February 11, 2011

After a morning that saw an unusually – even for sold-out events – small fraction of fans score tickets to the group’s final show at Madison Square Garden on April 2nd, LCD Soundsystem have added four shows on March 28 – 31 at the nearby Terminal 5 to try to satiate the ridiculous demand. We raised many of the concerns raised by our readers in the comments of our post on this morning’s LCD @ MSG onsale to a Ticketmaster PR representative and were given a blanket “no comment.”

[Photo by Jeremy Gordon]

LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy was as confused and upset by this morning’s events as we were. He took to the band’s twitter feed to promise that tell fans that he was “looking for clarity from ticketmaster” and would “pass on anything I find.” Murphy finally settled on adding the additional shows in hopes of lowering demand for the grand finale. My new hero then penned one of the most honest, heartfelt and at times hilarious letter in the history of bands communicating with their fans…

fuck you, scalpers. terminal 5 shows added.

holy shit

this here is just to say that we were more than taken aback and surprised about the speed of ticket sales for the april 2nd msg gig, as well as the effectiveness of scalper pieces of fucking shit at getting their hands on said tickets before fans could, and it’s knocked us on our asses.

no—we didn’t have a smart paperless ticketing system in place, and no—we didn’t have the pre-sale worked out very well, but this is simply because we’ve never sold anything out so quickly in our lives, and certainly never sold out anything as big as msg. i personally thought i was being bold in suggesting to our manager that we might sell it out “in 10 days”. that was my bold claim. everyone laughed at me. it’s us and liquid liquid. that’s it. we had meetings and meetings about the “other band” we needed to “fill the place”, as we were definitely considered to be nowhere near big enough (most of these bands were, like, way bigger than us, by the way

READ ON for more of James Murphy’s letter…

In this week’s audio and video recap, we lead off with a section from Big Sam’s Funky Nation that taper Z-Man pulled in Cambridge, MA. Z-Man is one of the tapers with the quickest turnaround, and he recently has moved to Massachusetts, so expect to see more uploads from that area. Also, we’ve got a rarely played cover from Gov’t Mule that Warren likes busting out in Caribbean climates it seems, a recording from a concert by Keller Williams showcasing his children’s songs, Umphrey’s McGee laying down a fantastic jam on an old classic and a crisp recording from Yo La Tengo.

If you don’t want to stay on the site for an hour streaming the individual tracks, you can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast. Click here to download.

[Thanks to AHappyHourHero for this week’s photo]

Big Sam’s Funky Nation – I Came To Party > Big Sam Funky Nation > Gimme That Funky Horn
Date & Venue: 2011-02-03 – Middle East – Cambridge, MA
Taper & Show Download: Z-Man

Fresh off wowing fans on Jam Cruise, Big Sam’s Funky Nation delivers this 19+ minute segment to start us off this week. Big Sam’s Funky Nation [tour dates] plays tonight at Dan Electro’s Guitar Bar in Houston, TX.

[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/bigsamsauce.mp3]

Video from Saturday’s For the One Month to Mardi Gras party in NYC:

READ ON for tracks from Mule, Keller, Umphrey’s and Yo La Tengo…

The Michael Dorf-produced Neil Young Tribute took place at Carnegie Hall last night and our friends at Thrasher’s Wheat have a full report on the event. Among the highlights were

One Month to Mardi Gras @ Le Poisson Rouge feat. Eric Krasno and Chapter 2 & Big Sam’s Funky Nation, February 5

When people think of Mardi Gras, they think of N’awlins. And when people think about the music associated with the Crescent City, jazz and funk come to mind. Saturday night, on the site of the old Village Gate where jazz and soul greats from The Duke and Coltrane to Nina and the Queen of Soul once performed, two bands of slightly different minds came together to tear the roof off the sucker.

[All photos by Marc Millman]

Around 10PM, Eric Krasno (guitar & vocals) and Nigel Hall (keys & vocals) took the stage with Chris Loftlin (bass) & Nikki Glaspie (drums, backing vocals) for 90 minutes of tight jazz, funk and soul…or what in the ’70s came to known as fusion. After opening with ’76 and Be Alright, Krasno led Chapter 2 into an instrumental cover of Get Back keeping in line with what he and Hall recently did with one of their other bands on Rubber Soulive.

From there, the band worked their way through a ten song set that featured four tunes from Krasno’s latest offering, Reminisce. Highlights of the set included a killer version of Band of Gypsys’ Power of Soul that clocked in at just over 10 minutes (during which keyboardist James Hurt sat in for a solo near the end where he left it all on the stage. He also returned during their last song before the encore) and an incredible version of Stevie Wonder’s beautiful composition Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers made famous by Jeff Beck on his album Blow By Blow – the album that defined the Fusion era. It was here that Krasno showed just how good he is. You don’t attempt to cover the greatest living guitar god unless you have some serious chops of your own.

• Marc’s One Month to Mardi Gras Videos: Get Back, Power to Soul Pt. 1, Power to Soul Pt. 2, Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers, Everybody Wants to Rule The World, Big Sam Jam #3 Pt. 1, Big Sam Jam #3 Pt. 2, Big Sam Jam #3 Pt. 3, Give Up The Funk, Crazy & Fuck You, When The Saints Come Marching In
• Previously From Marc Millman: Ozomatli, Early Elton, Soul II Soul,

READ ON for more on One Month to Mardi Gras…

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