The B List: Grousing The NY Times Archives

1985: Should Rock Lyrics Be Sanitized? [October 13th,1985]

Lowell George of the 1970’s rock band Little Feat was probably kidding when he sang, ”Some contend that rock and roll/is bad for the body and bad for the soul/bad for the heart, bad for the mind/bad for the deaf and bad for the blind.” Yet with an elaborate media campaign that culminated last month in a day of Senate hearings and stern, if vague, admonitions from Commerce Committee members to America’s record companies, some parents have upset the record business.

1986: The Beastie Boys: Metal-Rap Group [December 29th, 1986]

The Beastie Boys aren’t exactly original – they rap in the cadences of Run-D. M. C. – and compared to such calmly amoral rappers as Schooly D, they’re virtually a comedy act. Yet for the moment, the Beastie Boys’ crafty backup tracks and personal bravado promise to put sheer obnoxiousness back in the rock-and-roll spotlight.

1987: Invisible Touch Latest in Genesis’ 20 Year Life Span [May 27th, 1987]

” ‘Invisible Touch,’ like all of our albums was done relatively quickly,” Mr. Collins, the trio’s lead singer and part-time drummer, explained recently. ”It was completed in three months of hard, intense work. Instead of writing material ahead of time, what we’ve always done is go into the studio and improvise. We each have our own drum machine, and often what evolves is based on drum-machine patterns that set up a mood out of which comes a song. During this process, I sing along with the rhythms. Everything gets put on cassette. Then we plow through and find the bits that work and develop them. The lyrics are written much later by different individuals. The words for ‘Invisible Touch,’ ‘Tonight, Tonight, Tonight’ and ‘In Too Deep’ were mine, while Mike Rutherford wrote ‘Land of Confusion’ and ‘Throwing It All Away.’ ”

1988: Prince’s New Show Combines Sex and Piety, Mist and Motion [September 16th, 1988]

Prince has assembled a hyperactive, in-the-round arena production. Its stage constantly spurts mist and raises or lowers platforms and partitions, as lights and effects are splashed on from above. There are gimmicks, like the Thunderbird in which Prince enters and exits, but the show revolves around human stamina. Prince dances up a storm, doing splits and knee-drops and strenuously lascivious poses; he even spins a basketball on his forefinger.

1989: The Grateful Dead have a good night at Brendan Byrne [October 14th, 1989]

Like all vital institutions, the Grateful Dead changes slowly but constantly. Within the format of leisurely, unhistrionic, unpremeditated sets that the band established in the 1960’s, the Dead toys with possibilities as its cult audience ponders every variation. The Dead never blasts its listeners, who are invariably dressed in 1960’s-revival tie-dyed jeans, flannel and peasant dresses; instead, it assumes they will be attentive. In fact, the amplification tonight was so discreet that the crowd’s hubbub almost drowned out the first song.

1990: Backstage, Bands on the Run Have Cleaned Up Their Acts [June 10th, 1990]

On many tours everyone from concert promoters to managers to musicians themselves have stripped shows of profit-gobbling perquisites like large quantities of alcohol, extravagant catering and other ego boosters so costly that even the biggest touring acts of the 70’s were often hard-pressed to break even on the road. At the time rock tours were primarily intended to boost sales of a new album; they were not seen as moneymakers in themselves. But now, although tours are still used to promote recordings, they are also regarded as profitable ventures in their own right, with the emphasis on efficiency and organization rather than frivolity and self-gratification.

1991: Nirvana: A Band That Deals in Apathy [September 27th, 1991]

On a recent afternoon, Nirvana showed its lack of regard for the customary laws of time and space, as well as for society in general, when Mr. Cobain failed to materialize for this interview. “He’s disappeared,” said the band’s road manager nervously. The bassist Chris Novoselic happily volunteered for the job, and seemed equally at home discussing his recent stint in a Los Angeles jail on a drunk driving charge as he did talking about the highly individualist workings of Nirvana. “We’re never been goal-oriented, personally or as a band,” Mr. Novoselic explained on the phone from Boston, where theband was to perform that night. “We just want to play, and put out what we consider good records.”

1992: The H.O.R.D.E. tour arrives at Jones Beach [July 14th, 1992]

If Martians had come on Sunday night and swept the Jones Beach amphitheater and its audience away to some other planet, prep schools would be in deep trouble. Horde (Horizon of Rock Developing Everywhere), a gathering of post-Grateful Dead bands, made its appearance, and anybody wondering where the children of the cultural elite go for musical entertainment didn’t have to look any further.

1993: A fascinating profile of original Wetlands owner Walter Durkacz [March 17, 1993]

In discussing his tenure at Wetlands, which began in the late 1980’s, Mr. Durkacz, who is 36, credits the club’s owner, Larry Bloch, a former Greenpeace volunteer and a self-proclaimed Deadhead, with the idea of opening a 60’s preserve that offered a tie-dye brand of environmentalism. When Mr. Durkacz began booking the bands that helped give the club its personality, he had never been to a Grateful Dead concert.

1994: Pavement, Sidestepping to Soft Rock, Is as Oblique as Ever [March 13th, 1994]

On its second full-length album, “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain,” the noise that endeared Pavement to fans of difficult rock has been stripped away, revealing coherent song structures and comparatively gentle arrangements. But the music remains just as oblique, mainly because of the stream-of-consciousness poetry of the singer and songwriter Stephen Malkmus.

1995: Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, Icon of ’60s Spirit, Dies at 53 [August 10th, 1995]

The Dead’s fans savored the group’s unpredictability, seeing as many concerts as possible and sometimes following the band for a full-length tour. For most of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, the band toured stadiums and did not play to a single empty seat; some concerts sold out before they were advertised, purely through announcements in the Deadheads’ newsletter and on a telephone hotline. (The band had planned six concerts in late September at Madison Square Garden as part of a fall tour, but it is unclear if they will proceed.)

1996: Phish Offers Communal Jams With A Legacy [January 1st, 1996]

Phish is more streamlined than the Dead were. With one guitarist and one drummer instead of two of each, there are fewer perspectives on the rhythm. Phish is also more organized, less inclined to ramble or search audibly for its next maneuver than the Dead were. To yield something like a Dead concert without the dead spots, Phish maps the territory between fixed songs and haphazard jamming; its instrumental passages move purposefully from section to section. Though there’s room for spontaneity, there are also long, satisfying crescendos and carefully plotted moves from consonance to dissonance and back.

1997: Playing, Swaying and Praying at the Tibet Freedom Concert [June 10th, 1997]

Prayer flags fluttered from the speaker towers, and each of the seven-hour shows opened and closed with chants by monks from the Drepung Loseling monastery. In a large tent, monks chanted longer ceremonies. They also worked on a sand mandala, an intricate painting in sand that was completed and then swept away on Sunday as a lesson in impermanence.

1998: The Concert Juggernaut; How One Company is Transforming the Live Entertainment Industry [July 20th, 1998]

Early last year, Robert F.X. Sillerman, a New York-based entrepreneur who controls SFX and made a fortune buying and selling radio stations, began a $1 billion binge of acquisitions. He snapped up a dozen of the country’s largest regional music promoters, giving him control of more than half the national market, including concerts by acts ranging from the Eagles to the Spice Girls. He further consolidated his power by buying amphitheaters, tour-promotion rights, ticketing companies and artist-management agencies. Though other companies, like Universal Concerts, have taken steps toward centralizing and consolidating the concert business, none have operated on this scale.

1999: moe.: The Pleasures of Unpredictability [November 2nd, 1999]

Moe’s set on Sunday at the Hammerstein Ballroom was amply spectacular, but unpredictability was its biggest strength. This upstate New York-based group, a longtime leader among ”jam bands” devoted to rock-based improvisation, stands out because of brains and muscle.

2000: Obituary: D. Allen Woody, 44, Bass Player [August 28th, 2000]

Allen Woody, as he was known, was born in Nashville, where his father, a truck driver, weaned him on the blues, country and rock oldies. Inspired by watching Paul McCartney play with the Beatles, he began learning the bass at age 14. Not long afterward he first heard the Allman Brothers Band on the radio and became interested in exploratory Southern rock.

2001: Vanishing Wetlands of the Musical Sort [July 30th, 2001]

”They called the other day to say they were closing their doors, and I was devastated,” said Marc Brownstein, the bass player in the electronica-fueled jam band the Disco Biscuits. ”I’ve been going to the club since its opening, when I was in high school, to see this band called the Authority. I was so amazed. It seemed like the biggest, most prestigious venue in the country. When I got a band, our only goal in life was to play Wetlands.”

2002: Wilco: A Jilted Band Finds Love After All [April 21st, 2002]

Jeff Tweedy, Wilco’s songwriter and leader, said by telephone from his home in Chicago: ”There’s a lot of irony there, but if it doesn’t bother AOL Time Warner, it doesn’t bother me. There’s no way around the fact that they did in effect pay for the record twice.”

2003: Summer Festivals: When The In Crowd is 100,000 Fans Strong [May 4th, 2003]

A turning point for rock festivals was the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, held in the Southern California town of Indio. It was a determinedly tasteful weekend of alternative rock that began in the spring of 2000 and returned last weekend. Unlike Woodstock 1999, Coachella has taken pride in making concertgoers comfortable, while booking a handful of million-selling bands like the Beastie Boys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers alongside others whose combined cult followings added up to a gathering of more than 30,000 people a day in the desert.

2004: Les Claypool: There’s No Sleep for These Fishes [June 17th, 2004]

”Here we are playing at 4 in the morning, we’re doing this demented, twisted version of ”Another Brick in the Wall,’ he said.” You know, people are tripping and having a good old time and we’re cruising past Cuba.”

2005: STS9: Providing Energy for Dancing (and Metaphysical Energy From Quartz Crystals) [February 21st, 2005]

In latter-day hippie style, the band performed alongside an onstage display of crystals, quartz spheres and elaborate foliage, while perched on top of the club’s large floor speakers were two easels, where Oliver Vernon and another painter worked on canvases as the band played.

2006: Hippies and Hipsters in a Dancing Mood at the Bonnaroo Festival [June 19th, 2006]

But listeners impatient with jam-band noodling had other choices. My Morning Jacket, in a midnight set on Friday night, left behind the electronic experiments of its most recent album, “Z,” and unleashed its three guitars in songs that pealed and surged in structures with monumental architecture. Then it turned to other bands’ material, including the Who’s mini-opera “A Quick One While He’s Away.”

2007: Sharon Jones: She’s Not Anybody’s Backup Act [September 29th, 2007]

The elephant in question is Amy Winehouse, this year’s breakout vocal star. She hired Ms. Jones’s longtime band, the Dap-Kings, to back her up in the studio and on tour, giving the group its first real taste of the limelight. But as Daptone prepares for the release on Tuesday of Ms. Jones’s new album, “100 Days, 100 Nights,” and Ms. Jones prepares for her highest-profile concert yet, at the Apollo Theater on Oct. 6, it has found that its association with Ms. Winehouse is a mixed blessing. For one, they say, people unaware of their years of hard musical labor might wonder if Ms. Jones is jumping on Ms. Winehouse’s bandwagon.