible to be further away from the Canvey Island of Dr. Feelgood. Not that odd a thought, as I was there to see “Oil City Confidential” at one of only four cinemas in Scotland showing this hybrid rock/cinema event.

Sitting at the start of the second decade of the 21st Century, watching a paean to proto punk, pub rock is probably pretty weird as evidenced by the almost embarrassing smattering of people that left probably 90% of the seats vacant. Director, Julian Temple had melded a strange amalgam of home movies, film noir clips, reconstructions, live footage and talking heads into a fatally flawed film. That isn’t to say it wasn’t a good film, or an interesting one. It was, but it didn’t gel as a film about Dr. Feelgood. Far more, it seemed to be an homage to Wilko Johnson.

If Wilko was dead, not Lee Brilleaux, I could see the point and how it would work; friends and band-mates recounting anecdotes and tall tales but this didn’t work for me – because of Wilko. His stage persona was lithe, frenetic, focussed but as narrator of his own story he seemed largely lost. It didn’t help that I seemed incapable of accepting that the old shambling figure before me seemed nothing more than a detached observer of his own life. This really couldn’t be Wilko.

From time to time, we’d see this narrator play something to illustrate part of the story but the playing, like his words, was all over the place. I met him once. Dr. Feelgood were in the middle of their first U.S. tour but during a few days off, Wilko flew back to London. I was at United Artists offices in the city, sitting in reception when he walked in. The exact details are somewhat clouded by the passage of time but the trip home had been prompted by the non-appearance of a bag of white powder in The States.

The receptionist greeted him warmly and having ascertained why he wasn’t on the other side of the pond, found the missing bag. Wilko then asked for a room with a typewriter and disappeared. On my way out from seeing the press officer, I was walking past an open door when the, by then wired, guitarist called out to me. He’d been busy battering out lyrics on a portable and asked me if I’d listen to some of them and give my opinion. I remember being impressed both with the occasion and words but that’s all the information I’ve retained.

That’s the crux of my problem. I remember the Wilko that I met and yet I seem unprepared to accept that I have aged as much as he has. Somehow, the juxtaposition of the 1970’s high-energy performances seen in the captured live footage, with the guitarist as he is now seemed all the sadder. I wanted an unsullied celebration of this all too English amphetamine fuelled, electric, delta blues. I wanted the snapshot in time.

Canvey Island was itself a major player in the film. The faded fifties glamour of the casinos and holiday camp were a powerful backdrop to the evolution of the band. Even seeing it now, it offered far less pathos than inspiration as we followed one of the regular 2 hour tours that takes fans round all the important Feelgood landmarks.

The fact that fans still take those tours is testament to something hugely important that was sidestepped to a large degree: there was a Dr. Feelgood after Wilko left the band. It might not have been as exciting an era as when he was part of it but it saw the band continue to grow as a group of musicians and Lee Brilleaux take his rightful place as one of Britain’s best blues men. They may never again have had the startling effect that their early years made on the music industry but it can easily be argued that without Feelgood, there would never have been Punk. Unlike Punk, of course, Feelgood weathered the changing musical tastes of several decades and stayed true to their roots. They also remained in the hearts and minds of fans of basic rhythm and blues.

For me, the most poignant part of the film was Wilko sitting with his life in cuttings and pictures spread out before him. I had a deep sense of intruding on a private moment, watching someone access personal memories that should never be lightly shared. That, more than anything else troubled me. It seemed that he had lost his own connection with those events; was seeing them as a third party and yet I understand the reasoning (if there is one).

Despite that pathos there was one real sense of emotion in the film. It came from Shirley Brilleaux, Lee’s widow. She was filled with such feeling for this man that saw her smile, laugh and cry whilst thinking of him. Such simple emotions that were obviously heartfelt left me hungering for more knowledge of her husband. In many ways, Shirley was the unexpected star of this film. She did Lee proud.

When the film petered out there was a break before the video feed was turned on again. It was just enough time to hit the bar and hope for better things to come. I wasn’t expecting much, based on what I’d seen of Wilko and the announcement that Alison Moyet was going to be a guest did not bode well for me. “Alf” from Yazoo with Wilko Johnson? No way!

Strangely, that was the unexpected highlight of the evening. She looked great and sounded amazing! As for the shambolic narrator, a simple truth became self evident – all he needed was an audience. Not a film crew but a real audience that he could strut his stuff in front of – and boy, did he strut! The moves, the energy and, of course, the licks were all there. I just wanted someone to put a “Wilko” wig on him and take me back 35 years. The video feed was stunning. To see every chop of his fingers on those strings, every chord change, was incredible. I just didn’t want to see the bushiness of his eyebrows or the lines on his face that the high definition picked out in minute detail.

Playing counterpoint to Wilko’s machine-gun like guitar was Norman Watt-Roy on bass. Watt-Roy goes back to 1968 with The Greatest Show On Earth, an early signing to the Harvest label. From there he joined Glencoe, then Loving Awareness and finally Ian Dury & The Blockheads. It was an odd sight. He seemed unaware of his guitarist but somehow, as is the case with all great bass players, totally attuned to him. Odd isn’t really the word. More outlandish. Part gargoyle let loose; part Orang Utang; part octopus. A figure dancing to his own tune yet producing the most incredible runs far beyond the reach of many. His dexterity on the fretboard and his obvious skill with picking and slapping the strings between the bridge and first pick-up was totally breathtaking.

There was one other guest onstage. A leather-jacketed harmonica player that looked totally familiar and yet I couldn’t believe I was seeing. Charles Shaar Murray, one of the greatest music journalists ever, showed he really knew how to blow a blues harp and paid a fine tribute to the one man missing from the stage – Lee Brilleaux. Somehow, that tied it all together. Wilko’s guitar was as good as it ever was but his singing was weak and reedy.

Alison Moyet lifted the event, as did C S M but really all it did was point out that Dr. Feelgood was at its best when the original line-up was together. A stunning guitarist capable of great lyrics and a wonderful vocalist who could make a harmonica wail unlike anyone outside the American blues elite. One thing is certain, Lee and the Feelgoods are missing from today’s music and that’s sad.

Ploughing through videos and not the snow outside

The last week should have seen me working in the house. There’s painting, plastering and varnishing to do but with Friday’s daytime temperature a chilly -8 C, it will have to wait.

It’s meant I’ve been huddled over a heater in front of the computer and working on my various blogs that haven’t had any attention paid to them for ages. The Rockmine Television one is very nearly finished. I’ve only got 2009 and the start of this year to do and that will be every U.K. number one up. At the moment, along with the Eurovision Winners, it amounts to 1157 videos.

I would have completed it had I not been distracted looking for festival footage. I started collecting rock video in 1982 and have cupboards full of video tapes that would take me years to digitize and as a result, I’ve become rather bored by the whole thing, or so I thought. A casual trawl through YouTube once again got me excited about video.

You mention festivals and everyone will say Woodstock, Isle Of Wight, Glastonbury, Reading, Knebworth, Phoenix, T In The Park, the Hyde Park Free Festivals and many more. Material from all of them is available but I discovered was there was footage of Fehmarn Isle, Bilzen Jazz ‘67, ‘68 & ‘69, Windsor ‘67, Copenhagen Jazz ‘68, Rome ‘68 and even Kastival ‘68!

I know it’s rather sad to say it but I got rather excited by that. I went looking for footage of the Sunbury Festival in England and found another of the same name in Australia that I’d never even heard of. And I call myself a rock music archivist! There is just SO MUCH stuff out there! It really is a video collector’s dream. So, while I haven’t yet finished one listing, I’m adding masses of stuff for the next one. There are people who would say that sums me up perfectly but, hey! what the hell…

Having put a posting up several days ago, I was completely taken aback when my stats rocketed. It’s very strange to discover that the key to the blogs is just to be me. When I started www.rockmine.com back in 1995, I shut myself in my office for several days while I got to grips with HTML and then just put up the stuff that interested me. Somehow, over the years, I forgot that.

Many years ago, Radio One’s “Newsround” did a piece on me. I was the last article on it and it went straight back into Nicky Campbell, who described me as “anally retentive”. Fine praise from a James Bond collector! I prefer to remember Mick Wall who, when he was editor of Classic Rock, came to visit the archive with the board of directors of Future Publishing and called me “the real deal”. The editor of Total Guitar said I was “the God of anoraks”. Oh, happy days!

Yet here I am snowed in, wondering what on earth I’m doing in the wilds of Perthshire with a garage and a house full of books and papers when all I really need is in my head. Mid-life crisis is really no excuse for the amount of time I’ve taken to remember that! Back in 1975, I was working on a college project that needed a slogan or dictum. Being a pretentious sod, I came up with “If religion is the opiate of the people, then rock music is marijuana for the masses”. Somehow, I forgot that myself.

If you want to get up, or get down, get maudlin or melancholic, energized or ecstatic, music can get you there. Since I was a kid, I’ve known that and yet it’s so easy to lose track of the simple constants and truths we hold dear. Oddly, in amongst more than 1,000 number ones, I found songs to do all of those things and songs that took me back to so many moments in my past. There are even songs I hated that had other memories attached that give them significance way beyond their artistic value.

That’s what makes rock and pop wonderful. There are tracks today that don’t do anything for me and yet they’ll be no less significant for someone twenty or thirty years from now than the music that I still listen to. The secret may just to be open to everything. That’s what made John Peel such a great DJ, he listened to everything with an open mind and an open heart.

If music touches you, it doesn’t matter who it’s by, or what it is. All you can say is that you feel it.

A New Year and a new blog!

Happy New Year to you all.

After Christmas, I started to think about my blogs and my website. I’d lost my direction with them and couldn’t get a handle on how to find one again. My website, Rockmine had been huge at one time but it became so big that it took up all my time. Knowing that was my dilemma. Did I invest more time in it or let it just stagnate in cyberspace, much like I’d been doing.

Rockmine had worked because it was me. I took my interests and compulsive list making and turned it into a website that other people liked. Trying to jump on bandwagons or follow trends wouldn’t work for me, so I had to get back to basics. I had to get back to what interests me and do something serious for a change.

On New Years Day, I knew what I wanted to do. I’ve had the Rockmine.TV domain for years but never used it and yet I would happily sit watching video on my computer than wile away hours in front of a television. The only problem I’ve ever had is that YouTube is full of stuff and finding what you want can be as frustrating as it is exciting.

The solution is a solution for me. I’ll take all my lists and add video to them. I find the clips once, and then I never need to bookmark anything again or go searching. It all just sits in one place. Being rather sad, I thought I’d start with two things I always get asked about – Eurovision Winners and U.K. Number One Singles. I once had all the number ones as singles but that was in another lifetime. Now, I can get rid of all the records and keep the website which is my latest blog – Rockmine Television.

At the time of writing this, there are 866 videos there. Every Eurovision Winner and all the U.K. Number One Singles from 1960 – 2000. While I’d really have loved to get more up by now, I don’t think that’s a bad job in 6 days. I would have done more but it is so easy to just sit and watch things you haven’t seen, sometimes for decades  and remember how good or bad they were! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Today In Rockmine, December 6th

It’s a bit weird, starting to blog again. After all, what have I really got to talk about?

There is stuff. How relevant it is to other people’s lives is debatable but it gives vent to my thoughts. Most of you know that the building I’m currently residing in, is on the market but so far it hasn’t sold. There may be signs of movement in house sales but they seem to be related to reducing the price and overly blandising the place. Magnolia really doesn’t do it for me, so for now I’ll stick with what colours are on the walls. There’s an obvious stress there but it’s one that’s echoed by millions of others who want to move up or down (or even sideways) on the property ladder.

My biggest problem has been one of decluttering. Really, it’s been a nightmare. There were times in the last decade that the sitting room and the family room as it’s listed on the sales schedule have been inaccessible. Here for example is what the latter looked like at one point:

Now, it looks like this:

To declutter to the extent seen above took ages and it meant that the garage, which was stacked with newspapers and rock magazines and looked like this:

got much, much worse. This picture was taken after I had taken more than 3,500 old music papers to the skip! Don’t worry, they were triplicates at least. The two piles at the apex of the roof are 10 foot tall. By the time the whole wall was fully stacked and then a second row of piles started, the list to the right of the picture became so pronounced, the whole garage started to lean that way!

Some years back, a ton of old newspaper was worth more than £ 200 but such is the economic situation that it’s fallen to £ 25. To get that, it has to be graded and bailed. If you can’t sell it the obvious thing was to find an alternative use. It would have been fun to turn the papers into bricks and build another house but I never found how to do that. I did find the “paper Brick House” which was China’s pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. It’s worth a look. If you didn’t know about it, click on this link.

What I did, of course, discover is that you can make paper bricks or briquettes to burn as an alternative to logs or coal. Thanks to the dire economic climate we find ourselves in, adverts for these can be found in Sunday colour supplements and the catalogues that come free with them. They look wonderful and sound like a perfect solution but very few of them point out that you have to soak the paper in a bin prior to squeezing it into the brick-maker and expelling as much water as possible. Then it’s a simple job of leaving them in a warm dry place to lose all their moisture content before burning. With a Scottish summer being wet enough, even considering something like that in winter was tantamount to lunacy.

Thankfully, it seemed I wasn’t the only one with this problem and I found some mention of dry paper brick making. This amounted to just rolling newspaper as tightly as possible and then binding it with metal rings to stop the “log” falling apart in the fire. Needless to say, the sites selling wet paper brick makers also sell metal rings but that seemed a ludicrous expense. I decided to butcher a number of wire coat hangers and literally roll the straight wire around the paper log. The first time you do this is the worst but after the wire has been a fire once, it’s far easier to bend. For those of you wanting to try this at home, I’ll post some pics later today.

Today In Rockmine

I am, as they say, a tad frustrated. Having exceeded a certain age, I should be past my mid-life crisis but it seems to continue unabated.

Back in the mists of iTime, I effectively shut myself away in my office for about five days. I did venture out for meals and shagging but the rest of the time was spent trying to master HTML. The mission was a success, I sort of got the hang of it and hand coded a site that went online on July 18th, 1995. Fuck! Is it really that long ago? It feels like yesterday and yet, it also feels like another lifetime.

Now, here I am with a web-site and a blog – but am I doing either? The answer is simple. No, I’m not.

What you get comes straight from my head. Sometimes, I will accept, I have no idea what’s going to present itself on the screen in front of me. It’s stream of consciousness, or drivel (whichever you might think). The one thing that’s been a constant, since that very first day, is it came out of my head. It wasn’t checked with someone or edited and yet the blog has ground to a halt.

Someone has been very sweet and was checking it for me on a daily basis but I realised that it was screwing me up beyond belief. Since I was in my teens, I’ve written, poetry, porn, crap of all sorts but it just came from my fingers. I didn’t need to think about it and I didn’t. I typed it out, posted it – and waited for a cheque or a rejection note (and in some cases, come-ons from the editors of top-shelf magazines). It was a laugh, a job, something to do but I always took it seriously. It was me. Just as this is.

My head has always been so fucked that it’s a wonder I could ever function on anything resembling a normal state. I come from a dysfunctional family but then, who doesn’t. I hate confrontation but am incredibly confrontational. I always have been but who really cares. We’re all like that. It’s year upon year of suppressed anger that eventually takes over. You lose sense of yourself and yet somewhere in the back of your mind you can often find the key. One moment, one situation, where rather than face a confrontation, you simply give in. That moment, where you want to say “no” more than anything and don’t, is where it all goes wrong.

Is this a semantic debate or a rock blog? It’s both, believe me. For me at least, it is. I have to take ownership of what I have done and continue to do. The mistakes I’ve made are numerous but as long as I take responsibility for them, it’s fine. They’re in the past and gone but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to learn from them.  I have a vivid memory of sitting on the floor as a small child playing with a construction set and a friend of my mother’s asking why I wasn’t out on a bright summer’s day playing with friends. Before I could answer, my mother did. “He’s happier playing on his own in here”, she said.

Needless to say, I didn’t want to be stuck in the corner of a room listening to two women bitch about everything and everyone they knew but I didn’t open my mouth and say anything. Here we are, four and a half decades on and not much has changed, except for one thing. I know where I fucked up and it makes me desperately unhappy. It’s amazing how satisfying even saying, “No, I don’t want coffee tonight” can be.

The archive; the almanac; the memorabilia – all of them are, in some ways, extensions of myself but they’re not me. Now, all I want to do is do something with them. In the case of the garage and the huge piles of newspapers I’ve found a solution I’m comfortable with. I’m burning them! A one-inch pile of tabloids will easily make two paper “logs” more than 3 inches in diameter. They burn for at least an hour and make very little ash. Carefully positioned at night, they’ll even keep a fire going until the next morning. Ripping up things – and creating warmth – what could be more satisfying?

In amongst this upheaval, I’m trying to rebuild my iTunes library. In the last few years, it’s quadrupled in size but I look at it with deep sadness. Everything that ever gave me joy is there but the artists that created those works are pale shadows of their former selves. They no longer inspire me. I want someone to do that again. I want to hear something new and exciting but I struggle, I really do.

If it wasn’t for the wealth of sites on blogspot.com providing links from everything from the most obscure 60’s releases to albums that will hit the shops in a month or so, I would go nuts! The music industry whinges on and on about illegal downloads but it’s all crap. Back in the “good old days” you could go into a record shop and while away an hour or two in listening booths, or in later years at “listening stations” but you could listen to new releases by anyone and everyone. That doesn’t happen anymore. back in the ’60s and ’70s the amount of music on mainstream TV channels was vast in comparison to today. From “Crackerjack” to “The Black & White Mistrel Show” and even “Tonight”, you could see and hear what was happening in music.

We’re not talking about the latest project from Simon Cowell here, we’re talking about real music, written and performed by real bands who had slogged for years paying their dues in flea-pits and bars across the land. I really miss that.

At one point, I thought my problem was that I didn’t care anymore but it’s really the opposite. I care too much. I hope I never, ever stop caring but I need new, exciting music and I’m not getting it. If you know of anything exciting, send it to me. I AM SERIOUS! And don’t worry what it is. My tastes are extremely eclectic but one thing remains constant. The best single ever recorded – “London Calling” by The Clash.

Today In Music – An update

Well, here I am again.It’s the Rockmine blog but not as you’ve known it.

My problem started when I finished one year of the Almanac and had to then start again. I love the idea of keeping information free but the almanac is something I’ve invested so much time and energy in, that I can’t just go on giving it away.

The dilemma I had was how to continue Rockmin e as a site, a blog and even as a real archive. It’s always been difficult to keep it up to date and I’ve consistently had a pile of newspapers every week that I’ve never managed to work through. When the property housing Rockmine went on the market, I realised the scale of the problem. My pile of papers needing checked for cuttings was more than 150 feet! The cuts that I had removed were no less a problem, filling dozens of boxes. All of this stuff, should be neatly filed in a bank of filing cabinets but it isn’t!

Of course, the house sale means I am moving but still don’t know exactly where or what I’m going to do. That leaves me in limbo as to whether the archive will move on. I have decided to continue the almanac and (behind schedule) get it out as a book, published by Rockmine but printed by Lulu. One thing I’m considering is selling off the cuttings but that’s a huge task. There must be hundreds of thousands of them and it’s a frightening cataloguing problem. Bizarrely, if it were catalogued, it would be a hugely valuable information list. Somewhat akin to indexing all the music content of the major daily press over the past 24 years.

Oddly, I’ve been trying to deal with this problem since the largest hard-drive it was possible to get was 270 mb! Happy days. The basis of the current Rockmine site was built on an Apple PowerBook 180c which had 3 meg of ram, doubled to 6 with Ram Doubler and pushed to 36 with MaxRam. Hey, it was a 9 inch colour screen set in what looked like a Tonka Toy computer designed by Sony. Back in those days computers were full of excitement and wonder but I don’t get excited anymore.

While I’m wallowing in nostalgia, there is a crazy tale regarding the indexing of the archive. My friend Bob, who sadly suffered a stroke nearly two years ago is a businessman with an eye for solutions to problems. When faced with the one of how to index the archive, he rose to the occasion and negotiated a deal with a prison. A new privately-run one had just opened in Kilmarnock and they needed to find work for the inmates. Every one of the prisoners had to have a job every day or the Scottish Prison Service would fine the prison. So Bob got us a deal whereby we’d get as many prisoners as we needed to scan all the music papers in the archive and annotate them.

The prison was even talking about buying the scanners and computers as it would be teaching the inmates computer skills to help with their rehabilitation and prepare them for life in the outside world. Believe it or not, the reason the scheme fell through was me. I wasn’t prepared to risk the archive being potentially wrecked by a bunch of prisoners and I wasn’t prepared to oversee them doing the work. Strange days indeed!

Well, here I am again.It’s the Rockmine blog but not as you’ve known it.

My problem started when I finished one year of the Almanac and had to then start again. I love the idea of keeping information free but the almanac is something I’ve invested so much time and energy in, that I can’t just go on giving it away.

The dilemma I had was how to continue Rockmin e as a site, a blog and even as a real archive. It’s always been difficult to keep it up to date and I’ve consistently had a pile of newspapers every week that I’ve never managed to work through. When the property housing Rockmine went on the market, I realised the scale of the problem. My pile of papers needing checked for cuttings was more than 150 feet! The cuts that I had removed were no less a problem, filling dozens of boxes. All of this stuff, should be neatly filed in a bank of filing cabinets but it isn’t!

Of course, the house sale means I am moving but still don’t know exactly where or what I’m going to do. That leaves me in limbo as to whether the archive will move on. I have decided to continue the almanac and (behind schedule) get it out as a book, published by Rockmine but printed by Lulu. One thing I’m considering is selling off the cuttings but that’s a huge task. There must be hundreds of thousands of them and it’s a frightening cataloguing problem. Bizarrely, if it were catalogued, it would be a hugely valuable information list. Somewhat akin to indexing all the music content of the major daily press over the past 24 years.

Oddly, I’ve been trying to deal with this problem since the largest hard-drive it was possible to get was 270 mb! Happy days. The basis of the current Rockmine site was built on an Apple PowerBook 180c which had 3 meg of ram, doubled to 6 with Ram Doubler and pushed to 36 with MaxRam. Hey, it was a 9 inch colour screen set in what looked like a Tonka Toy computer designed by Sony. Back in those days computers were full of excitement and wonder but I don’t get excited anymore.

While I’m wallowing in nostalgia, there is a crazy tale regarding the indexing of the archive. My friend Bob, who sadly suffered a stroke nearly two years ago is a businessman with an eye for solutions to problems. When faced with the one of how to index the archive, he rose to the occasion and negotiated a deal with a prison. A new privately-run one had just opened in Kilmarnock and they needed to find work for the inmates. Every one of the prisoners had to have a job every day or the Scottish Prison Service would fine the prison. So Bob got us a deal whereby we’d get as many prisoners as we needed to scan all the music papers in the archive and annotate them.

The prison was even talking about buying the scanners and computers as it would be teaching the inmates computer skills to help with their rehabilitation and prepare them for life in the outside world. Believe it or not, the reason the scheme fell through was me. I wasn’t prepared to risk the archive being potentially wrecked by a bunch of prisoners and I wasn’t prepared to oversee them doing the work. Strange days indeed!

Anyway, back to today, or the present at least, I’m doing more archiving than I’ve done for many years, even if it’s just putting cuttings, legal papers, whatever in clearly labelled boxes. It seems that having your house on the market is one thing but getting people to see past the piles of magazines and papers spread throughout is another thing all together. I have to admit it’s a very strange situation, carefully boxing up a lifetime’s work and having no real idea what you’re going to do with it.

One thing that I do have to deal with is the memorabilia that still fills crates and cupboards and hangs on the walls. Then there’s about 4,000 vinyl albums and twice as many singles to get rid of. So, what I’m going to do is start to list everything on here. The concept of the Garage Sale, as was, is gone. I now HAVE to clear the garage, so you can expect a plethora of music related items to turn up here. I have, in some cases, complete years of “Sounds” and “New Musical Express”, carefully wrapped in black bin-bags in either complete or nearly complete years. There are hundreds of books and magazines and dozens of standees as they seem to call the cardboard cut-outs used as point-of-sale promotions. Some of those things are WAY TOO big to post but they are hugely collectable.

I’m even thinking of renting a local shop for a few weeks to sell the vinyl. In the meantime, as I have hard copies that I paid for, am I allowed to download copies from the internet to save me the hassle of digitizing stuff?

If nothing else, that sounds like an interesting project that I can share with you! I will keep you posted…

Today In Music, June 25th

The Day The Music Died.

Depending on your age, taste in music and whether or not you spend your life completely detached from popular culture, you’ll have a day “The Music Died”.

Millions across the world can tell you what they were doing and their feelings when Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, and George Harrison died. They may span a generation but to the fans, all that mattered was that their hero had gone.

Today, another superstar’s name joins that list – Michael Jackson.

Whatever you think of him, no-one can deny he was one of the most talented pop performers ever and one of the biggest selling artists of all time.

For the last few years, Jackson’s life had been troubled to say the least but now isn’t a time to sift through his problems. I’d rather just celebrate his career with a selection of his work.

Here he is with “Ben” from the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour from 1972.

Promo video for “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” from 1979.

The “Thriller ” promo video from 1983.

Earth song from 1995.

Michael Jackson, 1959 – 2009. R.I.P.

Today In Music, March 16th

Today In Music, March 16th

From the Rockmine Almanac for today (Monday 16th March):

Birth
1942. Jerry Jeff Walker born Paul Crosby in Onenta, New York State.

In The Mail
1959. RCA Records in New York receive an anonymous letter informing them that plans have been made for a Red Army soldier to kill Elvis Presley during his tour of duty with the U.S. Army in West Germany. The company takes the letter seriously enough to forward it to the F.B.I.
What followed was one of the most bizarre cold war intrigues. The F.B.I. took the the threat seriously enough to assume that it was in fact a KGB plot based on their fear of the effect that rock music might have on Russia’s subjugated youth. All of Elvis’s German contacts were vetted and in the case of his homosexual barber, replaced to minimize any potential assassination attempt.

In Court
1978. Gary Glitter (34) is fined £ 100 and banned from driving for 18 months when he appears at Salisbury Magistrates Court. He admitted driving his Rolls Royce with excess alcohol in his blood last October.

In Hospital
1971. Kim Payne, roadie with the Allman Brothers Band is shot through the right thigh by an off-duty motorcycle cop who tries to give him a ticket for speeding in the band’s hometown of Macon, Georgia. The official (police) version of events is that Payne resisted arrest and broke free as the cop was trying to cuff him. Payne, on the other hand, says the cop couldn’t get the handcuffs over his leather gloves and when he started laughing the cop erupted and shot him. Bleeding profusely, Payne blacked out in the parking lot where the shooting happened. Had he not been rushed to the emergency room he could easily have bled to death. He was later charged with speeding, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. When he appeared in court later in the month, Payne was found guilty of speeding and resisting arrest and fined $ 200.

On Television

1970. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, U.S.A.) with Tiny Tim. All of Tim’s performances on Laugh-In are on YouTube. I think this is the right one for this date but it may not be!

Death
1968. Tammi Terrell (real name Tammi Montgomery) dies of a brain tumour at Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia. She was diagnosed last year after collapsing into Marvin Gaye’s arms onstage during a duet of “That’s All You Need To Get By”. Since then, she had undergone six operations but they were unable to save her.

Music Paper From Today

Record Mirror from 16th March 1991. A copy taken from Rockmine’s almost complete run of U.K. music papers from the last 45 years.

Babble

There was a really good piece in the Observer Music Magazine in which Paul Morley discussed the availability of musical knowledge.

The trouble with much of it lies in verification. Wikipedia, as we now know is full of inaccuracies but potentially no more than any other cyclopedia. Since it’s inception, Rockmine has tried to be the authoritative source for information. I am human and therefore, there are mistakes but the policy throughout has been to reverse engineer the history of music. Not to go looking for what books have said over the years but rather, to go back to the nearest authority. That means going back to the closest account of an event. For more than two decades, I’ve scoured daily papers, checked court filings, made lists of TV schedules and accumulated several million pieces of paper to back up what I think I know.

So, Rockmine and the Rockmine Almanac are built on a vast resource that is in the main totally wasted on giving you a handful of music related stories every day? I don’t think so. I don’t care about being the biggest, the fastest or the coolest. All I care about is ensuring that when I post a piece of information here or on Rockmine.com, it is correct. Now, before you point it out, I am aware there have been instances when my databases have failed me.

Over the years, I provided background information for everyone from the BBC to MTV and the Sunday Sport to The Washington Post. Unfortunately, that’s in the past and this is a different age both electronically and economically. Regardless of that, information still has value.

The Rockmine Almanac is vast but I want to do something with it. My initial plan is to make a concise version available as a book with a page-to-a-day format. It will probably only be 5% of the information I have but I think people still love dipping into something as tactile and satisfying as a book. Regular readers among you will be aware that I had hope to have it out by now but realistically, we’re talking about a month before I upload it to Lulu.com. It will be published by Rockmine but printed on demand by Lulu, although it will be available to order throughout the world. Some of what will be in the book can be found here or elsewhere on Rockmine for free.

Gathering the information for that and everything else on Rockmine is not without cost. My daily newspaper bill has in the past been frightening although I’ve now cut down greatly. Travelling to libraries and parking while I do my research all adds to the cost of providing what is a free service. So, as of today, in an effort to help pay some of the many bills I incur along the way I’ve added a donation button to this blog and also Rockmine’s main site.

I know some of you may find this offensive but it all helps to cover my costs which are constantly rising. Anyone making a donation of £ 1 will get their name on a donor’s page and anyone making a donation of £ 5 or more will get a permanent link to their home page or commercial website from a link page on Rockmine. Maybe this goes against the ethos of a free internet but it now seems pretty commonplace. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

As well as the donation button, you’ll also notice I’ve added a search facility to the blog so you can now search every entry. I’m also looking at adding a number of other widgets but I’ll discuss those more tomorrow along with what’s happening with the Rockmine Almanac.

Today In Music, February 10th

 

From the Rockmine Almanac for today (Monday 10th February):

Birth

1940. James “Jimmy” Merchant (Frankie Lymon And The Teenagers) born in New York.

On Tour

1980. Sammy Hagar’s UK tour which should have started today at Portsmouth’s Guildhall is postponed. His son is in hospital in the States with kidney problems and Hagar wants to be with him.

In Court

1988. The breach of contract case brought by Zang Tumb Tumb Records against Holly Johnson finishes at the High Court in London. Mr. Justice Whitford, presiding, rules that restraints in Johnson’s contract were unreasonable. He dismisses the label’s action and refuses to grant the injunctions they were seeking to ensure that Holly would not record for another company. Giving his verdict, the judge said: “Mr. Johnson, who I found entirely reasonable, was, in my judgement, entitled to free himself from these onerous obligations… He is a singer. He wants to make a living”. Holly, who was tied into a ZTT contract as a member of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, had been looking for a solo contract with another label. The judge adjourned the case until a later date when the matter of costs will be decided. On leaving the court, Holly (27) said, “This is a great day for recording artists everywhere and I believe this will help them in the future to get better and fairer agreements. Now I just can’t wait to start work again”.

In Hospital

1998. Frank Sinatra is once again admitted to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles following reports that “Ol’ Blue Eyes” is suffering from blood in his urine which may indicate bladder cancer.

On Television

2004. The Ellen DeGeneres Show including musical guest, Sting

Death

2002. Folk singer Dave Van Ronk dies in New York University Medical Center, where he’d been undergoing treatment for colon cancer. His management company said that during the treatment “his cardio-pulmonary system failed”. Van Ronk (65) had been an influence on many of the singer songwriters from the sixties onwards, including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian and Suzanne Vega.

Music Paper From Today

 

 

New Musical Express from 10th February 1968. A copy taken from Rockmine’s almost complete run of U.K. music papers. The front page is mainly given over to a rare gem of UK psych pop from The Nerve. Original copies sell for more than £ 30. Both the A and B side can be found on the Psych compilation CD, “Magic Spectacles”. 

Daily Babble

 

As you can see from the image above, I’ve got a working A3 scanner again. Now all I have to do is work my way through the thousands of music papers I have! I need to sort my system for scanning. I pulled out 4 last night and my office is now in total disarray. I took 4 piles out from different shelves and different papers and now I can’t move around the 8 piles I created. Aarghh!

 

I went out to the garage to look for some other mags to scan and found a load of “Sounds”. All had paper tabs in for news stories that I was meant to include in The Almanac. What was that I was saying about having a system? I suppose I better try and tidy up – or do some more scanning… 

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