Amoeblog

In Celebration of Bob Dylan Turning 76 + Amoeba's 20% Off Sale, A Career Overview & Guide To Building Essential Dylan Library

Posted by Billyjam, May 24, 2017 01:14pm | Post a Comment


Today's installment in this weeklong Amoeblog birthday series, which honors Bob Dylan's 76th birthday with an accompanying Amoeba Music instore 20% off sale today, is the series' most important and personal for me. The artist born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24th, 1941 has for me consistently ranked as among the most important artists of all time, of all genres. A dedicated fan since I was just a little kid too young to understand his deeply layered lyrics, when my dad introduced me to him via his repeated plays of the albums Bringing It All Back Home (also avail on 180 gram vinly LP and on 2LP MFSL reissue as cover above) and Nashville Skyline (also avail on MSFL reissue vinyl), I credit both my musically diverse late father and Bob Dylan's music for giving me an appreciation of American music from Woody Guthrie's protest folk era, to country music (including my intro to Johnny Cash) and most importantly preparing me for rap music, in particular the rhyming structure of hip-hop. So for this birthday week Amoeblog series on Dylan I will provide a random timeline of Dylan events: tracing such moments as his famous mid sixties press conference in San Francisco up to his 2016 Nobel prize in literature. Also included  in this piece are references to many key Dylan albums / a suggested rough guide to building the basic essential Dylan music collection. Naturally with such a deep body of work (the online Amoeba shop numbers 400 Dylan titles!) this piece will only scratch the surface. Note that all Bob Dylan product found at Amoeba (LP, CD, DVD, posters etc.) are on 20% off sale today and instore only at Amoeba's three locations: Berkeley, San Francisco, and Hollywood.

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Birthday Week Part 2: Rosemary Clooney, Maxwell, and Robert Moog

Posted by Billyjam, May 23, 2017 10:38pm | Post a Comment

In continuation of yesterday's Amoeblog tribute to Morrissey's 58th birthday and the Amoeba Music one-day storewide 20% off sale on all Morrissey and The Smiths product to celebrate the date, we continue the birthday theme today by honoring three diverse artists whose birthday fell on this date of May 23rd: Rosemary Clooney, Maxwell, and Robert Moog. In the case of the latter artist/creator, whose legacy was celebrated over this past weekend with the annual MoogFest in North Carolina, select music artists whose careers were influenced by the moog synth creator will also be celebrated in this second birthday week Amoeblog installment.   Note tomorrow Wednesday, May 24th, Bob Dylan's 76th birthday will be celebrated with both a tribute Amoeblog as well as  one-day 20% off instore sale on the artist's releases And then on Friday this week, May 26th: birth date of the late Miles Davis,  the jazz great's legacy will similarly be celebrated in this one-week series.
Born on this date in 1934 and died in August 2005 at age 75,  Robert Moog was the inventor of the Moog synthesizer five and a half decades ago and, as such, widely credited with being a pioneer of electronic music.  It was in 1965 when the Moog company rolled out the commercially available modular voltage-controlled analog synthesizer systems. The radical musical creation would alter and help shape the course of popular music over the next half century. His electronic synthesizer keyboard instrument, that originally cost $11,000, counted among its earliest owners The Beatles, Sun Ra, and Mick Jagger after its introduction at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. As noted by such academics as Cornell University professor of Science and Technology Studies, Trevor Pinch Moog's creation and his name are often mispronounced. Moog rhymes with "rogue" not with "fugue" as it has repeatedly been mispronounced dating back to its earliest usage.

Among the earliest artists associated with the history of the Moog synth included Walter Carlos (later Wendy Carlos), Diana Ross & The Supremes, The Doors, and The Byrds followed by such others as  Rick Wakeman of Yes, Keith Emerson, Kraftwerk, and Gary Numan. Another fan of using the Moog synth, although not often associated with the instrument, was Bob Marley, But it was the aforementioned Walter / Wendy Carlos provided many music fans first introduction to the Moog with 1968 release of the crossover classical album Switched-On Bach which reworked Bach's pieces on this then new instrument. But in terms of the first big pop hit for the Moog as the main instrumentation, that occurred a few years later with the 1972 international pop hit single "Popcorn" by Hot Butter (song below) which was actually a cover of the song Gershon Kingsley wrote and first recorded in 1969 for his album Music to Moog By and done by numerous other artists including Jean-Michel Jarre who was recently featured on the Amoeblog for his WIMB? appearance.

Five-Beer Mission to Explore Strange New Worlds

Posted by The Bay Area Crew, May 23, 2017 07:42pm | Post a Comment

Star Trek & Beers

By Kai Wada Roath
Ambassador of Confusion Hill and host of the Super Shangri-La Show

Turkish Star Trek"Human beings do not survive on bread alone, you poor, soulless creature, but on the nourishments of liberty. For what indeed is a man without freedom, naught but a mechanism, trapped in the cogwheels of eternity."
~ Harcourt “Harry” Fenton Mudd

Just as Manchego cheese is paired with Pinot Noir, five beers should be paired with watching the 1973 Turkish cult-classic Omer the Tourist in Star Trek (known simply to most as Turkish Star Trek), where the Enterprise picks up a goofy Turkish hobo and then must deal with a salt-sucking vampire. Despite being filmed six years before the official Star Trek motion picture, this mind-boggling movie is not shown at many sci-fi or foreign film festivals, but it has been known to teleport to Amoeba’s used movie section from time to time, or, as Cyndi Lauper would say, time after time.

Five beers also go very nicely with listening to Star Trek themed bands in the garage with your friends. Bands such as Thee Shatners (with an amazing B side on the LP), The Encounters, Warp 11, Stovokor, No Kill I, and The Vulcaneers (with their hit record Beat Me Off Scotty) are guaranteed to entertain guests for hours and non-Trek loving friends for at least a half an hour.

New "What's In My Bag?" Episode with Watsky

Posted by Amoebite, May 23, 2017 02:49pm | Post a Comment

Watsky What's In My Bag? Amoeba Music

"I generally am of the strong opinion that the Vince Guaraldi Christmas album and the Oscar Peterson Christmas album are the best Christmas albums of all time," says rapper and writer Watsky while holding up The Isley Brothers' album I'll Be Home For Christmas. "But I'm willing to give Isley Brothers' Christmas a chance." Watsky was at Amoeba Hollywood recently picking up some records that were near and dear to him, as well as some albums he hadn't heard yet, including the aforementioned holiday album. A you would expect from the lauded writer and lyricist he had some interesting things to say about all of his picks.

George Virden Watsky, better known, simply, as Watsky, began his career as a highly-acclaimed slam poet. Considered the Bay Area's reigning teen slam poetry champion in the mid-'00s, he racked up Watsky x Infinity titles like Youth Speaks Grand Slam Poetry Champion and Brave New Voices International Poetry Slam Champion. He has appeared on HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Season Six.

Watch Dungen Perform Live at Amoeba Hollywood

Posted by Amoebite, May 22, 2017 04:51pm | Post a Comment

Dungen Live at Amoeba Hollywood

A day after performing their own soundtrack to the 1926 animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed at The Getty Center, Swedish psyche-rock band Dungen stopped by Amoeba Hollywood to play selected songs from their score, which was released in album form as Haxan. Though Dungen are no strangers instrumental freak-outs and jams, Haxan marks the release of their first all Dungen Haxan -instrumental record. The quartet were in top form on stage, creating a hypnotizing blend of atmospheric textures, musical grandeur, and funky grooves.

The video starts with "Haxan," a darkly triumphant march, led by front-man Gustav Ejstes' piano and accented by Reine Fiske's economic, but piercing, guitar lines. Next is "Aladdin och Lampan," a funky number with jazz chords, psychedelic jazz flute and a some killer bass riffs. The band closed their set with "En Gång Om Året," a song off their 2015 album Allas Sak, a piano driven psyche-ballad that lets Ejstes' vocals to shine through.

Check out the performance below:

Dungen - Live at Amoeba Hollywood
Watch and comment on YouTube

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