November 15, 2007

I’ve been on the road for much of the week, and if I released a series of videos chronicling my travels you’d see hundreds of minutes of an exhausted Ace

We couldn’t have been happier when the New York Times finally took down their Times Select pay wall, allowing free access to nearly all of the illustrious paper’s articles since 1981. While we love reading old reviews, news stories and columns from some of the best music journalists in the history of the game, we don’t like paying $3.99 to read a 500-word article. Mr. Sulzberger, tear down this wall!

We’ve been bookmarking some of our favorite articles from the vast NYT archives, and recently we realized we should probably share the links so people don’t have to enter 100 different search phrases like we did. This week’s B List compiles one great article from each year between 1981-2007:

1981: Tom Petty: Ready to Fight the Good Fight [May 6th, 1981]

”A lot of our fans have been with us for a long time, and I think they trust us,” the 29-year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist said recently. ”MCA has done a great job selling our records, but they couldn’t see the reality of what it’s like on the street – they couldn’t see that raising the album’s price wouldn’t be fair.”

1982: Talking Heads Fans Get a Night to Remember [August 23rd, 1982]

”THIS ain’t no party,” the Talking Heads warned gravely a year ago when they made their most recent concert appearance in the New York area. But the group’s expanded lineup, with a vocalist, guitarist, percussionist, extra bassist, and keyboard player added to the basic Talking Heads foursome, belied those words. Their shows were parties -joyous, celebratory, and loose.

1983: Police perform for 75,000 at Shea [August 20th, 1983]

”We’d like to thank the Beatles for lending us their stadium,” said Sting, the bassist and singer of the Police, near the end of the trio’s concert at Shea Stadium.

1984: Miles Davis Returns With Revamped Band [June 24th, 1984]

This revamped unit provides richly layered, rhythmically emphatic accompaniments for Mr. Davis and for two other absorbing soloists, the saxophonist Bob Berg and the guitarist John Scofield. The earlier group sounded like a collection of competent but uninspired individuals. Now Mr. Davis has a real band , and like all his better bands, it is an instrument that he plays as deftly and dramatically as he plays the trumpet, an extension of his own personal sound.

Read on for many more articles, reviews and columns from the Grey Lady…

Jack Kerouac ruined my life. I had fantastic grades in high school. I was a hard worker, I went to class, had plenty of what ‘they’ call potential. I was well on my way to being a successful, productive member of capitalist American society. I could’ve been a banker, a businessman, a scientist or something respectable.

Then, I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Within two days of reading those final two words — “Dean Moriarty” — I quit the baseball team, bought a guitar and thought about smoking reefer. I started a poetry club at school and began saying things like “dig that, man!” In a word, I became “beat.”

I’ve since grown out of my immature, pseudo-beatnik phase and moved onto a mature, unrealistic-beatific phase (my Zeppelin phase remains the same). I got myself a day job, a cell phone and a 401k. But the profound impact of Kerouac and Moriarty goes on like the road. I still think about smoking reefer, and I occasionally listen to subversive jazz records. That mad, sympathetic desire for the American night still drives through my soul like a lone ‘38 Hudson sneaking up the Jersey Turnpike at 4 AM from parts unknown headed to destinations undetermined. I can’t shake that feeling…and I really don’t want to.

All of this mad-crazy fabulous energy was reawakened from slumber yesterday when I snuck out of work early like a grey dawn ghost and hoofed it down to the New York Public Library on 42nd and 5th. You see, the “scroll” has come home to Manhattan, part of a comprehensive exhibit about the embodiment of “Beat,” Jack Kerouac. For those of you not familiar with the Kerouac mythology, the “scroll” is the original 120 foot run-on-paragraph manuscript of the groundbreaking Beatnik utterance, On the Road. If you believe the legend, Jack speed-typed it out in a three-week insomniac haze of coffee and pea soup in his wife’s NYC apartment in 1951. It’s the original improvisational jam session of the literary world: a soul blown jazz-sax solo of stream-of-consciousness, over a rhythm section of real-world American-road experience.

Read on for more of Neeko’s semi-coherent ramblings and literary erections…

Much like a eunuch in an orgy, I watched many of my friends and colleagues enjoy the shit out of the gaming tables last night but experienced no pleasure for

You gotta love a band with a sense of humor, and no one keeps us in stitches like the Beastie Boys. The B-Boys summoned the immortal words of William Martin

Two of our favorite artists joined forces recently when the White Stripes took to the studio with Beck at the board producing three new tracks. Beck also contributed vocals and